You want to see the front line in the fight against terrorists? You don't have to go to Iraq. The cop on the beat is walking it every day where it really counts, right at home, because terrorists don't care about lines, they care about getting you where you live. And in New York City, home to ground zero, the NYPD has created over the last six years what one CIA veteran in Washington calls "the best counterterrorism center in the world." Working with the FBI and other federal agencies ("the three-letter guys," as a police sergeant calls them), the NYPD says it has stopped at least six significant plots against the city.

Then again, maybe you don't really care about terrorism any more. Maybe you really do feel safe or you just don't want to hear another politician telling you to be scared. The T word has grown tiresome. "People have such short attention spans these days, that's to be expected," says Paul Browne, the New York City Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information. "The police department certainly expects it. You can't really expect an entire city of 8 million to stay in a state of quasi-heightened alert." So sometimes the cops put on a show, like the thousands of police that poured onto the streets for New Year's Eve. But oftentimes they operate in ways that are more subtle, even secretive. What they never let themselves do for a minute, however, is forget that the bad guys are still out there, and that they must calculate very carefully how to meet a threat that is real, not imagined. (Article continued below...)

I wish the same could be said of our presidential candidates. Watching the campaign in these heady days of emotive tears and comebacks, one has a sense the debate about national security is increasingly detached from reality. The pause in Baghdad's carnage has the Republican pretenders to the presidency treating Iraq as a problem almost solved. It is not, as even the vaunted Gen. David Petraeus attests. Nor has the danger of nuclear proliferation in Iran diminished, even if the Democrats seem inclined to think the crisis has passed. The threat of a power vacuum in atomic Pakistan doesn't go away, the Taliban do not retreat in Afghanistan, nor does the dangerous anger of terrorist wannabes subside in the United States merely because the headlines fade.

These all remain clear and present dangers, yet perhaps because the situations are so intractable one hears only airy pontifications from the leading candidates. In one notably weird exchange, Mormon Mitt Romney and Baptist Mike Huckabee cited the arcane works of jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb, executed in Egypt more than 40 years ago, to underpin the sweeping assertion that Muslim anger against the United States has nothing to do with reactions to American policies. Sweet exegesis! Such neo-Orientalism will do little to make us safer.

What really can make a difference is more intelligent use of local law enforcement. It is, says NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, "a tremendous force multiplier." There are about 12,000 FBI agents in America, but there are more than 700,000 state and local cops. "They are the ones that are going to have the contacts, going to have the information," says Kelly. This is especially true as the grim experience of Iraq and setbacks in Afghanistan have shown the limits of military adventurism in response to terrorism. Yet the Bush administration, while it continues pumping more than $2 billion a week into Iraq, is constantly looking to cut the few hundred million dollars of federal funding spent on local cops in America. "It strikes me as ironic," says Lee Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, "that as the nation shifts away from a military strategy it is cutting back on resources for law enforcement, which will be needed to pick up the slack."