Every election year, it seems, Joan Didion comes along, looks at all the attack poodles yipping on TV, all the "befuddled" and "apathetic" swing voters who spend half their time sitting on focus groups, all the queer notions trickling down the latest campaign dispatch, takes it all in, sits back, and quietly asks, "What is wrong with you people?" To wit:

We also knew that the election for its explicators would once again come down to "character," the "human connection," or what Laura Bush would tell you about her husband if you ran into her at the store. We were no longer even surprised that the ability of these explicators to read character seemed to have atrophied beyond conceivable repair: consider the way in which the raw fragility of Teresa Heinz Kerry was instantly metamorphosed into "strong woman," or her husband's pained shyness into "aloofness," or the practiced courtroom affability of the plaintiff's attorney who was his running mate into "sunniness."

Or, most persistently, the calculated swagger of the President himself into "resolve." I recall, shortly after September 11, at a time when the President was talking about "those folks," "smoking them out," "getting them running," "dead or alive," reading one morning in both The Washington Post and The New York Times about how his words were his own, the product of what the Post called his "unvarnished instincts." … Yet every morning, according to the same stories, the President met with senior advisers, including Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Andrew H. Card Jr., for a ten-minute "communication" session, the purpose of which was, in the Times's words, "to strategize about the words, emotional cues, and information Mr. Bush should be conveying."

It's a long, long piece, but it's worth it.