One of my favorite columns written in the heat of a presidential campaign came in the midst of George H.W. Bush’s first run for the presidency in 1988.

Bush, then a two term vice president whose very existence screamed “patrician,” was widely derided in that long ago campaign as a lapdog to Reagan and a man too weak to lead America. One writer compared “Poppy” Bush to every woman’s first husband and Newsweek even examined the “Wimp Factor” that seemed to follow Bush around like a cloud.

While that media narrative was in full bloom, an old friend of of the sitting VP wrote an opinion piece about the George H.W. Bush that he knew–a brave patriot, a decorated war hero, and a political leader who showed courage throughout his career.

That single column did little to swing the election Bush’s way–Dukakis’ campaign took care of that task. But it did put a dent in the media-driven theme of the day and perhaps gave 41 an opening to bury his wimpy image forever.

It would be a wonderful treat for me to be able to write a similar story about the Newt Gingrich that I knew, and write on and on about his courage, consistency and character. But as anyone who has known or covered Newt for more than 15 minutes, the reality of his public life is far messier than our 41st President.

That is not to say that Gingrich did not accomplish much as Speaker of the House. He was responsible for a political movement that put Republicans in charge of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years. Under his strong speakership, the GOP Congress balanced the budget for the first time in a generation. It balanced the budget 4 years in a row for the first time since the 1920s. And the Gingrich Congress passed landmark legislation like Welfare Reform. And he accomplished all of these things while fighting an embittered Democratic minority, a Democratic president and a hostile press.

He was deservedly named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1995 and helped Republicans retain control of Congress for the first time in modern political history. 1995 and 1996 were part of a remarkable political run for Newt Gingrich. Were his story to end there, most conservatives would surely have considered him a hero along the lines of Barry Goldwater. But Newt Gingrich did not have the luck, or good sense, to slowly fade away.

And things got messy.

Gingrich began facing growing criticism among conservative critics who echoed the GOP caucus’s concerns that Bill Clinton consistently got the better of Gingrich in budget negotiations. The House Speaker once admitted to a stunned GOP conference that he had no idea how to keep up with the president in negotiations.

By the spring of 1997, a group of conservatives including myself, Tom Coburn, Matt Salmon, Steve Largent, Mark Sanford and Lindsey Graham began demanding that Gingrich stand firm on promises made during the Contract with America or step down as speaker. During this time period, the battered speaker began moderating his image by being more giving in White House negotiations with the president. Congressional Republicans took note that he was caving on one appropriations bill after another.

In the days leading up to the Easter break, Gingrich began negotiation away what he had once called the “crown jewels” of the Contract with America–the tax cuts. At that point, conservative members rebelled against the speaker and attempted to replace him. The coup failed but Gingrich would be forced out for good a year later after delivering a petulant speech that attacked conservatives as “the perfectionist caucus.” Gingrich turned his backs on the conservatives who made him speaker and instead fought with Democratic liberal David Obey to pass what was then the biggest omnibus spending bill in U.S. history.

The conservative revolution brought in by Newt Gingrich was officially over and a month later a group of conservatives would call Gingrich and let him know that his days as speaker were over.

TO BE CONTINUED

As I sat talking to Bill Clinton this morning, the conversation turned to the great successes of the 90s. Looking back, I believe it was the courage shown by conservatives like Matt Salmon, Steve Largent and Tom Coburn that led to the first balanced budget in a generation, four consecutive balanced budgets for the first time since the 1920s, historic welfare reform and paying down the national debt by trillions of dollars. And I have no doubt that if conservatives like Matt were in Congress over the past decade, Republicans would have stayed true to their values and America would be stronger today.

from Politico
I quit Congress 10 years ago today.

It was nine months into my final term and I would be savaged for this decision for years. The transition home was publicly and personally wrenching.

Republican candidates who begged for my endorsement months earlier took to attacking me on the campaign trail. Contributors that tripped over tables in restaurants to shake my hand would turn their heads away later when I walked into a room. And media speculation as to why a 38-year-old congressman who won his last election with 80 percent of the vote would quit bordered on morbid.

One newspaper ran an editorial claiming I was morally unfit to hold office because it was running with a rumor that I had gotten a woman pregnant. A year later when I finally confronted the editor over the recklessness of an editorial that caused my family great pain, his response over a plate of fried catfish was, “Well, sometimes we don’t get it right.”

As my mother’s son, I should have been enraged and held a grudge for at least a few decades. But by that point, the fight was out of me. I changed the subject, picked up the bill and drove home.

What was so frustrating about my decision to leave was that I could not fully discuss my reason for quitting a job I loved.

My family knew my reason, as did my close friends and neighbors. But media types and politicians who tried to dig up every last detail of my very personal decision were left wanting more. They didn’t appreciate my bland explanation that I had resigned to “spend more time with his family.” They sought their revenge in different ways.

But by the time I left, my singular focus had turned to two sons facing troubling times. Andrew had been diagnosed with diabetes and Asperger’s, while Joey had a similarly serious condition — he was in middle school. But he had also endured his parents’ divorce while spending the better part of seven years away from his dad.

After going to a family counselor for a while to work through some of those challenges, the counselor’s conclusion was blunt and clarifying: “You can either take your sons to Washington or come home now. If you don’t, bad days are ahead for your family.”

When I heard those words, I knew I was coming home.
My family was in crisis. The days of racing home to put a bandage on searing emotional scars were over. I could not rip two boys away from their mother, extended family and school friends to transplant them in Washington.

My career in Congress was over.

I spent the next decade catching up, coaching baseball, going to Sunday lunch after church, spending Friday nights watching high school football with the kids and playing music with my sons. But most importantly, I was there to say goodnight.

The family counselor was right. The boys flourished with the love of their mother, grandparents and dad. And they still do today. That’s why my decision was both the easiest and most difficult I have ever made.

To channel Ronald Reagan’s famous debate question, I know my boys are better off today than they were 10 years ago. I just wish I could say the same for my country.

When I left Washington, America was running a $155 billion surplus, the economy was in overdrive, and the United States of America enjoyed a primacy unrivaled on the world stage.

A decade later, we are crippled by debt, depressed by a jobs crisis and drained by an endless war waged against an invisible enemy.

Our president is ill-prepared and our Congress is incapable of grasping the great challenges that now confront us.

This week we will remember those who lost their lives on Sept. 11. It is also a time to reflect on what we once were and what we can be again.

Why is the United States Justice Department wasting their time, money and energy on the prosecution of John Edwards?

Given the novel legal theory they’re pursuing and the resources at Edwards’ disposal, I would give the government even odds (at best) at convicting the former presidential contender.

For those who say the government should move forward with the case because of Edwards’ bad behavior, I would suggest they focus more on the hellish few years that Elizabeth Edwards’ children have had to endure and the fact that John Edwards has already been eviscerated in the court of public opinion.

In this case, schadenfreude requires too much collateral damage.

George Scarborough pictured

We measure success in many different ways. Some look to material wealth for the measure of a man, while others make their judgment based on a person’s political influence. Still others keep their focus on fame – even if that fame is gained for the wrong reasons. In the professions I have chosen – politics and media – winners and losers are sorted with a ruthless efficiency that has little tolerance for the kind of setbacks suffered by mere mortals.

My children have accomplished many things that would make any father proud. But none of those successes have made me as proud as when they’ve responded to failure with true grit and determination.

My father enjoyed great success in his life. He rose above an abusive and lonely childhood to become a faithful husband, a loving father, and a businessman who was as generous as he was successful.

He loved the Lord with all his heart. He based his life around First Baptist Church, and was most fulfilled in his work with Samaritan Hands. Dad, a southerner by birth, was a remarkable baseball and football coach feared by his opponents in the corner of upstate New York where I was raised. I can still remember the Saturday afternoon in 1975 when his two-year-long football winning streak was broken. The Yankees on the sidelines threw their hats in the air. “We finally beat George!” they screamed before marching off to the tune of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

As we crossed the field I looked and saw my dad smiling. A new winning streak would begin the next week, and he had been through worse than losing a ballgame played by teenagers. Four years earlier, Lockheed had laid off Dad when the engine supplier critical to his project went bankrupt. As he approached his 40th birthday, my dad was out of work. I remember driving around the South with him for two years as he looked in vain for a good paying job. I remember the tears of my siblings at Christmas, the worried looks around the dinner table at nights, the $40 unemployment check that Dad got every week that allowed him to buy a bag of groceries and a tank of gas.

But it wasn’t until the day after he died last Wednesday that I found the diary he began writing the day he lost his job.

Wednesday April 28th, 1971: “Received notice of lay off.”

Thursday April 29th, 1971: “Gave Gil Carmichael copy of resume, registered with Mississippi Employment Office.”

Friday April 30th, 1971: “Registered with Coats and Coats, gave Harry Lackey a copy of my resume, interviewed at IDS.”

And so his daily diary went for the next two years, highlighting every job lead, every interview, every rejection notice and every hopeful possibility. He looked for a good paying job for two years but ended up taking a job without a salary, hoping that he could somehow feed his family of five on a straight commission arrangement.

Dad’s final entry in that diary was simple. “With the Lord’s help, I will do well.”

And he did. Over the next four decades, Dad worked without ceasing, raised three children, paid our way through college and supported us without fail time and time again.

My father enjoyed great worldly success. He made more money than he would have ever imagined on that day in 1971 when he was unceremoniously fired. He even gained a bit of fame this week, with his life story ending up in the Congressional Record and his name making POLITICO’s Playbook.

But for me, George F. Scarborough’s greatest legacy did not come from what he did when succeeding by the world’s standards, but what he did when no one was looking. Because of the singular focus he showed during his darkest days, my family and I stand on the shoulders of a giant who has given us the chance to dream big dreams and the example to get back on our feet every time we get knocked to the ground.

Thank you, Dad. We love you dearly and will work without ceasing to make you proud.

David Cameron pictured

Something radical is happening in Britain, and it has nothing to do with Diana’s kid marrying a commoner.

Prime Minister David Cameron is challenging the British cradle-to-grave welfare state that has grown uninterrupted since Winston Churchill was kicked out of office after World War II. Sixty-six years later, another Conservative is pushing the steepest spending cuts his country has seen since the election of Clement Attlee in 1945.

Cameron has taken the hatchet to defense spending and proposed raising the age for retirement benefits. It has been a death-defying act for a British politician whose chance of survival seems unlikely at best.

Falling short of an outright victory at the polls last spring, Cameron’s Conservative Party successfully formed a coalition government with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. They immediately began taking dramatic steps to reshape and reform Great Britain’s bloated welfare state. Within months of becoming head of government, Cameron was hailed as the second coming of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who saved the island nation’s economy and international standing in the 1980s.

It is a comparison that makes Cameron uncomfortable. Like Thatcher, he came to power after an era of Labour rule had left the country dispirited, politically fractured and teetering on the edge of economic collapse. But Cameron tried to position himself as a compassionate conservative who did not share Thatcher’s free market radicalism or partisan zeal. He framed himself as a moderate forced to make tough choices because of bitter economic realities.

As prime minister, Thatcher cut spending, privatized government run agencies, cut taxes and deregulated the private sector. She became the archenemy of Britain’s powerful public sector unions and saw her public approval ratings fall to historic lows in 1982. But unlike Cameron, she loved to fight and often turned her anger on fellow Tories who were too timid for her taste.

In the end, the “Iron Lady” took no prisoners and won most of the battles she fought. In the process, Thatcher revolutionized modern British politics and launched an economic boom that lasted nearly 30 years.

Like Thatcher, Cameron was elected not because he is personally beloved or even because a majority of the public supports his economic program. Instead, he became prime minister because he was the only politician who seemed willing to stand up to public pressure and make the radical adjustments Britain’s economy needs to stay afloat. And just as Thatcher’s election in 1979 foreshadowed the Reagan Revolution here at home, the rise of David Cameron offers clues to America’s political future.

Cameron was elected because he promised to make tough choices and, a year after the formation of his government, he has been true to his word. In a nation conditioned to believe in an all-encompassing welfare state, Cameron looks to raise the retirement age to 66 by the end of the decade, lay off hundreds of thousands of public workers, raise taxes and slash the costs of government programs by an average of 19 percent. He’s even willing to transform the National Health Service, for generations seen as the third rail of British politics, in a move that even members of his own party are blasting as “the greatest upheaval in the organization’s history.”

Those radical reforms have been met with large-scale protests that have occasionally descended into violence, but to their credit the prime minister and Clegg stood firm over the past several months. A budget presented in March by George Osborne, Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, doubled-down on the spending cuts despite increasing public resistance. Now Cameron’s numbers are on the verge of collapse and Clegg is looking for a door to exit stage left.

Despite the worsening political climate, Cameron has no choice but to soldier on. Great Britain’s welfare state is more bloated than America’s, and its fiscal condition is even more perilous, with a public deficit nearly 11.5 percent of its total economic output compared to 10.7 percent for the U.S.

But soon enough, Britain’s grim reality will be our own. America’s debt burden, already approaching 70 percent of the U.S.’s GDP, is unsustainable. Whether President Barack Obama is reelected or defeated next fall, Washington will be pushed by the prevailing political winds blowing in from across the Atlantic. As was the case in Thatcher’s day, the British are ahead of the curve when it comes to economic reform.

If Republicans defeat Obama next fall, they should not expect the flowering of a new conservative age in American politics. Unlike the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, which led to a decade of dominance for conservatives in the U.S. and U.K., the rise of Cameron is unlikely to create a new governing philosophy that will bend the arc of Western politics.

Instead, Cameron and his debt-slashing American allies are more likely to be treated as a necessary evil by the public. Like an exterminator called in to kill the rats and roaches before a big holiday party, they may be the only ones who can come to the rescue to clean things up. But that doesn’t mean they should expect gratitude by an increasingly cranky public, or an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner after the job is done.

The Pope arrives at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington 2008

Is the Christian church slowly slouching toward an inevitable death? A study funded by Northwestern University says “yes,” concluding that Christianity is headed for extinction across the Western world.

With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche, faith in God is very much alive in America this Holy Week. That is not to say that some religious leaders have not tried to destroy the institutions they run through dreadful misconduct.

The sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church were made worse by the Vatican’s shameful and slow response to generations of predatory priests. Evangelical preachers like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard also became embroiled in sex scandals. Since their television platforms made them some of the most well known religious leaders, their very public falls fed into the cynicism of millions.

Too many other televangelists still pollute the airwaves begging for money while preaching the glories of the prosperous life. Jesus’ emphasis on servant leadership and humility obviously never penetrated the mind of these foul creatures.

While preachers and priests damaged the church’s reputation over the past 25 years, politicians did Christianity no favors either. The combination of religion and politics has been a toxic mix for a faith already in full retreat after the social upheaval of the 1960s.

The de facto alliance of religious conservatives with GOP candidates created even deeper divisions between liberal elites and conservative churchgoers—and assured that the church would have even fewer allies in the national press at the turn of the 21st century.

The reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 was followed by an unprecedented assault on the church from liberal media outlets. In apocalyptic rhetoric that predated Glenn Beck’s bizarre attacks against liberals, respected historian Garry Wills lashed out in the New York Times at America’s conservative Christian community for possessing ” a fundamentalist zeal, religious intolerance, and a hatred for modernity.”

Wills argued that Bush’s victory meant that the United States had more in common with al Qaeda than our Western European allies. Another Times column that week ominously suggested Bush’s Christian allies would now return America to the Dark Ages.

Actually, instead of being plunged into the Dark Ages, the American left experienced a renaissance of sorts following the election. Very soon after, a cottage industry in publishing sprung up that focused on attacking Bush, Christians, and the concept of God. Setting the Almighty up as a straw man during the Bush years was a very profitable business model for bookstores.

The New York Times best-seller’s list filled up with titles like “The God Delusion,” “God is Not Great,” “The Rise of Christian Nationalism” and “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

It was enough to keep Bill Maher busy for years.

And yet through preacher scandals and political upheaval, the Alpha and Omega is doing just fine. Long-term religious trends are looking up and a counterrevolution of sorts is underway 40 years after the excesses of the 1960s.

I have personally been heartened by what I have seen in churches like Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the heart of Manhattan. Keller keeps showing up on the Times’ best sellers list while filling his Upper Westside congregations with young believers every week. (When I attend Redeemer, I am excited to see that I am one of the older members in the congregation.)

Thoughtful leaders like Keller, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner believe that politics should be left outside the doors of the church so spiritual leaders can focus on preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ instead of sponsoring glorified political rallies. At the same time, they are moving away from defensive doctrines and instead focusing on the things Jesus said would assure his followers a place in heaven: antiquated concepts like feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and bringing hope to the hopeless.

It is a powerful message that may stem the decline of religion in America. While religious attendance in the United States has been down over the past few decades, the long-term trends are positive.

“The single most significant trend in American religion from 1900 to the present has been the steady and spectacular decline in the percentage of religiously unaffiliated people in the American population,” J. Gordon Melton, founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif., wrote in a recent ARDA paper. “In 1900, the religiously unaffiliated included some 65 percent of the population. That figure has now dropped to around 15 percent.”

According to a survey conducted by Pew Research in 2006, more than half of the population still attends religious services on a weekly basis. More than 75 percent of Americans believe the Bible is the word of God. And sixty percent “see an active and creative higher power behind the origins and development of human life.”

A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 54 percent of Americans say religion is a “very important” part of their lives and that 61 percent were a member of a church or synagogue. Seventy-six percent of Americans describe themselves as Christian.

Two thousand years after the first Holy Week, the state of the Christian church is strong in America. And if religious leaders continue to focus more on the teachings of Jesus Christ instead of blindly following the agendas of politicians, it will surely grow even stronger for years to come.

Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan pictured

Throughout his remarkable political career, elites regularly treated former President Ronald Reagan as though he were a badly told political joke.

Reagan rankled the sensibilities of the polite political crowd when he fought the transfer of the Panama Canal during his 1976 campaign for president: “We bought it, we paid for it, it is sovereign U.S. territory, and we should keep it.”

That position simultaneously horrified the foreign policy community and revived the former governor’s political fortunes.

A decade later, Reagan’s support for a missile defense shield was ridiculed as science fiction, even as it brought Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s negotiators to their knees.

Presidential biographer Richard Reeves wrote that throughout Reagan’s political career, he “was dismissed as a lightweight with no strategy.” It was a misperception that the former actor exploited time and again.

During the 1966 Republican primary, supporters of California’s legendary governor Pat Brown sent money to Reagan because they were certain the aging actor would be chewed up and spit out in the general election. Reagan shocked Brown when he became a popular two-term governor.

“Hardball” host and Carter administration alum Chris Matthews remembers former President Jimmy Carter’s White House celebrating the night Reagan won the GOP nomination in 1980 — also certain that the doddering old actor would be destroyed by Carter.

But on election night, Washington was stunned as results poured in proclaiming the launch of the so-called Reagan Revolution. By the time ABC news anchor Frank Reynolds grumbled, “What the hell is going on here?” Reagan was on his way to winning more than 90 percent of the electoral votes.

The disconnect between Washington’s view of Reagan and America’s perception of him bears repeating in a year when so many GOP candidates are being showered with contempt by a new generation of Washington elites. As former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fades from sight, Donald Trump has become the latest target of stinging political headlines.

The New York Times’s Gail Collins wrote a column last weekend titled “Donald Trump Gets Weirder,” in which she argues that Trump is the loopiest guy in the GOP field.

Business Insider published an article titled “The 7 Most Ridiculous Things Donald Trump Has Said in the Last Two Weeks.”

But the most telling critique came from Fox News’s Glenn Beck, who told Bill O’Reilly that Trump’s public statements are beginning to make him uncomfortable.

When your political rhetoric shocks a man who believes the rise of the Antichrist could be ushered in by President Barack Obama’s agenda, it might be time to refocus your communications strategy.

But Trump clearly doesn’t give a damn what polite society thinks of his presidential prospects.

While former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels work assiduously to be seen as serious challengers to Obama, Trump keeps doubling down on the birther controversy and spitting out policy prescriptions that would horrify most Washington strategists.

I called Trump last Friday to see if he would back off his claim that the president of the United States might be constitutionally prohibited from holding his office.

“I’m not finished with that issue by any stretch of the imagination,” Trump told me. “You mock me for that, but his own grandmother says he was born in Kenya and says she was there.”

The New York real estate mogul didn’t stop with questions about the birth certificate. Trump also claimed the president’s first book was ghostwritten by a domestic terrorist.

“Bill Ayers wrote ‘Dreams From My Father,’” Trump told me. “I have no doubt about it. That first book was total genius and helped get him elected. But you can tell Obama did the second book himself because it read like it was written by somebody of average intelligence with a high school education.”

For Trump, the theory feeds into his belief that Obama is unfit to be president.

“He is the most overrated guy. It’s unbelievable. Obama is worse than Jimmy Carter, and I put Carter at the head of the pack for bad presidents.”

Trump was no kinder to former President George W. Bush, dismissing him as “horrible for America, because there is a disunity in this country that we have never seen. That began with Bush.”

When he’s not focused on what he sees as Obama’s personal shortcomings, Trump could be mistaken, at times, for a traditional conservative candidate.

Like former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Daniels, Trump promises to confront America’s debt crisis. Like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, Trump wants to remove U.S. troops from overseas entanglements. “We can’t be the policemen of the world,” he told me.

But when I asked about his energy policy, I was again reminded that there is only one Donald Trump.

“We need to seize Iraq’s oil fields,” Trump brashly said in a statement that seemed to channel Reagan’s logic regarding the Panama Canal.

“Oil is going to be at an all-time high, and when we leave Iraq, the Iranians will seize their oil within 15 minutes,” he said. “Iran is already making moves. They won’t even have to fire a bullet.”

The Donald says a Trump administration would never let that happen.

“We spent $1.5 trillion on the Iraq War. Besides, if we don’t seize the oil fields, then all of the soldiers we lost in Iraq would have died in vain.”

This is not how serious presidential candidates are supposed to talk. This is not how respectable policy leaders are supposed to think. But anyone who believes political commentators’ scorn for Trump will keep him from winning the Republican nomination need only read the nasty things Washington’s wise men said about Reagan in 1979.

That is not to say that Trump is Reagan. He is not. But he isn’t Palin either. That means a run by the New York billionaire would shake up politics in a way not seen since Ross Perot sought the nation’s highest office in 1992.

A crowd celebrates the death of Osama bin Laden outside the White House on Sunday

Sometimes it’s good to just let out a cheer. Now is one of those times.

It will take months to process the news that came out of Pakistan on Sunday and its long-term impact on U.S. foreign policy. But for today, let’s just say thanks.

First, let us give thanks to the men and women of the United States armed forces. Their sacrifice and that of their families have sustained the American cause at home and abroad for the past decade. I’m also thankful for the hard work and tough professionalism of our intelligence community. On Sept. 11, 2001, they stepped into the breach and prevented bloodshed at home during the opening decade of this age of terrorism. Politicians used intelligence professionals and then got rid of too many of them when America seemed far enough removed from the immediate danger of a domestic attack.

Let us also give praise to President Barack Obama for just saying “no” to his political base and continuing Bush-Cheney policies he vilified during his 2008 campaign.

The Obama and Bush administrations made their share of mistakes, but would it really kill partisan hacks on both sides to say both presidents did what they believed to be best to keep America safe? God bless 43 and 44 for their efforts.

Over the past decade, Osama bin Laden taunted our leaders, threatened our nation and inspired the murders of thousands of innocent men, women and children around the globe. Saddam Hussein was deposed and the Taliban were routed, but bin Laden always seemed frustratingly out of reach.

By the 2008 elections, finding the man who had ordered the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon became an afterthought, a fantasy for even our most recklessly pro-war politicians and pundits. Proponents of the endless war in Afghanistan began arguing that achieving victory in that graveyard of empires had little to do with bringing bin Laden to justice.

And then, late in the evening on May 1, news spread across official Washington that bin Laden was dead. A spontaneous party began outside the White House. Hundreds gathered at ground zero and broke into joyful singing. The Phillies-Mets game was interrupted by deafening chants of “USA! USA!”

It may be disconcerting for some that a civilized country rejoiced at the news of someone’s death the way America did on Sunday night. But for the first time since Sept. 11, all Americans — regardless of race, religion or politics — had something to celebrate. After enduring two wars, a financial collapse and worries that we were losing our place at the top of the global pecking order, the death of the monster who launched this horrific era is rightly considered a national catharsis.

After Sept. 11, Americans came together in a way not seen since perhaps World War II. Political leaders took a brief break from demonizing their opponents. Activist groups cooled their rhetoric. Seemingly everyone made a bigger effort to be a little nicer and more respectful.

It was hoped that the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords would lead to a similar outbreak of civility. It didn’t happen, and the calls for restraint were quickly derided or ignored. Maybe civility is too much to ask in these fractious days, but I hope the spirit we saw Sunday night survives the week.

The past 10 years have been very tough for America. The war against terrorism will continue for some time, but now is the time to stop and say “thank you.”

Thank you to the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and National Guard. Thank you to America’s intelligence community. Thank you to our first responders, New York’s police and fire departments; former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and their administration; Rudy Giuliani and America’s mayors and governors; Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, Gen. Mike Hayden, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Obama administration and the Democrats and Republicans who served America’s best interests over the past decade.

And thank you, Mr. President. You did a hell of a job bringing the madman of Sept. 11 to justice. A grateful nation thanks you.

It’s tough being conservative Democrat.

For some Southern Democrats, this past weekend was like deja vu all over again. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran as a pragmatic, forward-thinking Democrat who promised to turn his back on big government liberalism. But soon after being elected, Clinton began forcing Democrats to take tough votes on tax increases, gun control and NAFTA.

Conservative Democrats in Clinton’s Congress were left with two bad options: 1. they could vote tin a way that reflected their district, or 2. they could help the president by casting votes that were unpopular back home.

Because Clinton was the first Democrat elected to the White House in over a decade, most Democrats blindly went along for the ride. A few years later, most of those Democrats were run out of Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994..

I always wondered what would have happened if more Democrats in 1993 had forced Clinton to be the moderate leader he became after the GOP was swept into power. I asked the same of Republicans over the past eight years who foolishly refused to stand up to George W. Bush.

Would a defiant Democrat or Republican who crossed their own party’s president been in better shape to weather a political storm?

And today, do Democrats gain anything politically today undercutting Barack Obama on health care reform?

It’s hard to say but I do know that after my congressman voted for the Clinton tax increases, I drove him from the race by hammering away on those votes every day.

The Democratic candidate who replaced him immediately began to try and put space between himself and Clinton. But every time he did, he seemed to weaken himself even more. My opponent angered his base without convincing voters he would stand up to Clinton one elected.

Realizing that running against his own president was a high wire act of the first order, I used my debate time pounding away at his ambivalent relationship with the president.

“Would you have voted for Clinton’s gun control bill or not?”

Would you really have just said no to Bill Clinton’s tax increases?”

After insisting that he would have voted against just about every major piece of legislation Bill Clinton proposed in his first two years, I would finish each debate by asking one question.

“Did you even vote for Bill Clinton two years ago?”

After stammering for a few minutes, he would mutter the words “uh huh” and then have to answer a series of additional questions that tied my poor Democratic opponent to a president who was out of step with the voters of my district.

I learned on that first campaign that running away from your own party’s president pleases no one.

I don’t know how President Obama’s health care battle will resol but I do know this. There are dozens of scared Democrats wondering tonight whether their congressional careers have been shortened by yet another president whose policies were far more liberal than promised.

Given the current political landscape, these Democrats have every reason to be concerned.