Their virtues notwithstanding, Gag Rule and What We've Lost are tracts for the times. Michael Kelly's and Hendrik Hertzberg's collections, though timely, are not. Each covers a lot of cultural ground, contains much brilliant writing and conveys a distinctive voice. Both will be, or deserve to be, read long after the 2004 campaign.

Michael Kelly, former editor of The New Republic and The Atlantic, notoriously had strong likes and dislikes. He despised "pacifists," "anti-American" leftists and "strident economic populists." Since he would doubtless have considered me all of these, I always assumed he would have despised me and cordially despised him in return. His death in April 2003, while covering the US invasion of Iraq, did not change my feelings. But reading Things Worth Fighting For has changed them somewhat. It's impossible not to warm to someone who writes so charmingly about the nonstop nattering of 2-year-olds ("Back to You, Tom") and 4-year-olds ("Sunshine on My Shoulders"), so wryly about the downside of enlightened social policy ("Wonk New World," "The Lure of the Evil Weed"), so ruefully about being fat ("Girth of a Nation"), so Thurberesquely about Robert Reich ("The Reich Stuff"), so savagely about Richard Holbrooke ("A Plea for Diversity") and so sardonically about the New York Times's "About Men" column ("Good Riddance to the 'New Man'"). Kelly was a fine storyteller: His dispatches from Bosnia and the Persian Gulf are full of sharp-edged anecdotes and revealing dialogue. Two long pieces from Kuwait ("The Rape and Rescue of Kuwait City" and "Rolls-Royce Revolutionaries") and two from Kurdistan ("The Other Hell" and "Back to the Hills") are superb. So is this passage--just about the only one in the book that deals graciously with any person or idea to Kelly's left:

We are not a nation that worries a great deal about the chicken pluckers among us. Somebody has to speak for them, and Jesse Jackson does, with beauty and with strength. In a country where most of the well-fed white men who run both parties have made a corrupt peace with the abandonment of the poor, with the devastation of entire cities, with the decimation of generations of black families, it is desperately important that there be a voice demanding that attention must be paid.

Mostly, however, he paid no attention. Instead he concentrated almost exclusively on character. For Kelly, politics meant the character of politicians; virtually nothing else about it seems to have interested him deeply. Along with dispatches from the front, Things Worth Fighting For consists largely of profiles from GQ, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Bob Dole, Richard Daley Jr., David Gergen and Yasir Arafat, among others. They are very good profiles, full of information, color and shrewd character judgments. Jesse Jackson is "the mirror image of Ronald Reagan, one who sees mostly an America defined, forever and ever, by the lessons of his childhood." Bill Clinton's "essential character flaw isn't dishonesty so much as a-honesty." And so on.

But Kelly lost track of causes in judging their adherents. "Imitation Activism" rebukes antiglobalization activists at a G-7 meeting. Comparing them unfavorably with Vietnam-era protesters, whom he compares unfavorably with civil rights marchers, he pronounces them "a generational imitation of a generational imitation of a form of politics that was once reserved for matters of life and death" and informs them that "you don't possess anything that can coherently be called a cause." That's Kelly's first and last word on the global economy. After observing a Kuwaiti corpse tortured by Iraqi invaders, "I never again could stand the arguments of those who sat in the luxury of safety--'advocating nonresistance behind the guns of the American Fleet,' as George Orwell wrote of World War II pacifists."So he simply ignores the wimps' arguments against invading Iraq twelve years later. International law, collective security, diplomacy--these are for political girlie men.

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