The US needs to be very careful about rushing to act upon the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. This may seem to be a desirable instant solution to a difficult political problem in an election year.

The debate about intelligence reform has rapidly turned to the issues that always dominate Washington: Who would win and who would lose control over people, money, and power?

But for citizens outside Washington, the issue is seen through a far more important prism: What will actually work best?

It could well be that we will only learn the importance of clear command the hard way -- through the work of some future commission investigating our response to the next major terrorist attack.

Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together like laundry in an industrial dryer -- without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.

The Republicans have made much of Kerry's record; his campaign is haunted by replays of the theme song from the old TV show "Flipper." Mr. Bush, however, has a far more dangerous pattern of behavior. On issues from tax cuts to foreign policy, the president tends to stick stubbornly to his original course even when changing events cry out for adaptation. His explanations seem to evolve every day, but his thinking never does.

What we would like to hear from Mr. Kerry is how the events of the last year have changed his own thinking.

The 2004 Democratic convention had its moments, some of them quite good, if not all intentionally so.

I should never have gone back and read the speech again. I should never have gone back on Friday morning, in the unforgiving light of day, and re-examined the words Kerry had so forcefully uttered the night before.

What an incoherent disaster. When you actually read for content, you see that the speech skirts almost every tough issue and comes out on both sides of every major concern.

You can't base an entire foreign policy on process.

Why is Barack Obama generating more excitement among Democrats than John Kerry?

He has earned a reputation as a show horse and a workhorse -- apt to take a visible role in high-profile issues causing anxiety in suburbia, but equally willing to work doggedly to forge compromises on serious legislation. And he hasn't shied away from potentially polarizing racial issues; he helped to pass an important law to address racial profiling in Illinois. Obama has transcended the strictly racial identity often forced on— or embraced by —black officials.