At the Kettering Foundation, where I presented a paper about online discussion and democracy Tuesday, foundation president David Mathews paraphrased the same challenge Joe and I were talking about last week. "Being off the page," he said, "is a product of the kind of work we do." Kettering's work is research into the mechanisms of democracy and the relationships of citizens to government and other institutions. The focus, though, is often on exploring the possibility of a revitalized citizenry, one that engages with those mechanisms of democracy in a more conscious and ongoing way. The complexities of this revitalization, and its foreignness to everyday life in the U.S. circa 2004, are what put the inquiry "off the page" and in culture's hopeful margins.

President Bush during his Tuesday press conference answering a question about whether his policy on Iraq could cost him the election: The American people may decide to change. That's democracy. I don't think so.

On Meet the Press yesterday, the L.A. Times's Ron Brownstein predicted two possible fallouts from Condoleezza Rice's 9/11 testimony and the release of the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike" memo. One major issue was the interpretation of Rice's under-oath claim that the memo was "historical" in light of the memo's mentions of current and future activities by al Qaeda and anti-terrorism investigators. The other was a focus on why the president and his team didn't do more to respond to the information in the briefing, for instance following up for more about the reported 70+ active FBI investigations into al Qaeda. But it seems to me that the biggest fallout, politically, for Bush, Rice et. al. is the continued erosion of the White House's overall credibility in the "War on Terror." The wartime footing of the administration and its stated and unstated claims to the moral high ground--over Democrats, critics,…