WASHINGTON "Who is Karl Rove?" the puzzled fellow from Dubai inquired on hearing he had a phone call from the White House. He found out. Karl was sorry to inform the sheiks that the 68-2 vote against the port deal in the House Appropriations Committee meant they would not be managing our East Coast terminals and it would probably be wise to cut their losses and get out. Thus the embarrassing episode ends in the best possible way for Dubai and Bush. But the firestorm was instructive for what it revealed. Middle America reacted viscerally to news that -- after having been endlessly harangued by Washington that they will spend their lives in the shadow of Islamic terrorism -- Arabs from some place they've never heard of would be running our ports. Their reaction: "How dumb can these guys be?" Bush's explanation never caught up with that first reaction. And when Hillary began pounding the ports deal as proof the Bush-Cheney team was clueless in a post-9/11 world, Republicans, seeing their No. 1 issue, national security, slipping away, dumped Bush. Bush, seeing his numbers plunging, told Rove: Tell Dubai goodbye. But it is the media's contemptuous hostility toward people in whose name they presume to speak that was so instructive. Here is PBS-New York Times conservative David Brooks: "This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven't seen in decades ... a xenophobia tsunami ... a nativist, isolationist mass hysteria." Here is his Times colleague Thomas Friedman on learning that folks thought the Dubai Ports deal was kind of a dumb thing to do: This is "borderline racist. ... There's a poison loose. ... If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages." Dark Ages• Are we really headed back to the fifth century if Halliburton aces out DPW for the New York terminal? Fox News' Tony Snow, in a column titled "Fearful Fringe Nativism is the Essence of Surrender," calls opponents of the deal "paranoid," caught up in a "Dubai hysteria." "Fear has become the defining characteristic of a new strain of American nativism." Snow ends: "Eternal vigilance remains a cost of liberty -- and Fearful Fringe nativism is what it has always been: the essence of surrender." A disconsolate Weekly Standard has now weighed in. The collapse of the ports deal means "it's a paleo moment in America," wails Fred Barnes -- as in paleo-conservative. America is headed for a politics that is "gloomy, negative, defeatist, isolationist, nativist and protectionist." What are we to make of all this keening? The media establishment was jolted as it realized that Middle America's belief in the Global Economy is wafer-thin. What happened to the ports deal is that Davos World collided with America First and got its clock cleaned. Economic patriotism, which engages the heart, thumped globalism, an intellectual construct of economists and corporatists. Not to understand this is not to understand America. Though Bush may be an open-borders, free-trade Wilsonian who believes he has a providential mission to democratize the world, America never bought in. To Middle America, Afghanistan and Iraq were always about punishing the people who did 9/11, not about converting them to Jeffersonian democracy. What Barnes calls paleo-conservatism is the conservatism of the common man, rooted in tradition and wisdom born of experience. It is not the Big Government, open-borders, free-trade, interventionist, globaloney of the neocons and their Rebel in Chief. The cakewalk crowd doesn't understand America because it doesn't live there. It lives in an ideological world of its own creation, which is forever colliding with reality. And more collisions are coming. Pat Buchanan edits The American Conservative magazine.

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