WONDERS

Posted at 7:15 a.m. ET

Sometimes we read something that just sticks, and reminds us of how lucky we are.  Peggy Noonan, in today's Wall Street Journal, reports the following, about John McCain's return to the U.S. Senate:

He's come quietly back to the Senate, where one of his colleagues told him of an amazing thing. The colleague had been touring the young democracies of Eastern Europe during the American election, and he found it wasn't so much Barack Obama that immediately knocked out observers but Mr. McCain's concession speech. This is the first American transfer of power they'd seen in eight years, and they couldn't get over the peacefulness and grace with which Mr. McCain accepted the people's verdict. "It really impressed them," the colleague told Mr. McCain, and later me. It gave them a template, a guide to how the older democracies do it.

When he told me of this, I remembered the observation of a journalist who had covered Russia. The Russian newspapers had generally played down Mr. Obama's victory, she said, because it got in the way of the establishment line: that the corrupt American democracy is composed of two warring family machines that have the system wired and controlled with the help of their corporate oligarch cronies. It's not a real democracy but a pretend democracy, and a hypocritical one. This helps the Russians rationalize and excuse their infirm hold on democratic ways and manners. And then the black man from Chicago with no longtime machine or money is elected . . .

So the Russian press muted its coverage. Mr. Obama's victory upset their story line. They have to think up a new one now. They will.

We still await the new story line from the American left.  Apparently, if the nutroots out there are any indication, it will be something like, "Barack was good, Barack was pure.  But then he was elected with the help of the corporations and the militarists, and he's been forced to give in to them.  He's a prisoner in the White House, which shows how far we have to go."

Yeah, that sounds right.

December 5, 2008.