Week of October 13, 2008

Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the [Freedman's Savings Bank] was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.

I'm 100% sure and positive that history will say that George W. Bush has been a great, very great President of the United States of America.

I remember the email I wrote back with a certain embarrassment. I was neither gloomy nor down, I responded. My reigning feeling was one of"awe" -- that you could live your whole life and never experience a moment like this one. At about the same time, I told another friend that I found it staggering to turn a corner, bump into History, and discover that he's unbelievably gargantuan.

I write as an American historian, born in the presidency of Warren G. Harding, who has over many decades observed Republican leadership.

One of the most luminous moments — the “Declaration of Conscience” — came during the McCarthy era, when Margaret Chase Smith joined with six of her Republican colleagues in the United States Senate to denounce fellow Republicans for resorting to “the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.”

The coverage of the 2008 campaign leads me to ask:

Are there not today Republicans of conscience who will coalesce to say to Gov. Sarah Palin and her backers: “Stop it. This vilification is not what the party of Abraham Lincoln is about.”

And say to Democrats: “Stop it. The Keating Five was then, and this is now. What we should care about is the lives of Americans in the 21st century.”

As was said of Prague in 1968, “The whole world is watching.”