Ron Elving

Aside from times of genuine national crisis, it is hard to recall a week with as many events of political significance as the one we have all just witnessed.

As a kickoff for the re-election year of a president, it could scarcely have been more fraught. And as always, our perception of events was subject to our differing political perspectives.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET

Viewers tuning in for the latest Democratic presidential candidates' debate Tuesday night may sense something missing in Des Moines.

Don't put too much stock in all those New Year's predictions you're hearing and seeing about American politics in 2020. Anyone saying they know what will happen is probably just trying to get our attention.

And probably succeeding. We've all fallen for headlines and clickbait proclaiming foreknowledge of events. We do it for sports, the stock market and just about any other outcome that cannot be foreseen.

That goes for elections — especially for elections — and particularly in a high-stakes, pivotal cycle such as we are in now.

When it was announced Wednesday night in the House of Representatives that all of the time allotted for debate on impeachment had expired, a cheer went up within the chamber. After a dozen hours of rancor and wrangling, there seemed for a moment to be an end in sight.

The spirit of that cheer was generally shared by the nation at large. But alas, that night, there would be closure only for the House and not the nation.

This fall's cornucopia of political books features two kinds: campaign-style autobiographies from people running for president and personal memoirs from former topsiders in the Trump administration.

The latest entry, Nikki Haley's With All Due Respect, bids fair to be both.

How big a deal was this week's House vote formalizing the ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Trump?

It could be quite a big deal indeed.

As has been noted, the vote opens the impeachment inquiry to public view and responds to complaints about its secrecy. The vote also may, in the view of legal scholars, strengthen the case for courts to enforce congressional subpoenas that have been issued — or soon will be.

President Trump will present the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor Tuesday, to a former top aide to President Ronald Reagan who has been a stalwart of the conservative movement for the past half-century.

Edwin Meese III, always known as Ed, is a native Californian and a living reminder of the time when the Republican Party counted on the Golden State as the cornerstone of its Electoral College majorities.

The topic of impeachment is back and hotter than ever in Washington. But is it back by popular demand? Will the issue simmer into the fall, or will the heat dissipate in the days ahead?

More Democrats than ever — a majority — now favor opening formal proceedings to remove President Trump from office. More joined the chorus over the weekend after reports suggested Trump pressured an ally to support a certain line of attack on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

But the fever for impeachment has yet to be felt by much of the public at large.

There was something different about the Democratic debate this week, compared with the earlier rounds this summer. Something was happening that was hard to pin down, but it was palpable. Not the contrast of night and day, but perhaps the difference between dusk and dawn.

It's a critical difference, and it comes at a crucial time. Because the Trump presidency these candidates are competing to truncate has reached what may be a critical juncture. But more of that in a moment.

Questions will linger about President Trump's aborted plan to host peace talks between Afghanistan's elected leader and representatives of the Taliban, but one aspect of that ill-starred rendezvous is relatively easy to understand — the proposed location at Camp David.

The venue, a federal facility in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland about 70 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., has been associated in the past with U.S. presidents and momentous meetings.

Many heads got scratched this week when President Trump doubled down on his erroneous claim that Alabama had been in the path of Hurricane Dorian.

Apparently relying on a map that warned of high winds, or another showing hypothetical paths for the storm, the president over the weekend insisted Alabama was "in the crosshairs." At midweek, sitting in the Oval Office, he held up a map on which someone using a marking pen had ballooned the area of actual hurricane threat to include Alabama.

"How does one man have so much power?"

One hears that question asked in Washington a lot these days, often with exasperation and bewilderment.

And it is not always a reference to President Trump.

Quite often, the man in question is Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky.

The man who calls himself the "Grim Reaper" — of signature Democratic initiatives.

Updated at 1:57 p.m. ET

On the presidential campaign trail in Iowa and on the op-ed page of The New York Times, former Vice President Joe Biden has made the case for going back to a nationwide ban on assault weapons and making it "even stronger."

Some have reacted with quizzical expressions: "Back?" "Stronger?"

Updated at 1 p.m. ET

The second night of the Democratic debates in Detroit did not stray from its predicted script: It was open season on front-runner Joe Biden right from the start.

But it was also something of a free-for-all, with every candidate for himself or herself. And the intensity and outcome of the exchanges may have come as a surprise to some of the people onstage.

Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate in Detroit was widely expected to pit the two leading progressives in the field against each other. Instead, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had each other's backs in fending off the other eight aspirants onstage.

They gave as good as they got, and emerged at least as strong as either was going in. That was particularly good news for Sanders, who had been perceived as ceding ground to Warren in recent months.

With his latest round of attacks on four first-year members of Congress who are women of color, President Trump has once again touched the raw nerve of racism in American life.

He has also tapped into one of the oldest strains in our politics — the fear and vilification of immigrants and their descendants.

Day after day, you're seeing stories about the 2020 census on the front page and all over TV news, even though the once-a-decade head count is still months away.

The president wants the census questionnaire to include: "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" He's willing to delay the count "for as long as it takes" to have it his way.

When history looks back on the first round of debates among Democrats in the 2020 presidential cycle, it will see a generational milestone.

Both nights of the twin bill in Miami put the spotlight on a national party in transition, loosening the bonds of its past and looking ahead to new personalities to propel its future.