Short Memories?

I know that everyone's busy these days.

Barack Obama's busy assembling his Cabinet — and some people are busy feeling betrayed because Obama appears to be on the verge of naming Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.

The Rocky Mountain News, however, finds Obama's choices for his Cabinet "reassuring."

Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times writes about Clinton's "potential pitfalls" and compares her anticipated nomination to Franklin Roosevelt's nomination of Cordell Hull to be secretary of state in 1933.

They're busy recounting votes in Minnesota and preparing to count a whole new round of votes in Georgia in the last two unresolved Senate races.

The government is preparing to spend billions to bail out Citigroup. I worked for Citi for several years, and I'm just as baffled by this as a former co-worker, who confessed to me, via e-mail, that he doesn't know what to think about it. "I just cannot believe they are that messed up," he wrote.

Meanwhile, cash-strapped consumers are looking for the best deals for Christmas gifts on a tight budget when they're not making arrangements for visitors for Thanksgiving dinner.

It makes me think about a scene in the last segment of the 1989 miniseries "Lonesome Dove," when Woodrow Call (played by Tommy Lee Jones) hauls Gus' body back to Texas for burial.

In the scene, Call stops off in Nebraska, where Gus' old flame, Clara, and the reformed prostitute, Lorena, are living. He wants to give them the letters Gus wrote for them before he died and to tell Lorena that Gus left her the proceeds from his share of the cattle herd they drove to Montana.

Lorena's grief for Gus is so great that she spends hours outside, standing next to his coffin, speaking softly to the body inside. And she laments the fact that no one else grieves for him.

"They all forgot you, Gus," she says to the casket. "They've all got their own doings."

That's the feeling I'm getting these days on national security. Everybody's got their own doings.

The economy is clearly on people's minds these days — and rightfully so. But that doesn't mean that the terrorists have given up on their intention to do serious harm to this country and its people. If anything, it seems to me that a period of national economic instability is a good time for an adversary to attack.

And some observers haven't gotten so involved in their own doings that they've forgotten about the ever-present threat of terrorism and international conflict.

Less than two weeks ago, the Times of London reported that Obama was "being given ominous advice from leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to brace himself for an early assault from terrorists."

TWsPress worries that America has "fallen asleep ... it seems to us that we are sitting in the midst of a potential perfect storm ... precious few people [seem] concerned about being attacked again."

I don't think it's an absence of awareness. For many of those voters who supported John McCain — including my brother — national security was always at the top of their list of concerns.

But that group was in the minority. On Election Day, exit polls indicated that the overriding concern was the economy.

It was clear that far more attention was devoted to the economy during the general election campaign, which was to be expected, given the economic meltdown the country has experienced.

The loss of a job or a home has much more direct impact on American voters than the detonation of a roadside bomb half a world away.

Even so, I presume the incoming administration is aware of what can happen in foreign affairs.

Near the end of the presidential campaign, when it appeared more likely that Obama would win, his running mate urged supporters to stand by him in the transitional period because he was almost certain to be "tested" by his foreign adversaries in the first six months of his presidency.

That test will include Obama's secretary of state.

And, if that turns out to be Hillary Clinton, maybe she'll be getting that 3 a.m. phone call after all.