Time magazine, the superannuated newsweekly, seems to reinvent itself every few years with slackening energy, in one vain attempt after another to postpone its inevitable, rapidly approaching, and much-anticipated demise. Its most recent incarnation has largely dispensed with the snoozy business of gathering and conveying fresh information in favor of political advocacy. Not surprisingly, the ideology that the editors display is the boneless neoliberalism that most of the better-paid members of the journalistic class find comforting--not too left, not too right, but definitely more left than right. It's the kind of liberalism that considers itself practical, wised-up, unromantic. Neoliberals love it if you describe their views as "muscular."

"National service"--the idea that Americans would be better off if someone, preferably the federal government, paid them to volunteer to help one another--has always been big with neoliberals, and so now it's big with Time magazine. The editors devoted a special issue to the subject last year. And that was just the beginning, apparently. This week's issue of Time is also a national service extravaganza. It's billed as "the second annual community service issue," which means that we can expect national service issues at regular intervals until the editors get fired.

To promote the new issue, the magazine somehow convinced the two presidential candidates to appear back to back in a special TV forum, where they answered questions about national service lobbed at them by a Time editor named Richard Stengel and the PBS news personality Judy Woodruff. The forum was sponsored also by

Columbia was an ironic venue for a chin puller promoting national service. The most common and traditional form of serving the nation, needless to say, is soldiering: The modern American soldier does it all, performing the chores that liberals cheer--building schools in distant and godforsaken lands, handing out candy to children, changing diapers--while not neglecting the tasks that earn the undying admiration of conservatives, chiefly blowing things up. It's a nice mix of activities, sure to be a character-builder for anyone who tries it, and as service-oriented as anyone could ask for. Yet Columbia, like several other expensive universities, has banned military recruiters from its campus. Columbia's administrators evidently think you can carry this national service racket too far.

During the forum, the irony was noted by John McCain, who, it turns out, once served in the military himself (who knew?). "We're here in a wonderful institution," he said. "But do you know that this school will not allow ROTC on this campus? I don't think that's right." McCain has been a longtime advocate of national service, the niceties of which he prefers to leave undefined. His approach is typical of national-service advocates and is shared by his fellow candidate and enthusiast, Barack Obama, whose campaign has issued a "detailed" proposal for national service without saying too precisely what it is his newly minted national servants will be expected to do.