Wisdom means different things to different people. But surely it is neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative, neither postmodernist nor literalist, neither certain that Bush won nor certain that he lost. Wisdom came constantly to the late Meg Greenfield, who gave The Washington Post the nation's best and most fair-minded editorial page. D-Neb., this year. And to qualify my queasiness at W.'s sunny, shallow enthusiasm for executing people with admiration for his sunny, sincere enthusiasm about bipartisanship and racial harmony.
Wisdom includes hesitating to reach confident convictions about complex matters.
I wish I'd thought of that at 6 p.m. on Tuesday after the election, when I expressed an overconfident conviction that Gore had it won, only to develop by midnight a conviction that Bush had it won. That was a constitutional crisis. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a contributing editor at Newsweek.