The perfect follow-on to Michael Kinsley's ruminations about how we can't move Americans with abstractions is Al Gore's fabulous Martin Luther King Day speech yesterday "On the Limits of Executive Power." Frankly, if this kind of appeal cannot mobilize the American people, I am not sure anything will. Gore gave a similarly stirring and powerful speech after Abu Ghraib first broke, calling on the President to give us back our country. Surely these issues of claimed unassailable executive power go to the very heart of what it means to be a democracy, regardless of which side of the political divide you are on. With a rallying cry of liberty and justice (read, a living wage) for all, the Democrats just might live up to their name and speak for a genuine democracy as our founders imagined it and our people have created it.

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As someone who has invoked Patrick Henry more than once on this blog, I recommend Michael Kinsley's piece in Slate this morning: "Give me Liberty or Let Me Think About It." It has interesting parallels with the musings I just posted about "muscular Wilsonians" -- read, starry-eyed idealists who are willing to use force -- versus "sensible realists."

Matt Yglesias last week questioned the wisdom of the State Department's new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), which President Bush described glowingly in May as "charged with coordinating our government's civilian efforts to meet an essential mission: helping the world's newest democracies make the transition to peace and freedom and a market economy." It has been headed by Ambassador Carlos Pascual, the incoming vice president and director of foreign affairs at Brookings, and strongly supported by the folks over at Democracy Arsenal as well as by me, and, I suspect, my fellow bloggers here. Iglesias was riffing off of a long article by Chris Preble and Justin Logan for Cato, which I also recommend even though I disagree with large parts of it.

The debate is not really over S/CRS, which is a good start on reorganizing our bureaucracy to address a host of obvious problems where we have been patching together solutions but which is also pitifully small and under-funded. Preble and Logan themselves quote a member of a study team commissioned by the Defense Science Board as saying that the current version of S/CRS is "so small and so modest that it's not going to make a difference on the ground."

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