For months President Clinton has complained that Republicans are not moving quickly to confirm the judges he nominates for federal court seats. In a recent radio address he said, "We can't let partisan politics shut down our courts and gut our judicial system."

Such a statement typifies Bill Clinton's charm. He often says, in essence, What I do is above politics, what Republicans do is partisan. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) responded by opposing judicial activism, praising judicial restraint, and stressing the need for governmental checks and balances.

This is not a good time to be a boy," David Frum wrote recently in The Weekly Standard. "The schools view boys suspiciously as potential sexual harassers ... and lurking in the shadows are the omnipresent psychologists, impatient to pump them full of Ritalin."

Two rallies last month-Promise Keepers in Washington and the "Million Women March" in Philadelphia-showed that some political intellectuals have it wrong when they try to give us only two choices: individualism or nationalism.

It might surprise some world readers to know how fond I am of the Democratic Party. My favorite 19th-century presidents, Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland, were Democrats. My favorite historian of the early 20th century, Claude Bowers, was a Democrat. Those within the "party of the common man" used to orate against special interests and mean it.

Ron Sider is a nice guy, and honest enough to admit that he has been mistaken on some things. His best-seller 20 years ago, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, treated market systems the way dogs treat hydrants. (And I have sometimes treated Ron's group, Evangelicals for Social Action, the same way.) But Ron's "20th-anniversary revision" of Rich Christians shows a partly new perspective.

Newsweek last month reported a lesson learned by J.C. Watts, the Republican congressman from Oklahoma who is a potential vice president in 2001. Rep. Watts was a high-school senior in Oklahoma in 1976 and "king of the campus-until he got a white girl pregnant." Rep. Watts is black.

God's grace: that's the lesson inherent in many of the 200 letters received in response to "The tragedy of American college education" (Aug. 23/30). Amazingly, as sheep are about to eaten up by wolves in shepherd's clothing, the Good Shepherd calls them, and his sheep follow that strong voice. But does that mean we pay no attention to the wolves? Should we be sinfully complacent, so that grace might more abound? By no means.