FOURTH TURNING ALERT.

A number of columns suggest that there is much more at stake in the upcoming election -- at all levels -- than simply the liberation of Iraq. The latest from Thomas Friedman (requires registration) is as good a place as any.

The leading edge of the American baby boom generation is now just two presidential terms away from claiming its Social Security and Medicare benefits. "With unfunded entitlement liabilities at $74 trillion in today's dollars - an amount far exceeding the net worth of our entire national economy - and with payroll taxes needing to double to cover the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare, how can any serious person not call entitlement reform the transcendent domestic policy issue of our era?"

That's challenge number 1, and I will have more to offer on that challenge tomorrow.

The second group of boomers barreling down the highway are the young people in India, China and Eastern Europe, who in this increasingly flat world will be able to compete with your kids and mine more directly than ever for high-value-added jobs. Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

That's challenge number 2, but the education establishment is still not up to it. "Access" -- defined as keeping the unprepared or the unmotivated in the schools -- and "diversity" -- defined as tweaking the admission standards to achieve some sort of proportionality, still take up too much of the establishment's time.

The third group of boomers our next president will have to deal with is from the Arab world. The Arab region has had the highest rate of population growth in the world in the last half century. It has among the highest unemployment rates in the world today. And one-third of the Arab population is under the age of 15 and will soon be entering both a barren job market and its child-bearing years. There are eight Saudis under age 15 for every one between ages 45 and 60.

This is why I believed so strongly in trying to partner with the people of Iraq to establish some sort of decent government there that might serve as a beachhead for more progressive governance in the Arab world. I have not given up hope for this, but it may turn out that we made too many mistakes and that Iraqis are too divided for such a project to succeed. If so, the next president is going to need plan B - some combination of oil conservation that reduces our exposure to this region, a new military strategy and a renewed focus on promoting better government there through diplomatic and economic means. The Arab world is not even close to educating its baby boomers with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. Left untended, this trend is a prescription for humiliation and suicide terrorism.

Thus, the liberation of Iraq is a challenge -- but not the only challenge -- to policy makers.

 A recent Daniel Henninger column in Opinion Journal sounds a related theme.

After three presidential debates, it is clear that George Bush is asking the American people to make a similar, abrupt break with the comforts of the political past. Proposals such as Social Security privatization or individually run health-savings accounts are not being offered as just an intriguing "policy" alternative. These ideas are an historic necessity to surviving in the world economy as it exists today.

Perhaps. With respect to Social "Security," the shortfall projections are sensitive to the projection of future immigration. To the extent that homeland security policy discourages enrollment in U.S. universities, that flow of skilled immigrants is attenuated. Likewise, the discovery by employers that skilled workers will be able to earn a comfortable living in their own countries reduces immigration by skilled workers.

Alas, this doesn't alter the reality that the economic trains of China, India and Brazil have left the station. John Kerry's comments on Social Security Wednesday evening ("I will not privatize it") and his federally led health-care proposal makes clear that he expects the electorate to put off responding to this irreversible global reality for another four years. George Bush wants the big decision made in three weeks.

The Ownership Society is the appropriate, 21st century replacement to the New Deal. It's about making it possible for the economy to turn on a dime, not once a decade. The bad news is that George Bush didn't bother to bring up the idea until a few weeks ago, in his convention speech.

Neither Mr. Bush, two anonymous Treasury secretaries nor anyone else in this administration has spent significant public time the past four years preparing American voters to make a change that I'm certain most of them know has to come. All those lunch-bucket Democrats carting DVD recorders out of Wal-Mart know those prices weren't delivered by the tooth fairy, or by a factory on the other side of town.

Bill Clinton understood these realities, as shown in his trade policies. But Bill Clinton never really changed his party; he never prepared the party to transition out of its New Deal mindset. With John Kerry, the Democratic policy stone has rolled a long way downhill.

Too bad. Amid war, terror and global economic upheaval, this election is a tough and too-sudden call for many voters. My guess is that the American electorate knows full well that the world is changing, and that come November 2, will decide the moment is now to change with it.

Perhaps, although Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The Washington Monthly that there is a looming crackup in the Republican coalition.

Two decades ago, Democrats granted moral authority to identity-group liberals, who, in their admirable zeal to fight discrimination, soft-peddled evidence that the country was growing more tolerant, and refused to consider that factors other than racism might explain, say, lagging minority test scores. As a result, Democrats defended unpopular quota-style affirmative-action programs and bilingual education. Today, Republicans bow to the supposed moral superiority of Christian conservatives, who, though living in the most religiously-minded and tolerant country on earth, persist in feeling persecuted. The GOP lets these groups lead them by the nose--even when, as on stem cell research, it puts them in the position of defending the unpopular and morally dubious argument that millions of Parkinson's patients should be denied a major hope for a cure in order to prevent the destruction of a few zygotes with zero chance of ever becoming humans. Two decades ago, Carter's overly cautious foreign policy helped convince millions of security-minded Democrats to abandon the party. Now, Bush's incautious foreign policy may be driving millions of Republicans the other way.

Mr Wallace-Wells suggests that some, well, triangulation, would be good for the Republicans.

A different kind of GOP isn't hard to imagine, at least in the abstract. In The New York Times Magazine last month, David Brooks sketched out a reasonable vision of what he calls "progressive conservatism." Brooks wants the GOP to embrace a slightly larger government, to value balanced budgets as highly as low taxes, to stop doing so many favors for business, and to focus on entitlement reform, national service, improving teacher quality, and promoting marriage in the ghetto. This is the vision of the Republican Party that belongs chiefly to its rump reformist wing: John McCain, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others. It's not a bad platform, and Brooks is probably right that the Republicans would command more votes and run the country better if they hewed more closely to it.

To an extent, that argument represents some wishful thinking in Democratic circles. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas (details or compare prices) marvels at the propensity of middle-income Kansans to vote for Republicans -- for cultural issues that he argues cannot possibly prevail -- and against their economic interests. There is much more to say about that book, and I will have more once I finish reading the related -- if less polemical The Right Nation (details or compare prices). For now, let me offer one observation from Mr Wallace-Wells's article.

The argument seemed over. Big government had won.

But of course, the argument was anything but over. An increasing number of voters were becoming aware that government was failing to make much headway against the major problems of the day. The economy remained weak, energy costs were rising, and social chaos was spreading in the cities. A few reform-minded Democrats and intellectuals were starting to rethink the premises of big government liberalism, to wonder if there might be less expensive and bureaucratic--and more effective--means to traditional liberal ends. Carter was inclined to agree with them. But such thinking was anathema to the party's liberal leaders and most powerful interest groups, and they were positioned to stop it.

The problem the Democrats face as an opposition is that they -- in an interesting inversion of thirty years ago -- give the impression of being nostalgic for a past of programs and institutions they created and managed that worked. The evidence is that those institutions did not work very well.

Mark Steyn gets it:

So, for all that Bush is accused of being ''stubborn,'' it's Kerry who refuses to change. He reckons that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ''get back to where they were'' -- back to Sept. 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing congressional interns. All that going back to Sept. 10 means is that you'll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that, if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans -- and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans -- will die in terrorist "nuisances."

But he won't win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. That world is broken and you can't put that world back together.

The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal gets it.

Rather, it's because there has been a genuine and important philosophical battle growing for the past 20 years in Washington over the fate of the post-World War II welfare state. And that battle was clearly joined on Wednesday night.

The Republican challenge to the liberal big government consensus began in the 1960s with Barry Goldwater and accelerated in the 1980s with the Reagan tax cuts. Then the 1990s brought us the GOP takeover of Congress and, significantly, welfare reform. But the recapture of the Presidency in 2000 by a Republican willing to rethink such middle-class entitlements as Social Security has threatened the status quo in a way that hasn't happened in generations.

Mr. Bush isn't merely trying to shrink the supply of government by cutting this or that program. (Sadly, in our view, he rarely does.) Rather, his "ownership society" ideas about health care and pensions are a bold attempt to reduce the demand for government. This clash of visions--Mr. Bush's Republican new "progressivism" versus Mr. Kerry's conventional liberalism--is one reason so many Democrats feel so threatened by this President.

They caution,

We don't pretend to know if Americans are ready to endorse this kind of agenda, especially with a war going on. But it was certainly striking to us that the incumbent, Mr. Bush, was pitching the more aggressive reform plans, while the challenger proposed to stand athwart history yelling stop. On domestic matters as much as on foreign policy, voters this year can't say they aren't getting a choice.

Unfortunately, if the New York Times's endorsement of Senator Kerry is any indication, the Democratic establishment has learned nothing and remains nostalgic for the old days of "got a problem, get a program." Or perhaps they're nostalgic for the Yale Political Union?

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

Ryan Sager is on point about Senator Kerry's style.

There's a way to run for president, criticizing the present while providing a vision for the future, without sounding like the head of the Yale Political Union. But Kerry hasn't hit on it yet. He could still win, but this election season would have gone better for him had he come in understanding the difference between being right and leading people in the right direction.

More to come. As I type, I am listening to some of the mid-day campaign speeches. It will make for spectacle, if nothing else.