Not completely so, of course. As in 1848, 1968, and 1989, the insurgencies were many and they absorbed multitudes. As in all three, the protagonists were chiefly young. As in all three, the holders of power felt various degrees of panic. As in 1848 and 1968, they took place on more than one continent. As in 1968 and 1989, the insurgents were largely nonviolent, until the uprising in Libya. As in 1968, the targets were multiple, the identities of the movements alternately seductive and repellent in the eyes of outsiders, and often confusing.

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The mayor held a press conference later to say:  “The First Amendment protects speech.  It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.”  Previously, the mayor had declared:  “New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself.  What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.”  The protesters, he went on, had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”  I suppose it could be said that any demonstration makes a given space “unavailable to anyone else.”  And as for “expressing yourself,” well, that’s not what the First Amendment says, either.

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Then the marches stopped.

They stopped partly because the antiwar leadership was barely cobbled together, with some conspicuous quarters reluctant to speak harshly of the multi-murderous Saddam Hussein. The movement's drawing power was limited from the start, and then, once the war was on in earnest, it felt -- realistically -- that it had run smack against the brick wall of George Bush's manic pigheadedness. Demonstrators are unlikely to invest their energies in what look from the start like very lost causes. And the demonstrations also tailed off because the mainstream media didn't pay attention -- refused to pay attention. The story line they were promoting was: America kicks ass, new era begins!

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But while Harry Reid's move Tuesday to throw the Senate into closed session to demand answers on Iraq intelligence was a good start, Democrats need a lot more of such fighting spirit to prevail, despite all Bush's troubles.

First the good ship Harriet Miers was torpedoed after movement conservatives rose up in righteous revolt (but for James Dobson, who was whispered who knows which sweet nothings to keep him in line). Then the cleanest of prosecutors galloped in, wearing the whitest of hats and astride the whitest of horses, as investigating judges have done in recent years to take down Italian corruption when political parties were on the take and journalists had more amusing fish to fry. Patrick Fitzgerald alleged numerous lies on the part of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's "Cheney," and couldn't say whether Cheney himself was culpable in the White House campaign to smear Joseph Wilson, a conscientious objector to their war campaign. In the process, Fitzgerald grazed awfully close to the vice president and simultaneously decided to keep a Washington grand jury in business while he looks into a whole stud farm of Augean stables: Karl Rove's, above all, but also the Italian secret services that in 2002 colluded with who knows whom to circulate forged Nigerien documents that helped Bush ease his way into the calamitous Iraq war. If it wasn't bad enough for Bush that Libby was out, Fitzgerald let it be known that he was not necessarily done cleaning out bad guys. And to add insult to injury, along came Bush's once-staunch ally, Silvio Berlusconi, his own reelection campaign looming nigh, to declare that in 2003 he tried to talk Bush out of going to war against Saddam Hussein. Berlusconi has been telling this story for at least a year. So much for the fervor of Bush's "coalition of the willing."

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Today's stench of lies about John Kerry is a stale remnant of the old lies about the war Kerry fought in. As the nation fights another botched war, today's purveyors of war lies are ghastly descendants of the last generation's unpunished deceivers. Indeed, John O'Neill of the outrageously named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (and every TV talk show within reach) is the very same -- the young man recruited by Charles Colson to do Richard Nixon's dirty work against the young Kerry in 1971.

How we got to this month's twisted replay of war lies can be easily outlined. Bush, who blew off the terror threat before Sept. 11 and then launched a backfiring bait-and-switch war against Iraq, campaigns as commander in chief. Kerry counter-campaigns as a man who has known actual command and knows how to choose his wars. Enter Bush's surrogate smear artists to impugn Kerry's command and everything else that touches on what he did both in the war and against it.

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When the designated date came, the landscape remained dry and no saucers landed. A number of followers fell away. But a core of fanatics stuck to their guns, reinterpreted the data, concluded that they had (slightly) misread the signs, figured out the right date, and redoubled their energy. If reality was going to be in such poor taste as to disconfirm their belief, they would find a way to make them match. Thus does the book that emerged from this research, "When Prophecy Fails," by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, published in 1956, anticipate Ralph Nader. Nader, like the cult members, has newly retooled arguments at his disposal, and therefore must be counted as fervent in his reckless disregard for the all-too-real world in which George W. Bush and his crowd have taken power over every important institution of American politics on behalf of preventive war, plutocracy, environmental meltdown, cultural rollback and a judiciary that ratifies the above.

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Why does the National Review cover scream, "Thou Shalt Not Steal"? How is it, when the diehard opponents of judicial activism are the ones who took the fast lane to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of George W. Bush, when the opponents of hand recounts in Florida want a hand recount in New Mexico, when the sticklers for election law who demand acceptance of thousands of absentee ballot applications completed by Republican operatives, that Al Gore is cast as the candidate who will do anything and say anything to win? Why do both Democrats and Republican faithful now tremble with rage?

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Of course, when the vote is so stomach-turningly, sleep-interruptingly close, many a factor, from the sublime to the ridiculous, could be decisive. But for an unhealthy gallbladder, Pat Buchanan might well have eaten away at Bush's lead in a number of states. Possibly the decision by a Democratic official in Palm Beach County to list the candidates in two distinct columns, staggered, with the punch-holes placed between them, so that some confused elderly voters punched Buchanan's hole when they thought they were punching Gore's, will end up costing Gore the election. President Clinton's zipper, Gore's sighs, even (as Nader suggests) Bush taking time off in the final days -- there's a long list. Let's not leave out the blowhard pundits or the foggy and ill-informed journalists. It takes a huge army of accident, error, slovenliness and bad thinking to produce a defeat.

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Even pundits notice that the man is a gaffe artist -- that's the easy part, the (you might say) no-brainer. Evidence is not lacking that young Bush is grammatically challenged, semantically befuddled, factually slipshod. He makes a cheap spectacle of himself, whereupon his people can brand finger-pointers as, horror of horrors, elitists. Instant replay is made to order for television news -- it requires no homework -- and gaffes are made to order for instant replay.

It's not hard to go to the videotape to show Bush as Governor Malaprop, he of "subliminable," using "subscribe" for "ascribe," "retort" for "resort," "hostile" for "hostage," "forethought" for "forefront," "gracious" for "grateful," "gist" for "grist," "suckles" for "sucks," and so on ad infinitum. Jacob Weisberg in Slate has collected these and other examples (he is not the only one), as well as many an instance of Bush jamming together singular verbs and plural nouns -- as in "Our priorities is our faith" (Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10) and "Reading is the basics for all learning" (Reston, Va., March 28) -- and inverting, as in "We want to promote families in America. Families is where our nation takes hope, where wings take dream." (La Crosse, Wis., Oct. 19) There is also his memorable crack at Gail Sheehy: "The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never interviewed her." (Orange, Calif., Sept. 15)

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On the largest questions at stake in this week's collision between what may well turn out to be the dominant political passions of our time, Clinton veered and tacked so adroitly as to draw diametrically opposed treatments on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Post's Clinton is the one with his ear tilted upward, to big money, and even higher, to the celestial spheres whose music has the ring of free trade. The headline: "Clinton Defends Open Trade; President Condemns Seattle Violence." Only in the 10th paragraph did the Post reader come upon Clinton addressing what he delicately called "all the interesting hoopla that's been going on here." Here the president addressed the tens of thousands of nonviolent protesters graciously: "For those who came here to peacefully make their point, I welcome them here because I want them to be integrated into the longer-term debate." (Immediately he also condemned "those who came here to break windows and hurt small businesses or stop people from going to meetings or having their say.")

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Wilentz, red-haired and equivalently insouciant, won a slap from the New York Times for warning pro-impeachment Congress members, "History will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness." But a few days later the New York Times was publicizing the NYU event he thought up with a restive friend, New York writer Paul Berman, who talked to another restive friend, New Yorker film critic David Denby. Then NYU law professor Stephen Holmes was enlisted, and their phones started buzzing over the weekend, and electronic circuits got humming. And the next thing anyone knew, all the seats of the law school auditorium were filled Monday night at 7:30, and so was a spillover room of equal size equipped with two TV monitors, and the satellite uplinks were posted on the street outside, and the doors of the law school had to close to latecomers.

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The answer is, none of the above. More than anything else, the election is a referendum on the American political system itself. And, election after election, the system flunks. But the big flunk does not make big news. The big story, virtually the only story of this election, is a nonstory: At the core of American politics is a yawning, black sinkhole where Democrats' hopes melt down and most of the electorate vanishes. For the key to this election, as to most American elections, is the electorate that doesn't turn up. It is disproportionately -- no surprise -- less affluent, less educated, less white, less Republican than the private club of regular voters. To say its members are alienated is to say the obvious. The no-shows explain why a country with a largely Democratic belief system gives rise to an electorate that votes Republican.

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The answer is, none of the above. More than anything else, the election is a referendum on the American political system itself. And, election after election, the system flunks. But the big flunk does not make big news. The big story, virtually the only story of this election, is a nonstory: At the core of American politics is a yawning, black sinkhole where Democrats' hopes melt down and most of the electorate vanishes. For the key to this election, as to most American elections, is the electorate that doesn't turn up. It is disproportionately -- no surprise -- less affluent, less educated, less white, less Republican than the private club of regular voters. To say its members are alienated is to say the obvious. The no-shows explain why a country with a largely Democratic belief system gives rise to an electorate that votes Republican.

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"Does the President believe that oral sex is sex?"

"Does the President's religion include sexual intercourse?"

-- Questions put to presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal by prosecutors Jackie Bennett, Jr. and Solomon L. Wisenberg before the Washington grand jury, as reported in the New York Times on June 29 and 30, 1998.

..............................

Mr. Blumenthal, did the president ever tell you that he has stopped beating his wife?

With your own eyes, did you ever see the president stop beating his wife?

Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you that the president had stopped beating her?

Did the president ever tell you that he has stopped beating anyone else's wife?

Have you seen the president stop beating anyone else's wife?

If the president had stopped beating anyone's wife, would you necessarily have seen him do so?

Has Mrs. Clinton ever asked you whether you have stopped beating your own wife?

Did Mr. Clinton ever stop beating your wife?

Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you she had evidence that Mr. Clinton had beaten anyone's wife?

Did Mrs. Clinton refer to any records she had kept of Mr. Clinton's activity with respect to anyone's wife?

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The industry is newspapers and the man is Gene Roberts, managing editor of the Times since May 1994, and before that for 17 years the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the Inquirer, it is fair to say, Roberts was responsible for more serious investigations than all of Rupert Murdoch's papers on four continents over their entire lifetimes. The best known of Robert's initiatives was a multi-part series by Donald Barlett and James Steele that blew the whistle on the savings and loan bailout (a multi-hundred-billion dollar detail that's routinely overlooked when the subject of the infernal deficit rears its head). Hundreds of thousands of requests poured in for reprints, and the book version, "America: What Went Wrong?", was a best-seller.

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