Being a columnist at a place like this can be exhilarating. But not because the job is as influential as some loyal Times readers still seem to think. A columnist’s clout may well have been overstated even in Lippmann’s heyday, but it has certainly dimmed in an age when everyone can and does broadcast opinions on the Web, Facebook or Twitter, let alone in print, or on cable or radio. No opinionator in any of these media could prevent the war in Iraq or derail the rise of Sarah Palin. Nor did pundits create phenomena like Barack Obama or the Tea Party. The forces of history are far bigger than any of a democracy’s individual voices, however loud or widely disseminated. That’s one reason America is so thrilling to write about.

For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.