Free Republic

<p>Remember the remarkable coming together Americans experienced after the terrorists' mass murders of September 11? It's dead. It sank beneath the ever-churning waves of America's presidential politics. Global terror may be a big problem, but not bigger than winning the presidency.</p>

<p>Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill is famous for the political truism that all politics is local. Like just about everything else "local" these days, that truism is under siege. Ask George W. Bush.</p> <p>Mr. Bush is at the border's edge of a presidential campaign that will require him and a Democrat to traipse the country, nipping and tucking big national issues to smooth local sensibilities. Trouble is, many of the day's biggest issues are no longer containable inside the U.S. landmass. Like it or not, other nations are increasingly casting a "vote" on issues, such as jobs "outsourcing," which drive our politics.</p>

<p>For politics, it was a most excellent week. Not because dour John Kerry rose from his crypt to win the Iowa caucuses. Not because George Bush said, "Our greatest responsibility is the active defense of the American people" in his State of the Union speech. The political week was excellent because it was that rare thing in our politics: It was real, totally, gloriously real. Much of the rest of the time it has become something not quite real.</p>

<p>Over the years a certain legend has grown up around Bob Bartley that he was a writer of forbidding, dazzling and sometimes distant intellect -- aloof, shy and given to turning conversations into becalmed seas of silence. Whatever the truth in the legend, it only partly explained the man. There is more.</p>