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Washington's politics, and what passes for the city's intellectual life, are not immune from the law of gravity. What rises fast to the stratosphere comes back to earth, whether Hillary Clinton or Kenneth Starr, Madeleine Albright or Donald Rumsfeld, the Contract with America, or Obamneycare. Blink, and the Next Big Thing is that book left in the rain at the end of your neighbor's garage sale. (Though then there are those who bounce through gravity, Clinton and Gingrich in particular—but that's another column, to be titled "Why F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.")

David Petraeus burst into public consciousness as the general who had, supposedly literally, written the book on counterinsurgency—warfare centered on winning the hearts and minds of civilians, known to...