THE BELL CURVE:

Tom Wilck died last week, and I lost not only a dear friend but also my best — and drollest — political sounding board.

It all happened very quickly. Only a few weeks ago he was sitting on our patio telling us he was going through a series of medical tests. And then, quite suddenly, he was gone, leaving some of us with a greater awareness of our own mortality and a sense of diminishing time to address the undone matters in our lives. And leaving behind, also, an echo of the Orange County Council of the Boy Scouts of America who got it right recently when they presented Tom with their annual “man of character” award.

Tom was special in my life for many reasons, but most of all as a shining example of how philosophical differences can be reduced to civilities and, often finally, to absurdities and laughter. It wasn’t that he didn’t take his convictions — and the considerable time he dedicated to the community in which he lived — seriously. It was that he kept them in perspective and set a role model for others. Like me.

I first knew Tom professionally, when he was handling public relations for the Irvine Co. and I was a local writer to be properly serviced. It wasn’t until he took off on his own that we discovered the delight to be found in political incompatibility and the pleasure of social events that included his wife, Nadine, who was — and is — a solid professional in Tom’s line of work and could well hold her own in repartee.

Tom served Richard Nixon for a spell in Washington and strongly protected him in conversation against what he considered unfair charges. When they got too unfair at our lunches, he would remind me of Bill Clinton’s excesses, and we’d be off and running. And when that got tiresome, we’d turn to our own roots and find similar principles embraced in our beginnings that always offered a base for our friendship — and a jumping-off place for one-upsmanship humor, honed to a fine edge over the second martini.

I will miss my lunches with Tom sorely, especially in an election year when humor is going to be in short supply. We would have found a way to it. We always did. And I’m sure that he still does.

A memorial to Tom Wilck will take place in the East Room of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda at 4 p.m. Aug. 21.

Civility in political discourse got another shot in the arm — in Orange County, of all places — with the announcement last week that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama had agreed to a joint appearance just down the road at the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest. This will be a kind of preview of the fall campaign because it will take place Aug. 16, before either presidential candidate has been formally nominated.

The man who brought this off is Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, whose credentials for even-handedness in highly controversial areas were firmly established at an AIDS conference at his church in which a broad variety of points of view were aired.

Warren will interview each candidate separately for an hour before they appear briefly on the stage together. We are told by a church representative that the principal topics of the forum will be “compassion and leadership, questions that don’t often come up in political campaigns.” That may be the understatement of the year, at least as far as compassion goes. We are further told that “gotcha” questions are out, and introspective questions are in. If Warren can stick to those promises, this may turn out to be one of the more significant meetings of the candidates.

Some months ago, I received a form letter from Tom Harman in which he wrote: “As your State senator, I promise never to vote for ANY tax increase.” This 11th Commandment was in boldface type and underlined, in case we didn’t get the message. I got it and responded here by saying I would never vote for a candidate who locked himself into such absolute positions in an office where the first requirement is statesmanship which weighs and evaluates all the evidence before making intelligent decisions. Or where a perfectly legitimate tool of government is described by Harman as “morally wrong.”

I bring that up here because we are reading the same type of thinking in the current dispute over allowing the citizens of Costa Mesa to decide whether to increase the local Transient Occupancy Tax and/or the Business License Fee in order to meet some critical needs growing out of declining city income. There are arguments that can be made on both sides, but one of them isn’t to turn it into a moral issue. And that’s what Costa Mesa’s mayor pro tem, Allan Mansoor, has been doing in a series of letters to the Daily Pilot and the Orange County Register.

In a letter in the July 30 Pilot, Mansoor wrote, “If we raise taxes locally, we cover up the problems they caused and it becomes a vicious circle of borrow, spend and higher taxes that leads to socialism.” In the Mansoor reasoning, socialism is the devil incarnate, and taxation is its handmaiden. And the city suffers.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.