Pledging Allegiance

...the primacy of the domestic is the rule in democratic politics...

...In fact, Blumenthal argues, the relaxation of the cold war was the central event of the campaign...

...Similarly, his sympathy with Gary Hart's effort to develop "new ideas" for the postindustrial age lets him underplay the emptiness of much of the product...

...Moreover, Blumenthal is inclined to treat any worries about social and moral order--and hence, the problem of political community--as essentially epiphenomenal, part of the modern "politics of resentment" pioneered by Nixon and rooted in the cold war itself...

...There are exceptions: Blumenthal detests Ed Koch so much that his description degenerates into caricature, as flat and clunky as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon...

...She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts...

...They were Catholics from the south of Ireland...

...to feelings which are still free to postpone their dependence upon particular objects and events...

...with remarkable consistency, his depictions of political leaders are vivid and multidimensional...

...He kept his friends and listened to his advisers, and in 1988, those modest excelREVIEWERS CHRISTOPHER LASCH teaches history at the University of Rochester...

...Warrenpoint is not a straightforward account of boyhood or place, but rather a brief and fascinating journey without roadsigns through the circuitous routes of Mr...

...But political terrorism has not left it untouched...

...It stiffened his refusal to heed the critics of his campaign, making him, as Blumenthal says, "a man of technique who mostly spurned his technicians...

...The author was educated by the Christian Brothers and describes their ethic in the education of young Catholic nationalists in an alien society: they were not encouraged to join the IRA or participate in violent acts but to "regard the history of Ireland as unfinished business...

...And Michael Dukakis, the inevitable Democratic nominee, once he emerged as the chief alternative to Jackson, was just as unadventurous, playing it safe in foreign policy and always on the defensive...

...In this terrain, the Washington's Post's Thomas Byrne Edsall, among others, is a better guide...

...Nevertheless, these are almost asides, and Blumenthal touches only lightly on the issues of class, inequality, and taxation as perceived by broadly middle-class Americans...

...Even so, with all his shrewdness, there is something cockeyed about Blumenthal's emphasis on foreign affairs...

...The very word "Warrenpoint" has a resonance in my ear dating back from my earliest childhood family stories...

...His mother appears in his book as a lesser figure, fragile and remote, a woman who suffered attacks resembling epilepsy, and had a hard time coping with the simplicities of her life...

...On August 28, 1979, the Provisional Irish Republican Army blew up eighteen British soldiers by the side of the Carlingford Lough...

...making Dukakis seem chancy, it elevated Bush's drabness into a promise of the safely familiar...

...WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rutgers University...

...WANTED: A DEMOCRATIC AGENDA PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE The Last Campaign of the Cold War Sidney Blumenthal HarperCollins, $22.95, 386 pp...

...She was not a woman who stamped her children with her own imprint...

...Nevertheless, it is the tragic complexity of Ireland, both North and South, which has tuned Mr...

...It was an embarrassment to the Christian Brothers that Davis, [Thomas Davis, the leader of the Young Ireland movement], like many of the great exponents of Irish nationalism, was a Protestant...but it was implied that, after the generation of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory--Protestants all, regrettably--the sentiments those writers expressed could be retained and transposed into Catholic terms...

...With Dukakis, this had a hard edge: paradoxically, there was an ideological quality, the echo of the 1950s, to his rejection of ideology, to his appeal to "competence," and to his rejection of "divisive" rhetoric...

...He regrets Dukakis's treatment of crime, but chiefly because the governor failed to use the right trope--his painful, personal experience--to answer Republican charges...

...Yet George Bush habitually cautious, deferential to the Right, and anxious about his reputation for weakness--was not one to abandon cold-war orthodoxy, especially given its uses in the attack on liberalism...

...The landmine was allegedly set off by the terrorists who were hiding across the lough in the Republic of Ireland...

...As such, they would always be strangers in Warrenpoint...

...Sidney Blumenthal's elegant account brings it all back, but with a decisive difference: while Blumenthal feels and evokes the old frustration and anger, he has humor enough to be at least halfamused by the campaign's too-frequent follies, and he sees the election of 1988 as a tale of missed opportunities, not a reason for disillusionment but a call for vision...

...It enabled the Reagan administration to negotiate the INF treaty, largely salvaging Reagan's presidency from the wreckage of Iran-contra, and pro22 February 1991:139 viding George Bush with the slogan and legacy of "peace through strength...

...They are beautiful and mysterious...

...140: Commonweal...

...The new times call for leaders who can assure us of their ability to control new energies because, more than weather vanes, they are guided by things that endure...

...His most recent book is The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton...

...Even if accurate--a matter for considerable discussion--such ventures into the past are dangerous and probably superfluous in practical politics, and Democrats have every reason to be wary, especially because, on the face of things, the end of the cold war is testimony to the success of containment, not its putative errors...

...The candidates were political monochromats, framing a choice between the dismal and the dreary, tweedle-dum and tweedledumber...

...Not that Blumenthal ignores such matters: he makes some perceptive comments about Bush and the "politics of insolvency," and he faults Dukakis's distaste for any "class angle" in speeches or advertising...

...For many of us, then, and today, Warrenpoint is a better place to have come from than to be in...

...The Donoghue family went to live in Warrenpoint in 1928 for the employment it offered to the elder Mr...

...my Irish great-great-grandparents emigrated from Warrenpoint as young adults...

...Wilson Carey McWilliams he election of 1988 was a pretty depressing affair, fuel for the American public's raging disenchantment...

...ffMr...

...It also allowed Bush to run as a Reagan loyalist and as a man of moderation in foreign policy, able to make claims during GOP primaries on the party's fight and center...

...This is a scary world, after all, one likely to become more tumultuous while still filled with terrible possibilities...

...ELIZABETH SHANNON is the author of I Am of Ireland (Little, Brown...

...But then, many Catholics who have lived forever in the North feel strangers...

...And Blumenthal's treatment of Jesse Jackson is matchless, especially in his observation that Jackson's "third-world" vision is part of the imagery of the cold war, locked into the political past...

...Blumenthal's treatment of the nominees is only the most obvious example of his gift for political portraiture...

...His basic thesis is that 1988 turned on the failure of political leaders to address the waning of the cold war--soon to turn from a whimper into a bang--waging instead a contest defined by the political past...

...As Blumenthal indicates, both Bush and Dukakis regard politics as essentially administrative, the brokering of conflicts between rival interests, and hence more concerned with pacification than with justice...

...In the end, however, Blumenthal's verdict on Hart--that, neither a lion nor a fox, he failed both of Machiavelli's tests of statecraft--is more shattering because of his soft-handedness...

...lences were enough...

...Bush, of course, was at least as dismissive of "the vision thing, or whatever," but Bush enjoyed two great advantages of character: he understood loyalty, that towering political virtue, and he recognized his inadequacies as a candidate...

...So do many Protestants...

...On the other side of the tough, to the north, the taller, more impressive Mourne Mountains hunch their dark, rounded shoulders down towards the town, casting dark shadows in the sunlight...

...he is also attracted by the notion that it may have been unnecessary, as witness his evident hostility to "cold-war liberalism" and his monodimensional sketch of the history of the EastWest conflict...

...Informed by revisionist readings of postwar history, he is not content to argue that the cold war is over...

...Like Mr...

...Donoghue...

...Her son said of her: "She was neither stupid nor indifferent, but the implements she had to use---cloth, thread, meat, vegetables, the gas cooker, the stove--were invariably at odds with her need of them...

...Mondale's derisive "Where's the beef...

...Yet Blumenthal's eagerness for the future is haunted by its own ghosts...

...Donoghue's memory, imagination, and formidable musical and literary references, a distillation of what it means to grow up Catholic in Northem Ireland, of what a father means to a son, of what the death of a sibling does to family life...

...Music is a dominant force in Mr...

...Donoghue's memories have a hero, it is his father, Sergeant Denis Donoghue of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a stern, upright, fair, and unimaginative man who would not seem able to instill such fiercely loving loyalty, but in memory he gave his son "everything I needed...

...The fear of the future was a cornerstone of the successful Republican strategy in 1988...

...Donoghue is unforgiving that the politics of Northern Ireland did not allow his father, a Catholic, to rise above the rank of sergeant...

...Donoghue's life, and his def'mition of music in the book is the best I've ever read: "Music is the art which gives a formal destiny...

...The best explanation of this slighting is probably that Blumenthal regards such social and moral anxieties as part of a sort of cultural lag, best addressed by moving America beyond the paradigm of postwar politics...

...NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD teaches Chinese history at Middlebury College in Vermont, and has recently completed a book on Shanghai in the 1920s...

...On the surface, it seems quiet, peaceful, and well-ordered...

...Warrenpoint sits between, with the dark, gray, icy lough a forbidding barrier that separates the two...

...Donoghue's voice, and for that gift we are grateful...

...The town is white-washed and neat, without a sign of the cheerful messiness of a south-of-Ireland village...

...Blumenthal has no trouble making the case that it will take new ideas and alluring goals to persuade the public to embrace political risk, but it isn't always clear that Blurnenthal sees that even attractive novelty is not enough...

...Donoghue's family, they were Catholics and did not see a bright and promising future for themselves and their children...

...was not directed at new ideas per se, as Blumenthal implies, but at HaWs failure to live up to his promise...

...George Bush would not have been elected, cold war or no, if most Americans had not felt reasonably well off...

...Blumenthal is surely fight, however, that the Democrats need an agenda and a language appropriate to the new political world...