"I recently told an assembly at my son's high school," I wrote in 1997, "that they were living through a time so blessed they would tell their grandchildren about it. They looked at me uncomprehendingly ... because it is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one's own time until it is gone."

I concluded with "golden ages never last." Throughout the decade, and most especially as it began to wane, I returned to this theme of the wondrous oddity, the sheer impossibility of an age of such post-historical tranquility.

And inevitable ennui. So profound was that tranquility, so trivial the history of that time, that George Will and I would muse that if this kept up -- an era whose dominant issue was a president's zipper problem -- he might as well go back to the academy and I to psychiatry.

Of course, it didn't keep up. It never does. History is tragic, not redemptive. Our holiday from history ended in fire, giving birth to a post-9/11 decade of turbulence and disorientation as we were faced with the unexpected resurgence of radical eschatological evil.

Which brings us to the age of Obama, perhaps -- mirabile dictu -- the most exhilarating time of all. There is nothing as bracing for democracy as the alternation of power, particularly when it yields as serious, determined and challenging an ideological agenda as Barack Obama's. This third wave of transformative liberalism -- FDR, then LBJ, now Obama -- is no time for triangulation. This is not incrementalism. We're not debating school uniforms. When Obama once declared Ronald Reagan historically consequential and Bill Clinton not, he meant it. Obama intends to be the Reagan of the new liberalism.

It's no secret that I oppose nearly everything Obama has proposed. But after the enervating '90s and the tragic 2000s, the prospect of combative and clarifying 2010s, of sharply defined and radically opposed visions, is both politically and intellectually invigorating."