It's Sarah Palin week everywhere this week. Her book is finally out after weeks of preselling, and the candidate -- make that the author -- is suddenly back in the full media glare.

Well, make that the selected media glare. After a debut on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Monday, she settles into multiple appearances on ABC and Fox, by exclusive prearrangement. She also begins a book tour at midweek in Grand Rapids, Mich., moving on to Fort Wayne and Noblesville in Indiana, Cincinnati and Columbus in Ohio, and so on into December.

The itinerary is heavy on venues such as Sam's Club in Fayetteville, Ark., and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. And it includes just one visit to an early primary state, Sioux City, Iowa.

Of course, no one in Washington can watch any political figure with such universal name recognition and such emotional power maneuver on the national stage without assuming it's all about the White House. Still, the impression that Palin gives is one of a media figure unsure of her own next move.

Does she want Barack Obama's job? Or would she be more comfortable changing places with, say, the woman with whom she kicked off her media blitz?

Naturally, Oprah asked about the presidential race and got the "not on my radar screen" brushoff. Neither she nor her audience seemed satisfied with that.

But then, no one ever owns up to presidential election ambitions from this far away -- not even the incumbent president. What matters now is not what gets said but what's getting done. And by this measure, it is hard to see Palin as part of the serious crowd of Republican bidders in 2012.

That is because her focus remains so resolutely on the failings of 2008.

Revisiting Resentments

Beginning on Oprah, Palin picked up her campaign persona more or less where she had left it in November. Palin's charm and earnest appeal were as apparent as ever. And while she remained on the defensive through much of the broadcast hour -- Oprah remaining very much in charge -- Palin held her own and surely connected with much of her viewing audience.

Yet the main message she carried was about what went wrong last time around, and the many ways she was wronged by others -- principally, the campaign of John McCain and the national news media.

What is most striking about both the book (Going Rogue: An American Life) and the Oprah interview is the emphasis on personal issues and media grudges.

Question: What does she think about Levi Johnston, the father of her grandchild, posing for Playgirl magazine? Answer: Not much.

Question: Why did she continue doing those disastrous Katie Couric interviews on CBS last fall? Answer: She knew they were terrible, but the handlers assigned to her by the McCain campaign thought they were fine.

Palin also said she answered Couric airily when asked about what she read because she had become so annoyed with the "badgering questions" asked by Couric (whom she identified on Oprah as "the perky one").

Palin is clearly worried that people blame her for the GOP's loss of the presidency. That seems unlikely, given all the reasons the party was losing the election before she joined the ticket, and all the disasters that befell the economy in the weeks thereafter. It also seems improbable that too many of her party faithful hold her responsible, given her approval ratings among Republicans (which range in the 70s).

Rebuilding GOP Brand, Or Her Own?

Still, she wants it known that she was not a prima donna or a defiant problem child during the 10-week fall campaign, and she says if there was a script she was deviating from, she had a hard time finding it.

So was she "going rogue," as her book title asserts, or was she merely confused by what a campaign in chaos wanted her to do? Were McCain's men trying to stifle her as a media distraction, or was her role on the ticket a kind of media distraction from the first announcement? Didn't McCain choose her deliberately to change the story line?

In all likelihood, as the week progresses and Palin does more programs, we shall see to what degree she has spent her time preparing for national politics since she quit the governorship of Alaska.

But for now, the question for the media and the political class is whether Palin's real goal is to help the GOP get back in the game, or just to rebuild and rebrand her personal image. On the evidence of her initial interview and the book she has authored, the emphasis is clearly on the personal.

Many a major policy push has been wrecked at the intersection of politics and government, and over the weekend the Democrats' drive for a new health care system came close to being the latest casualty.

Weighing in at roughly 2,000 pages and $1 trillion, the big bill made it out of the House with just two votes to spare, even though Democrats have almost three-fifths of the seats in the chamber. The vote was close because all but one Republican voted no, and because 39 Democrats joined them in opposition.

Why so many bailing out when their new president made the bill his top agenda item and came to the Hill to beg for it on the day of the vote? Was this not the man who led their ticket to victory just one year earlier?

The answer is that House Democrats, whatever their view of the bill itself, were thinking less about 2008 than about 2010. In the end, most decided the party had its prestige and power riding on the legislation's passage. But nearly 1 in 6 decided the bill was a loser, at least in his own district. You can question these representatives' priorities, but if you take a quick look at their roster you can scarcely question their political judgment.

Districts Voted for McCain

By far the best predictor of Democrats who went against the bill was the presidential vote of their districts in 2008. No fewer than 31 of the 39 who voted "no" late Saturday night had won their current terms a year ago while Sen. John McCain of Arizona was carrying the same voter base as the Republican nominee for president. McCain's margin of victory was greater than 20 percentage points in 10 of these districts (nine in the South and one in Idaho).

These members may consider themselves good Democrats in many respects, but they do not consider their districts to be Democratic territory. Speaker Nancy Pelosi may want to consider handing out special citations to the other 20 Democrats whose districts also voted for McCain but who saw their way clear to support Pelosi and the health care package this weekend.

The next best predictor was region. Of the 39, 25 represent districts below the Mason-Dixon line (extended to reach states added after the original line was drawn) in states that were part of the Confederacy or immediately adjacent. Not surprisingly, almost the same number (24) are members of the Blue Dogs, an organization of moderate-to-conservative Democrats in the House, most of whom represent rural districts.

In 1994, when Republicans took majority control in the House for the first time in 40 years, a key to their triumph was the capture of a majority of House seats in the South -- a feat that had eluded the party since Reconstruction. The Southern Democrats offer a much smaller target today, but any scenario for dramatic gains in 2010 begins in Dixie.

Republicans see two big advantages on their side for next year. One is the change in the issue mix as the memory of George W. Bush fades and popular dissatisfaction transfers to a new administration and its works. The other is the usual shift in the makeup of the electorate in midterm congressional votes. The electorate for such contests tends to be smaller, older, whiter and more affluent than in presidential voting years.

That is why the Republican campaign operation feels increasingly confident about making big gains in the first midterms. Buoyed by independent voters' willingness to switch from blue to red in Virginia and New Jersey in off-year elections last week, Republicans are hoping to see a very different playing field a year from now from the one they saw a year ago

Narrow Margins of Victory

Naturally enough, another group likely to vote no last weekend was the unhappy club of Democrats who won their current terms without many votes to spare. Of the "no" voters, eight won with margins of 5 points or less (half of these with less than 1 point). All eight are serving their first terms in the House. Will they get a second term? History tells us the members least likely to be re-elected are the freshmen, especially those swept into office in a big presidential year. When the Republicans seized a net of 52 seats in the fall of 1994, the Democratic freshmen elected in 1992 provided much of the fodder.

There were a few exceptions to these rules among the Saturday-night dissenters. Artur Davis from Alabama was the only African-American to oppose the bill. His district gave Obama a victory margin of 48 points, and Davis himself ran unopposed. But in 2010, Davis is giving up his seat to seek the Alabama governorship, and that gives him a larger constituency to think about.

Dennis Kucinich, the representative from the Cleveland area who ran for president in 2008, made clear he thought the Democratic bill that came to the floor was too conservative. He said it left the for-profit health insurance alive and that was wrong. Kucinich prefers single payer and was not about to compromise.

But anomalies aside, the Democrats' vote came down to those who felt their best re-election bet was helping the party move the health care debate further down the road and those who felt it was too great a burden to bear with the 2010 midterm elections just a year away.

In fact, maybe the metaphor of an intersection for politics and government is too weak. It suggests they only occasionally cross paths. Truth is, politics and government don't just go hand in hand, they co-exist in the same space and moment. They are parallel realities that often overlap.

There may be politics that has little to do with governing, but there's no governing to speak of that does not have to do with politics.

Just one year after Barack Obama rewrote the American political rulebook, the old rules were back in New Jersey and Virginia in off-year elections held Tuesday.

Both states elected Republican governors, and the GOP swept the top offices in Virginia. The 2008 coalition of Democratic voters, bolstered by high turnout among younger voters and people of color, shrank back to historic norms, while independents who had been drawn to the Obama message of change a year ago turned back to the party of his opposition. That has been the historical pattern in both states one year after new presidents have taken office.

Late on election night, the big Republican wins in the governors' races had to share some of the media focus when two surprises emerged from New York.

The first came in New York City, where incumbent independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg was re-elected with just 51 percent of the vote after spending roughly $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Polls had shown him well ahead.

The other, and potentially more consequential, was the election of state Rep. Bill Owens, a Democrat, to a vacant congressional seat upstate. The district, the state's largest and most rural, had not elected a representative who was not a Republican since the 1800s. But a tumultuous split in the GOP had propelled the candidate on the Conservative Party line, Doug Hoffman, to a late lead in the polls, making him the darling of Tea Party activists from coast to coast.

For GOP, A Sweet, But Not Shocking, Sweep

In the first hours after the polls closed, the dominant story was the failure of the president to rescue his party's struggling candidates in the nation's 11th and 12th most populous states. Republicans won both governorships decisively, and while neither win was a shock, the sweep was sweet indeed for conservatives who had little to celebrate one year ago.

Perhaps the most meaningful aspect of these wins was the breaking of the Democratic string of statewide victories in both states. No Republican had won a statewide office in a dozen years in New Jersey, and Democrats had won the last presidential race, the last two Senate races and the last two gubernatorial races in Virginia.

That kind of reversal of fortune bodes well for the "out party" in the midterm elections coming one year from now. If states where the Obama revolution rolled up big numbers in 2008 are going to be competitive again, Republicans will come back with a vengeance after big setbacks in 2006 and 2008 cost them control of both chambers of Congress.

The Candidates Matter, Too

At the same time, it was a stretch to call Tuesday a rebuke to the president himself. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey found approval for the president at levels in the low to high 50s, which is about where it is nationally. Most polled said their votes on Tuesday were not about Obama, and those who said they were voting on Obama were split pro and con.

Some might ask why either state's election for governor had been in doubt at all in this recession year.

The Democratic nominee in Virginia, a state senator named R. Creigh Deeds, burst on the scene in the primary as the lone centrist alternative to Terry McAuliffe, a first-time candidate but longtime fundraiser and operative for former President Bill Clinton and others. The primary became something of a referendum on McAuliffe, a relatively recent arrival in the Old Dominion who struck many as presumptuous.

Once nominated, Deeds never did find a positive personal theme for his campaign. Despairing of his chances of reassembling the Obama coalition from 2008, he ran more as an out-of-state Democrat, far removed from the state's high-growth, vote-rich regions of Northern Virginia and the Atlantic Coast.

His main thrust was that his Republican rival, state Attorney General Bob McDonnell, had written an awful screed against women in the workplace decades ago while a student at televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University. It took McDonnell some time to put that episode behind him, but once he had, the race was over. After holding the White House at arm's length, Deeds welcomed the president in the closing days as his fate seemed certain.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the extraordinary feats of levitation by which the unpopular and unloved incumbent Jon Corzine had stayed in the race failed him on Election Day. Although polls showed the race too close to call, it was resolved in relatively short order.

On the numbers, not many weeks ago, Corzine looked likely to lose to a blank slate. The Republicans nominated an uninspiring and flawed candidate in Chris Christie, and the voters flirted for a time with a third-party option, Chris Daggett. In the end, Daggett faded to single-digit irrelevance, and the anti-Corzine vote came home to Christie.

In Upstate New York, A Welcome Surprise For Democrats

Both the Virginia and New Jersey outcomes suggested that the party in power, nationally and in the state capital, had a lot of explaining to do about the recession and other woes. It isn't enough to recall where the economy and other matters stood a year ago. Political memories can be short, especially when there's no appealing lead candidate to distract the mind.

Of Tuesday's marquee races, the strangest and most difficult to assess was the special election held in the 23rd Congressional District in upstate New York.

Just before the balloting began, polls indicated that Conservative Party candidate Hoffman had surged into a clear lead over both Democrat Owens and the official Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who had dropped out over the campaign's final weekend and endorsed Owens.

Hoffman's victory was to be the crown on all these more predictable achievements, demonstrating the power of the Republican Party's insurgent right.

But in the end, his own residence outside the district, and the dictates of too many high-profile activists from far outside the district (read Alaska, Texas), aroused an instinctual reaction amid the Adirondacks. The local papers generally lined up behind Owens, a homegrown former Air Force captain, and this is a part of the world where people still read their local paper.

The closer you look at any of the contests on Tuesday's election slate, the less they have to do with President Obama. But when the votes are counted, you can count on hearing his name more often than any other.

Even widely scattered votes in an off year are routinely treated as referendums on the president, whether he has been close to any of the candidates or not. Whether he campaigns for them a little or a lot, his brand is inevitably affixed and its value reassessed.

That is how it has always been, and how it very likely will always be. And it is all the more so when a president is new and still riding some of the historic personal wave that carried him into office one year ago.

Moreover, this particular new president is young and extraordinarily ambitious, thrilling a generation of new voters and instilling anxiety in many of their elders. That was true a year ago, and it remains true in polling today. His vision has inspired both admiration and fierce resistance.

So the name of Obama is a flash point of strong feelings, far more than the names of the candidates actually running for office this week. The people in Virginia or New Jersey may know the names of their candidates for governor; the rest of the country does not. Everyone, however, will recognize the name Obama, and that is where the conversation will turn.

It also happens that the one commonality across states and localities voting this week is voter dissatisfaction, driven by recession and unemployment and, in some cases, by fear of expanding government and debt. Ask yourself: Which emotion drives more votes, approval or anger?

A year ago, the anger tended to cut against Republicans after eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush. This year, for many, the polarity is reversed.

If you live in a place where important votes are being taken, the national aspect of the vote may seem remote -- if not irrelevant. Virginia's new governor will probably be Bob McDonnell, its state attorney general, who is leading a little-known Democratic legislator who never offered much of a platform and held his own national party at arm's length. The party holding the White House has seen Virginia choose a governor from the other party in every election for more than 30 years.

But that's not a very compelling story line beyond Virginia, so look for a lot of projection about what McDonnell means for the fate of the parties nationally.

In New Jersey, the irritants are the highest local property taxes in the country and a broadly shared disappointment with the incumbent governor, Democrat Jon Corzine. His two rivals are probably splitting an overwhelming vote of rejection. That's the story. But you can bet you'll hear it cast in terms of Barack Obama.

In the final days before this November's contests, attention has shifted to a highly unusual contest in upstate New York, a district Republicans have held since the Civil War. When longtime incumbent John McHugh became secretary of the Army, the GOP county chairs chose as their nominee for the seat he vacated a state legislator named Dede Scozzafava, hoping her moderate-to-liberal views would appeal to independents.

That provoked a rebellion on the right, benefiting Doug Hoffman, who had the ballot line for the New York Conservative Party. Activists from around the country, including Sarah Palin from Alaska and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey from Texas, rallied to Hoffman. It got ugly enough that Scozzafava dropped out, three days before the election, and endorsed Democratic nominee Bill Owens.

That's a complicated story having much to do with the ferment taking place on the right. But once again, the involvement of national leaders and presidential candidates will put a White House spin on it all.

Unless you live where the voting takes place, you fall back on what you know. Those who pay any attention at all on election night will glance up at the scoreboard and hear commentary on what the results say about Barack Obama. Does he have the kind of star power that transfers to other candidates? Has he pushed the public support for himself and his program to the point of pushback?

And however small the president's role has actually been this fall, the focus on him is fair in one sense. The results of these elections will affect him. They will make his struggles in Washington a tad easier, or more difficult, depending on how they change the political conversation.

That is how analysis, like prophecy, can become self-fulfilling.

The big news Thursday was that the recession appears to be over, but if you believe that, you're probably an economist. Not a politician.

Economists know that a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth: The economy gets smaller instead of bigger. Recently, we have had four such quarters, the worst recession since the 1930s.

As soon as we get a positive quarter, such as the one that just ended in September, that's one key indicator that the recession may be over. For the economists.

Politicians know that a recession is any protracted period of economic pain and the social strain that follows. The result is always politically hazardous. And a sudden bump-up in somebody's economic calculations -- however valid -- does not end the hazard. It might even make it worse.

If there is too much happy talk about "the end of the recession," while too many people are still feeling the effects, the contrast can be embittering and the political backlash devastating. It's tempting for the administration to tout the 3.5 percent annualized growth number released this week as a milestone in the recovery, but to do so is to raise expectations too fast, too soon.

A Perverse Logic

People are often willing to suffer their share when bad times come on a broad scale. But it's a different story when they're told things are getting better and they wonder why nothing is better for them. That is why, in the sometimes perverse logic of politics, voters often punish officeholders for a bad economy well after it has begun getting better.

It happened to the first President Bush. In 1991 the economy shrank for two quarters, a sharp but short contraction that probably ended before the year was out. The president's economic advisers told him the recession was over. They were right, on the numbers, and unfortunately the president believed them.

The president's 1992 re-election campaign asserted that the historic brevity of both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the recession of that year were reasons to re-elect Bush. But were both the war and the recession really over? Voters were not so sure, and the president's stubborn insistence that the economy was back became a target for satirists. In a sense, his eagerness for the recession to be forgotten prolonged its political impact.

Some parts of the country had felt the recession far more than others, and one of the worst hit was New Hampshire. Few in that state believed recovery was under way in 1992, and upstart challenger Pat Buchanan gave the president a fight in the Republican primary.

Bush still won the nomination easily, but he never quite recovered his momentum. And he lost the Granite State, and the presidency, that fall to Bill Clinton, whose campaign manager summed up the election by saying, "It's the economy, stupid."

The same logic that held the president of 1992 accountable for a recession that had ended a year earlier now holds the president of 2009 accountable for one he inherited. One year after his election, President Obama knows the Oval Office is also an oblong bull's-eye.

And while he is years away from the next New Hampshire primary, the young president needs desperately the political legitimacy and congressional support that accompany healthy poll numbers.

'Recession Remains Alive And Acute'

President Obama's approval numbers have settled in the mid-50s for the moment. The next move up or down will be critical to his chances of passing systemic changes related to health care, financial regulation, energy and the environment.

His standing will change with each decision he makes -- especially on emotional issues such as the mission in Afghanistan -- but ultimately his numbers will very likely track the performance of the economy. The key measure here is not the GDP but the unemployment rate, and that metric is still rising. Next week, it is likely to break through 10 percent, heading in the wrong direction. This is the same "lagging indicator" that sandbagged the White House in 1992.

That is why administration officials are right to restrain any celebration over the GDP and stress instead the challenge of jobs. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hit the right note at a congressional hearing this week when he said unemployment was still "unacceptably high."

"For every person out of work, for every family facing foreclosure, for every small business facing a credit crunch, the recession remains alive and acute," the secretary said.

Remembering that is the key to protecting the promise of this presidency -- and its hugely ambitious agenda.

The Washington Post has headlined a story about a poll it took with ABC News showing that the "public option" feature of the health care debate is supported by a clear majority of Americans.

But does that mean the public option will be in the final bill? Don't bet on it.

So does that mean Congress listens only to lobbyists and does not care about public opinion? Not quite.

It's all about what polls really measure and what lawmakers are really looking for in a poll. And in either case, the answer often differs from what meets the eye.

It Depends On How You Ask

Much depends on the language and framing of the questions. Supporters of the public option say it is merely an opportunity for those denied health insurance in the private market to obtain it from the government. In that guise, the public option seems to expand individual choice and freedom. That generally polls well.

The Post-ABC pollsters asked: "Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurers?" This question was answered yes by 62 percent in June, 52 percent in August and 57 percent last week. About half the support lost over the summer appears to have been restored (an intermediate poll done in September showed this movement under way).

The Post-ABC poll found acceptance increased still further when the public option was understood to be handled by the states, not the feds, and if it would be restricted to those who had no access to affordable coverage.

But opponents of the public option, as formulated in Congress, see it as a creeping mandate. They say private insurers could not compete successfully against the government and that some employers would stop providing coverage and let the government take over.

Rasmussen Reports, a polling operation favored by many conservatives, asks the question this way: Would you support a public option "if it encouraged companies to drop private health insurance coverage for their workers?" Given that as a consequence, Rasmussen's poll shows the public opposed to the public option by 2 to 1.

Polls Can Be Poor Guides

Most surveys find two-thirds of Americans are satisfied with the health insurance they have now, so fear of being forced into the arms of Uncle Sam is palpable and potent. The public option becomes a bridge toward national health insurance.

Some say that's the best reason to have a public option, to get to a "single payer" system of Medicare for all. Others say it gives up the game, revealing the liberals' backdoor strategy to achieve "socialized medicine." Some of this sentiment was highly visible in August's town halls, becoming the focal point of the discussion and coverage.

With that backdrop, key members of Congress returned in the fall and began scaling back the health care plan. The public option was left out of the bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee, which is the only bill so far to attract even one Republican supporter (Olympia Snowe of Maine) and also the one likeliest to preserve that fragile collection of ego figurines that is the Senate Democratic majority.

Sure, there are Democratic senators insisting that they won't vote for a bill without a public option. They range in seniority and seriousness from the veteran Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia to the appointed seat holder Roland Burris of Illinois. But so far at least, no one seems to believe they will really derail the entire enterprise over this issue.

That's why the sudden appearance of fresh polling data suggesting the public option is gaining ground pours sand in the gears of conventional wisdom. Is the Senate Finance bill really the most viable vehicle for health care overhaul or not? Should we let the people decide?

Truth is, polls are a poor guide in such matters. Not that lawmakers are oblivious to public opinion -- to the contrary, they are typically obsessed with it.

But the polls they care most about are not the national polls but the ones taken back in their states and districts. Polls back home can be vastly different from the national norm.

Lawmakers concerned about primaries more than general elections also cast an eye on the partisan breakdown of the polls they see. When a GOP member sees that more than 80 percent of Republicans oppose the current health care proposals in the Rasmussen Report, that lawmaker needs no further coaching.

As for Democrats hoping to do well among independents, the polling guidance can be contradictory. Polls generally show big majorities in favor of "reform," even if it means "big changes." But when people are told specifics about what is taking shape in Washington, it mostly engenders anxiety, especially given the low standing of Congress itself.

No surprise, then, that even the Post-ABC poll finds that only 45 percent of the public likes what it sees happening with health care in Congress right now. Rasmussen finds the percentage still lower at 42 percent. And that number has not changed since August.

So is that because the public option is in the mix or because it isn't in the mix enough?

Depends on whom you ask the question, and how you ask it.

That was some story about the balloon flying over Colorado: Good for hours of breathless, credulous coverage on all the cable TV news shows. We couldn't take our eyes off it.

But as balloon stories go, it was scarcely more effective than the one about Vice President Biden that's been all over the news all week. And this is not a joke about hot air.

The vice president has suddenly emerged as the face of policymaking at the White House on the biggest foreign policy decision of the young Obama presidency: the direction and scope of the mission in Afghanistan. And that's all the more surprising because Biden and his boss would appear to be at odds on the issue.

Candidate Obama told us this was the good war, the one we had to win. President Obama stuck with that line and committed 20,000 additional troops earlier this year. We were getting out of Iraq and into Afghanistan. And we had a new general with a new strategy.

Then that general, Stanley McChrystal, told the world the war was not going so well, and that he needed still more troops to keep from losing it entirely. The president plunged into a series of five meetings with his national security team so as to consider the request.

That's when we began hearing about how the vice president, known as a doubter on Afghanistan through most of this year, was becoming more influential. We learned in national newspapers and magazines that Biden, a promoter of the Afghanistan mission in his own presidential bid in 2007 and 2008, had spent enough time on the ground in that country and neighboring Pakistan to revise his view.

We also learned that Biden's new view was more widely shared within the White House than previously thought. More hawkish elements of the administration, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seemed suddenly in eclipse.

It could be a coincidence. But positions on Afghanistan have long been as much about politics as they are about strategic policy. Support for the Afghanistan war worked as a safe harbor or halfway house for plenty of Democrats in recent years.

They could oppose the war in Iraq and support the longer but smaller effort in Afghanistan so as not to appear too dovish. Besides, everyone seemed to think the essential goal had been achieved when the Taliban was ousted in 2001.

Now that we all know a little more about the situation on the Afghan-Pakistani border and about the difference between the Taliban and al-Qaida, it becomes possible to think about reordering the U.S. commitment to Kabul. That is especially true since our client ruler there, Hamid Karzai, appears to have tried to rig the election results earlier this year -- botching the job in the bargain.

The headless government problem in Afghanistan looms all the larger now that a runoff vote appears likely.

Polls of public attitudes offer conflicting signals. The country clearly believes the sacrifice of those who have died there fighting al-Qaida was worthwhile. But ask about sending more Americans to do the same and the sentiment turns negative. We may believe in what we've been doing there up to now, but we're far less sure about where it's going from here.

Still, if this president is going to make a turn this dramatic this early, someone has to prepare the ground. Enter Joe Biden, the man known for speaking his mind, or at least for speaking. Everyone knows he likes to hear himself talk and lets out random thoughts he later regrets.

But it's also true that Biden often has something to say. He wound up his 26 years in the Senate as chairman of the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he has been a serious student of the world and its ways.

Who better to advance a vision radically at odds with McChrystal's and to get global, respectful media attention for it? After all, Biden has tacked artfully back and forth on war issues throughout his long career.

In 1972, a year when the Vietnam War dominated American politics, Biden was a 29-year-old county councilman mounting a long-shot challenge to a veteran Republican senator. Fueled in part by anti-war sentiment in urban and suburban Delaware, his campaign also reached out to far more traditional voters in rural, southern Delaware. And it worked.

In 1991, when Congress spent days debating the first President Bush's war with Iraq, Biden was among those voting no. But in 2002, when another President Bush asked authorization to use force against Iraq, Biden voted yes.

The president took a calculated risk in adding Biden to his ticket and, later, to his innermost circle. If the Delawarean can help him find a middle ground and moderate the risk of the Afghanistan decision, Obama will have reason to be glad about his gamble.

Whatever motives you ascribe to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his grim report on the war in Afghanistan, there's no arguing the purpose of its leaker. Whoever decided to declassify it de facto by handing it to reporter Bob Woodward wanted to reorder the Obama administration's overall schedule and priorities.

The question now is whether that stratagem will succeed.

The White House had planned to mull over its Afghanistan up-or-out decision for at least another month or two before committing more troops -- as McChrystal has asked -- or deciding not to. Given the warnings of defeat in McChrystal's document, turning the general down would presumably mean the president was pulling out of what he once called "a war we must win."

So the choice is stark, and the political consequences will be severe. No wonder the president's people wanted to delay the decision. The idea was to get at least one or two marquee items from the Obama change agenda -- restructuring the nation's systems for health care, banking and energy -- enacted before turning to Afghanistan and the choice.

Whichever direction the president chooses, going all in or getting out, he will ignite a political firestorm. More than a major distraction, this will make it nearly impossible to ask Congress to take tough votes that could change the American way of life.

So the White House was content to wait until the snows arrived in the Afghan highlands before grasping the nettle. But plainly, the Pentagon was not. The vision of another war turning into a stalemate -- or worse, a defeat -- has the uniformed leaders on high alert. They deeply dread another Vietnam and another generation of recrimination over who was responsible. And in the case of Afghanistan, they do not see time as their ally.

At a minimum, the U.S. military hopes to get out of Afghanistan someday with at least as much pride as it has salvaged in Iraq. The situation there, dire indeed in 2005 and 2006, improved with the escalation known as The Surge.

The strategic shift in Iraq worked in part because the U.S. had crucial help from Sunni Muslims in Anbar province and elsewhere and an Iraqi government that could at least claim a measure of legitimacy. It is far from certain the U.S. has commensurate partners in Afghanistan, where the Karzai regime may have just been voted out (or may have won only by means of fraud).

So Afghanistan, the supposedly good and just war that candidate Obama supported (in contrast to Iraq, the bad and misbegotten war he opposed), has returned to bedevil him at just the moment he had hoped to be signing big historic bills into law.

His decision will be excruciatingly difficult. Afghanistan was a low-casualty war for years before it became the front line in what used to be called the War on Terror. Now it is increasingly a death trap for U.S. and NATO troops.

There are arguments for pulling out. Some say the Taliban will not harbor terrorists again, having suffered for doing so last time. And it is clear that terrorists do not need a base in Afghanistan to pose a threat in the region or around the world. It is quite possible that sending enough U.S. troops to do the job right will necessitate sacrifices well beyond those made for Iraq. It might mean reactivating the draft or something like it.

Yet for all this thinking -- shared by at least some in the president's innermost circle -- there is a countervailing political reality none can deny: To abandon Afghanistan is to cede it to the Taliban. Even if that movement did not welcome al-Qaida or other terrorist entities back into its territory, many millions of Americans would believe it was doing so. They would be told and they would remember that this was the staging area used for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It is difficult to expect any rational set of arguments, any assessment of the intricate realities of life in Afghanistan, to prevail over the power of Sept. 11 in the American mind.

That is why the Obama White House has been loath to revisit the Afghanistan question before it has achieved at least some of what it hoped to achieve in its first year. And it is why the administration has yet to respond to McChrystal or to the leaking of his report.

The week of the leak was chockablock with other foreign news, from the United Nations to the G-20 meeting to the exposure of a previously secret nuclear enrichment facility in Iran. And that's not to mention all those other stories that fill the cable TV screens every day, from Capitol Hill and Wall Street and the worlds of sports and entertainment. We in the news media have worse cases of attention deficit disorder than ever, an affliction we share with the culture at large.

Whoever leaked the McChrystal report wanted to force the White House to accelerate its decision on Afghanistan, regardless of the cost to other administration priorities. But the purposes behind the postponement remain as potent as ever.

As September wanes, the Senate brings its defense spending bill to the floor, and Afghanistan will be prominent in the debate. But will that be enough to change the White House timeline? Not unless the president is ready to endanger his core agenda in America for the sake of someone else's vision of success on the other side of the world.

Of course it's about race. And of course it's not. What could be more obvious?

Tune in to black talk radio. The conversation begins with the assumption that President Obama is getting pushback unlike any president in history. Point Two: It's because he's black. People who would otherwise respect and follow the White House -- and never think of being rude to a president -- are behaving differently because this one is black. So it's all about race.

But tune in to conservative talk radio, and nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, commentators and callers insist, the new president's race is a buffer and a shield. People who would lambaste any other president hesitate to breathe a discouraging word about this one, fearing a charge of racism. Therefore: The criticism of the president has nothing whatsoever to do with race.

Everything's obvious from that perspective, too.

The points of view are clearly contradictory, but in a sense they are also similar. They each contain elements of reality, but both turn false when pushed to their illogical extreme.

And that's just what people seem determined to do.

House Republican Leader John Boehner neatly encapsulated the all-or-nothing nature of the debate in his weekly news conference. "The outrage that we see in America has nothing to do with race," Boehner told the reporters. "It has everything to do with the policies that [the president] is promoting."

Nothing and everything. Neat and tidy.

A day earlier, President Jimmy Carter was close to the same oversimplification in the opposite direction, stressing the "racist attitude" in recent protests.

In the end, denying the possibility of truth on the other side of the debate is what makes both sides wrong. But it is not the only thing the two sides have in common. Both are nearing a boiling point, and in both cases their anger feeds on fear.

African-Americans react with indignation at any suggestion that President Obama is less a president than his predecessors. They are attuned to even subtle slights, let alone a nationally televised slap such as Joe Wilson's interruption of a presidential address.

Their underlying dread is that the breakthrough achievements of Election Day and Inauguration Day will be canceled by a latter-day "massive resistance," the blowback that followed the 1953 Supreme Court ruling against segregation in schools. Even deeper lie memories more than a century old of Jim Crow laws enacted to reverse the gains former slaves had made after Emancipation.

Of course, the anti-Obama voices are angry, too. They sense that this new president's policies, and indeed, this new president, have been thrust on them by political and social changes they do not accept and by news and entertainment media they do not respect. They sense in his program, and yes, in his persona, a challenge to their own convictions and their own security.

That makes them angry, but there is something else as well. At the Value Voters Summit in Washington this week, participants often spoke of being frightened or scared. They sense the country they grew up in -- the world they knew -- slipping away.

They also fear that their ability to do anything about all this is evanescent. That unless they take strong exception to the trends of today -- unless they fight -- they will find themselves marginalized or disenfranchised.

At base, the two sets of anger and fear are cousins, maybe even siblings. But that does not make the two sides of the debate feel much empathy for each other.

Nor is there much help to be found in the official political arena, dominated as it is by the parties and the media. The parties have less interest than ever in harmony or cooperation. In part, that's because they have lost so much of their internal diversity, moving instead toward intraparty ideological unanimity. In the modern Congress, members fear defeat in a primary at least as much as defeat in November.

For their part, the media are less interested in the traditional, play-it-safe, middle-of-the-road reporting because their business models are changing. The old competition for the largest audience, the watchword of newspaper wars and network broadcasting, is giving way to a smaller-scale competition for the most loyal audience.

In the world of cable TV and niche radio, Web site news and blogs, the premium is on being provocative. Playing up the anger in the body politic, and playing on the fear, can attract an audience of faithful partisans on one side or the other. And as these media take a harder edge, their more traditional colleagues are drawn to follow suit.

Talk of "post-racial politics" last winter was always terribly premature. The question now is whether we are even heading in that direction.

President Obama's speech to Congress and the nation this week recalled the heights his rhetorical power reached in last year's campaign. It also made clear he has abandoned any hope of a health care bill that's bipartisan enough to get 70 votes or more in the Senate.

What emerges from this year's historic debate will now be a distinctly Democratic bill opposed by virtually every Republican in both the House and the Senate. It will pass or fail depending entirely on Democratic leaders' ability to rally their own troops in support. In the Senate, that support will probably need to be unanimous.

The president reinforced his one-party strategy on the day after his speech, when he brought to the White House a critical group of senators who represent the middle ground on the issue in their chamber. Every one was a Democrat.

But even in the speech itself, the strategy was obvious. The president did make a few concessions to Republican thinking on health care, including a show of respect for the idea that excessive malpractice awards jack up the cost of care. He also signaled that he would jettison the government-run insurance alternative ("the public option") if necessary to get a bill to his desk. But apart from that, it was all full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

In fact, the president deliberately stepped on certain GOP toes that are particularly sore these days. Denying that his health plan would add to the deficit, he accused the Republicans of hypocrisy. He pointed to the Iraq-Afghanistan wars begun by President George W. Bush, which were treated as "off budget" and will add roughly $1 trillion to the deficit over a decade.

What's more, he also referred to a similar addition to the deficit caused by tax cuts "for the wealthy" enacted under President Bush in 2001 and 2003.

The president also denounced certain conservative criticisms of his plans as "myths" and "falsehoods" and "lies," particularly with regard to health care for illegal immigrants. That was what prompted the loudest objections from the Republican side of the aisle, including the now famous outcry from Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina.

Wilson's shouted "You lie!" resounded in countless media replays, in part because a personal meltdown makes better TV than the details of selling health insurance across state lines. But Wilson was also channeling the anger heard in many August town halls, becoming the media message of the month. Confused about the president's vague plans and filled with misinformation from a variety of other sources, many turned out for these forums in a barely controlled rage.

Conservatives in general took heart from these uprisings, and Republican officeholders took note as well. Resistance to the president's health agenda stiffened, and at least some Democrats facing voters in 2010 got a sudden case of cold feet.

That was the impetus for the joint session the president addressed this week. Despairing of changing many minds on the Republican side, the White House determined it had to shore up support on its own side. And that meant going back to what the Obama team knows best -- partisan politics of the kind seen in an election campaign.

Historically, this has not been the path to momentous legislative achievement. Even the controversial creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid did not cleave the Congress so cleanly along partisan lines. Neither did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But our politics have changed. In earlier times, the two parties each represented an amalgam of philosophies. Many Southern Democrats were more conservative than many Northern Republicans. A coalition comprising most of the majority party and a significant minor fraction of the other was a legislative force capable of considerable achievement.

Such a coalition had been President Obama's goal in approaching health care. Every president wants to unite the country in support of his goals. For this particular president, bridging the divides of age and race and ideology is both a special challenge and a focal point of personal ambition.

In fact, the new president's devotion to this ambition has been a disappointment to early supporters who expected a bolder shift to the left. Many would have preferred a larger stimulus package, a faster withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, a single-payer European-style health care proposal and much more aggressive regulation of Wall Street and the energy industry.

Truth be told, Obama does not have much to show for disillusioning his most liberal base. So far, at least, conservatives have found his efforts at centrism utterly unalluring. And those few GOP centrists in Congress who had flirted with collaboration are now feeling singed by the August heat.

So achieving any sort of consensus on health care seems out of reach. The immediate problem for the White House is uniting Democrats to do a bill alone. Beyond that looms the problem of restoring relations with at least a few Republicans so as to make coalitions possible on other issues later on.