Peggy Noonan

Where are we, one year from the 2024 presidential election?

The incumbent is famously, historically unpopular and has been for some time, so it’s not a blip or event-related. He should help his party’s prospects by stepping aside and letting Democrats fight it out. He won’t, we all sense this.

Republican hopefuls continue their battle, but everyone knows who’s way ahead in the polls. The front-runner, however, faces criminal trials on federal and state charges, which may take place during primary season. We don’t know if that will cast a shadow, or how broad or long.

We do know that we’re going on December, the Iowa GOP caucuses are on Jan. 15, and the New Hampshire primary will follow soon after. Things are going at a clip even if they don’t seem to be. The debate this week was all about the front-runners after Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, two candidates different in stands, approach, talent, temperament and appeal. Between the two of them they’re a fair enough approximation of their party. The other candidates, having given their all, should step aside, withdraw their names, and throw their support to either Ms. Haley or Mr. DeSantis.

Let them duke it out in the clear. That’s where a breakthrough is possible. Let one emerge as the leader of the not-Trump half of the party and go from there.

In a way both parties are being held hostage, the Democrats by the needs of an old man who wants to stay, the Republicans by an old man who wants back in. And both parties are at the mercy of cults, the Republicans’ one of personality and the Democrats’ of policy. They can’t free themselves from unpopular stands on such issues as illegal immigration. Both cults are self-limiting. This is why the majority of the American people, when polled, admit a second Trump-Biden race leaves them depressed.

Joe Biden’s main problem, the perception that he is too old for the job, is guaranteed to get worse each day. This makes his vice president more important than vice presidents ever have been. When people consider voting for Mr. Biden for the presidency they’ll know it is likely they’re really voting for Kamala Harris. This will only hurt Democratic fortunes, because she is uniquely unpopular. The practical path would be to make a change that reassures, to a veteran, highly regarded figure in whom people might feel confidence. This wouldn’t be easy and would give the president a black eye with some portion of his base, but black eyes heal in a year, and none of those angered will be voting for Mr. Trump.

I have been fascinated by Ms. Harris’s lack of success in her role considering the impressiveness of her previous résumé—district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator. I think she didn’t fully understand the nature of the vice presidency and thought she did. I think she let her political ego dictate her calculations. She was surrounded by friends and staff who had made a study of her but not the job and who assumed that by virtue of her first-ever status—first ever woman to hold the role, first ever black and Indian-American—she should be bold, remake the position, make her special significance and importance clear, be less an understudy than a co-star. But you can’t effectively change a thing unless you understand it first.

She meant to establish her place as the future president by showing off her charm and ease. Which is how she got in trouble with dramatic interviews, winging it with ad-libbed, mad-libbed arias in speeches, and taking on portfolios—immigration during an immigration crisis—that were important but not promising, and in fact dangerous. In three years under bright lights she proved herself insubstantial—not seeming to understand issues in any depth, getting lost as she discussed them, laughing in ways that said “please see me as a happy warrior.”

In her previous life she never had to use the tools of seriousness. She rose in a one-party state. Charm, networking and picking your way through the intraparty progressive minefields was enough. But at the level of the vice presidency it isn’t.

Her attempts to turbocharge the role left the press free to judge her on different terms. Here it must be said that many jobs in the top level of the federal government are hard, but vice president isn’t one of them. Every morning you get up and put on clothing. You then often leave for a trip—to the funeral of a head of state, to the Detroit Economic Club for a speech, or a party fundraiser in Bismarck, N.D.—and what you talk about there is the administration’s policies and plans, its claimable successes.

It is a boring speech—vice presidents’ speeches are always boring, are prepared to be such, because the people at the White House want the vice president to be boring. They want the vice president to be substantive, but they don’t want any attention off the president, or any disadvantageous comparisons made. Another reason vice-presidential speeches are boring is you wind up repeating the same stuff—policies, plans, hopes. Another reason is that you’re always speaking of serious, not playful things—domestic challenges, approaches to the world.

But it’s OK. Because everyone you speak to—everyone—knows it’s your job to be boring and gives you a pass.

If this sounds like “Wow, no one should ever become vice president, how insignificant,” no. You get a mansion; you’re not under the most intense daily scrutiny; people take care of you. The boon and political gift of the job is picking up chits and forging relationships for when you run for president.

You also get to help the administration you presumably believe in, and thus help the American people with good policies. It’s a good job. And all the American people ask of you is that you seem serious, well-versed, and possibly, beneath the boringness, wise, so that if something bad were to happen they can feel secure that yes, you can do the job.

I don’t think Ms. Harris understood this, not the institutional history of the job or why it has been done by most of its holders with certain hard boundaries. With her faith in her charm and ability to be warm and relatable, as they say, she forgot to be modest or to imitate modesty. But people do expect humility of vice presidents, a grown-up sense that they know they’re the second banana, that today they’re nothing but tomorrow they may be everything, as the first vice president, John Adams, said. But today is today so do your sturdy, boring job, and learn more every day about the inner workings of this thing called the federal government. Previous vice presidents have been a mystery. Our age is one of TikTok feeds, not mystery, but there is power in being a step away.

The way to approach the vice presidency is with low-key humility and carefulness. You don’t take the job and shape it to your persona; you take your persona and fit it into the job, which existed long before you and ideally will exist long after.

I continue to think about the fault lines exposed by what has happened in Gaza, including the generational division on support for Israel.

Political splits between old and young aren’t new. May 1968 in France was a split between college students and their elders and it was fierce and culture-changing. When I was in college, Vietnam split America between the rising young and the generation that fought World War II.

Splits aren’t new, but the one happening now is troubling in unique ways. For one, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian university students this time are reflecting a generation of indoctrination in higher ed: They’ve been taught to hold progressive views and do, taught to approach history as a matter of oppressor/oppressed, with the West the oppressor, and do.

American students in the 1970s hadn’t been instructed all their lives in the proper view on Vietnam. For all the intellectual fads and fashions that swept through their era, their commitments rose up pretty much from the students themselves: The anticommunist obsession of the U.S. government was wrong-headed, the domino theory mindless, the bombing of innocent agrarian villagers wicked. Young men didn’t want to be drafted, so they took to the streets.

If you’re in your 20s now, you’ve been taught throughout high school and college to view the world within a certain framework: white privilege, Western imperialism, the whole woke agenda. Every time you try to describe that regime you feel like you’re reciting clichés, which is part of its brilliance as an ideology: It makes you feel as if you’re chasing ghosts when you know you’re not.

While students were being indoctrinated, they weren’t being educated. Critical thinking can only get you in trouble, so stick with the narrative, don’t read too deep. A professor at an esteemed college mentioned this week that when he likened the airport mob in Dagestan to a “pogrom,” not one of his students knew what the word meant.

But what’s newest in these protests is the bloody-mindedness. The letters produced by students and the prevaricating responses of university leaders came immediately following 10/7, when it was already clear that unarmed Israeli civilians had been targeted, children and old people executed or taken hostage in the kibbutzim. One might call them innocent agrarian villagers. The college groups were aligning themselves with the strategically deliberate use of violence on civilians. And the final shock—that “We support the Palestinian people” devolved so quickly into hatred for Jews. This anti-Semitism was new. That’s not America, that’s not how we roll. It is beyond disquieting and feels like an active threat to the American future.

What are the universities going to do about this? It is good that alumni and donors are pushing back, good that some professors are speaking out. But I must say the general mood of many people my age is an astounded sense that we began in our youth, in the 1960s and ’70s, saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” And now, as we survey the wreckage the woke regime has done to the academy, the arts, the corporate office, we are thinking something that had never crossed our minds. “Don’t trust anyone under 30.”

We continue to think in this space that the invasion and bombardment of Gaza was a mistake, and not only because of the intractable question of who will govern it when the Israelis are done.

After the morning of 10/7 Israel was a wounded and grieving nation. It had endured a profound and gruesome shock; everyone in the country knew someone among the dead or abducted. In the world, those with a fully developed moral interior suddenly saw Israel differently. In their shock, opponents felt an easing of their coldness, supporters a quickening of their warmth.

In our view what was needed for Israel was an absorbing, a regirding. Sometimes you must wait, build up your strength, broaden your resources, reach out to friends, let opportunities present themselves—everything shifts in life; some shifts are promising. But don’t get sucked into Gaza and spend months providing the world with painful and horrifying pictures of innocent Palestinian babies being carried from the rubble. (“We told them to leave,” isn’t enough. Some people can’t leave, they’re not capable, they’re old people in an apartment somewhere.)

A few weeks of that and the world goes back to its corners.

Every day as things turn more kinetic, more fiery, with more casualties, there is the increased possibility it all spills over into the region, and new fronts are opened, and, as Israel goes deeper, the hostages are killed.

All this is a gift to cable news. Here is a truth: Anything good for cable news is bad for humanity.

Our final point. If the Gaza operation continues, it is even more important for Israel to face the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the wrong leader for this crucial moment. His own country doesn’t trust his leadership. He sapped the Israeli people’s strength over the past year by forcing on them a deeply damaging dispute over his judicial power grab, sundering what unity they had. His actions smeared Israel in the eyes of the world as increasingly undemocratic. He has been aggressively deaf on the rights of the Palestinian people.

Whatever war decisions he makes will be interpreted as not moving out of protectiveness and high strategy but from a desire to salvage his own reputation. He has allowed the messianic settlers of the West Bank to expand and dominate, and they may deliver to Israel a new war front. From the Financial Times on Thursday: “Armed settlers have stepped up their assaults on Palestinians, especially those in remote villages.” The European Union this week called it “settler terrorism” and asked Israel to stop it. Some think only Mr. Netanyahu has the clout to make them stop. But they haven’t stopped. Maybe they too see his weakened position.

The corruption charges that have dogged him leave him, always, with a reputation for untrustworthiness. As for his judgment, after Oct. 7 he essentially hid out from his own people and, having decided to come out and speak more, he decided to send out a Trumpesque tweet accusing Israeli’s security and military institutions, not him, of being responsible for Oct. 7. In the outcry that followed he did something uncharacteristic, which is admit the mistake and delete the tweet. You have to wonder what those he insulted have on him.

Sometimes a leader has too much history.

Everything is being remade now; all the pieces are moving on the board. Israel’s meaning must be made new, as if the young are looking at it and trying to understand it for the first time. It would be good for them to have a new person the world could look at, freshly weigh his or her words, sift them. Even if this person isn’t “much better,” an unknown variable might shake this up in a way that benefits civilization.

The U.S. in its support of Israel is tied to this discredited man in a way that doesn’t help.

It is a mistake for Israel, for its Knesset, to allow him to continue.

This is about describing and showing and making things clear. In the fog of war these things are never more essential.

Here is some first-rate describing, from Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker, in a piece called “The Devastation of Be’eri.” Be’eri is a kibbutz three miles from Israel’s border with Gaza. Hamas terrorists came there as Oct. 7 dawned. There were more than 100 of them, wearing camouflage and green Hamas bandannas. Many came on motorcycles, and all were heavily armed. Many cried “Allahu Akbar!”

Ms. Margolit wanted to know what the individual attackers looked like. She quotes an eyewitness description: “Like they had just come out of the gym. With crazy joy in their eyes, like they were high on something.” It’s the kind of statement you read and immediately know it was true. They were sleek young men, hopped up and murderous.

It tells you a lot about their purported cause. It tells you who they are.

This week we learned more about their actions. We learned it in large part because it wasn’t enough that the terrorists did it; they had to memorialize it. Some of them wore body cameras and took cellphone videos. The Israel Defense Forces compiled a video record, which also included footage from Israeli security cameras and dash cams, and showed it at a military base near Tel Aviv. Hundreds of journalists came. They were asked not to reproduce the 43-minute video but were free to describe what they saw.

From Graeme Wood in the Atlantic: “Men, women and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not.”

A man and his young sons are in their pajamas: “A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, ‘Why am I alive?’ and ‘Daddy, daddy.’ One says, ‘I think we’re going to die.’ The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep he raids their fridge.”

An IDF spokesman at the screening was unable to say whether the boys survived.

A terrorist uses a phone to call his family in Gaza. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands,” he tells his father. “Put on Mom! Your son is a hero!” He tells them to open WhatsApp to see his pictures.

Andrew Neil of the Spectator wrote on social media: “Other footage shows IDF soldiers beheaded with their lifeless corpses left splayed in the streets.” The BBC noted the “stark detail” of the “sheer horror.” Hamas gunmen cheered with joy as they shot unarmed civilians on the road. There was “an attempt to decapitate someone who appeared to be still alive using a garden hoe.”

Isabel Kershner of the New York Times described a litany of images: “An emergency medical worker pouring mineral water from a bottle to douse the smoldering remains of charred bodies. . . . Brutalized young women, one of them naked. . . . Victims are seen gagged. . . . Faces are frozen in shock and agony. Women’s bones are broken, their legs twisted in impossible angles.”

Later, the Twitter account of the Israeli government showed clips of their interrogation of Hamas prisoners. One is asked what his mission was in Be’eri. “To conquer,” he replied. (The warriors now prisoners seem to be admitting people were murdered but denying they did it, blaming the other guy in the battalion. Interestingly, a few of them expressed resentment toward the leaders of Hamas, who live in luxury while they fought in the field. This managed to sound both rehearsed and genuine.)

Why did Israel put together these pictures and sounds and show them to reporters? There is already copious testimony from eyewitnesses and survivors. Hamas has never bothered to deny what it did. But the world needs proof it can’t forget or sweep away. This includes Hamas’s supporters in the U.S. and elsewhere.

But also: It happened. If it happened, you have to show it. Big history is coming, in which Israel will be saved or not saved, and you owe it to history to tell what tipped the world into this moment.

Anyway, the IDF did a first-class job of telling. Here is one way it can continue. All wars are of course now propaganda wars, and maybe always have been—“Bleeding Belgium” was more than a century ago. But now the propaganda is instantaneous, worldwide and expertly produced. The Israelis lost a big propaganda battle in the story of the Gaza hospital. By the time they and American intelligence were able to counter Hamas’s accusations, the Arab street had exploded. And yet Israel did the right thing: It didn’t immediately deny Hamas’s claims, it said it was investigating, gathered the data, presented it to the world, and its explanation—that it was an errant terrorist missile—was in the end widely accepted.

The Israelis played it straight. They should keep playing it straight, adopt it as a strategy. If they do, it will be understood in time that Israel’s communications apparatus is the only one that can be trusted. This will matter a great deal down the road. There will be temptations along the way to lie, fudge or dodge because nations at war make mistakes and blunders. There are misjudgments, accidents and failures. But something tells me that in this war you won’t be able to fight propaganda with propaganda, only truth.

I end with the observation that we are seeing a fairly stark generational divide over all that’s happening. Speaking generally, if you are middle-aged or older, chances are good you feel sympathy for and old loyalty toward Israel. The young are more prone to antipathy toward Israel, sometimes accompanied by rage, sometimes by almost violent accusations against the colonialist oppressor state. At the bottom of today’s progressive politics there is blood lust. They speak of justice and equity but that’s not what they want, they want dominance. It’s all about the will to power. Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.

I was with a more peaceable group the other night at the Al Smith dinner, the big annual bipartisan dinner of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. One of the speakers, Mary Erdoes, told the audience that anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise and our friends need to know who’s with them. There was an envelope at each plate, she said, and if you open it you’ll find a blue lapel button. Wearing it is meant to show identification and affiliation with our brothers and sisters. Suddenly at that madly noisy dinner, all you could hear was one sound, envelopes being torn open, and the sight of buttons being affixed.

It was a great moment of making it clear.

It’s a powder keg, a story unfolding with the highest possible stakes. An interesting aspect: We know more than we did last week, but I haven’t seen any minds change. People are where they started. I am also.

Now and then you just want to share your worries. Here is one of mine, one of many. A day or two after the Oct. 7 horror I wrote to friends: “What is happening now doesn’t feel like the past, when, say, a surprised and underdog Israel, a tough and scrappy nation, spiritedly repelled its invaders. Or, later, when an unstoppable and determined nation came down hard on its foes, with all the hardware those foes didn’t have. This feels—and has felt from the beginning—like a nation that is not as competent, not as certain.” It felt like an Israel that had grown less disciplined, with a government that was complacent and distracted, “an Israel more generationally removed from its founding ideas, and its founders.”

Over and over I have seen the footage of the terrified young men and women running from the rave in the moments they first understood they were under attack. The most-used clip shows a young man in his 20s in some sort of knee-length caftan or cloak, his long hair up in a pony tail. The first impression was: modern. My second thought: That’s not David Ben-Gurion. Israel is a thoroughly modern Western culture in a neighborhood that isn’t thoroughly modern and doesn’t like all Western-inflected things. It’s long seemed to me societies that grow steadily more affluent grow stronger, and then at some point weaker.

Israel is unified by what has happened, but it will have to be strong now, and very cool. I find I am reacting to everything—from the first day, with the slain and abused children, with the videotape of babies sobbing as they were grabbed and taken hostage—not as a thinker on politics, or one who has read a lot of history, or lived long in the world, but simply as a mother. All of the instincts of a parent, especially a mother, are protective: You want to keep the young from harm so everyone gets to go on and live.

And so, even as I fear it may be too late—it looks to me as if plans for a ground invasion of Gaza are in place, that decisions have already been made, possible repercussions considered and perhaps accounted for—I am where I was:

Israel was attacked on Oct. 7 because its enemies thought it was weak—divided and distracted, with unwise leadership. Its job now is to get stronger—build itself up internally and in the world. In this corner we have urged a strategy of refortification, of digging deep and making foundations more stable. Strengthen, on all borders and within. Build up. Get Hamas in a way superior to what you have attempted in the past, dust off plans never acted on, step it up, be more focused, vigorous and professional. The world will not only understand it will be impressed by Israel methodically getting its tormentors. It largely won’t understand, in part because it doesn’t want to understand, more maximalist measures.

Why should Israel focus on making itself stronger? Because it is vulnerable. It is surrounded by passionate enemies and ambivalent friends. Because in the end it will never be able to do away with everyone in Hamas, it can’t get rid of all of Hezbollah. The region will only keep making them. Some problems can’t be solved, only managed. And because, in the end, all paths leading to a greater protection, and a new flourishing, run through politics—through diplomacy and deals and agreements and treaties.

If more fronts open it will be dangerous. Israel must do everything in its power to prevent them from opening. It is hard to see how a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza would make Israel’s position stronger. It will more likely bleed the country and deplete it, even as it produces an untold number of innocent casualties and a refugee crisis. It will make Israel look bloody-minded in the eyes of the world.

And Gaza is, most likely, where most of the hostages are—203 of them, at latest count, possibly including 13 unaccounted-for Americans. They haven’t been the focus of things the past week, and they need and deserve more.

Pounding, entering and holding Gaza will likely be a long, brutalizing exercise, and innocents will suffer. In conversation one picks up an air of, “It’s a terrible idea but the only idea we’ve got.” When your only idea is a bad one, that’s a sign to wait and think harder.

When the hospital grounds were bombed in Gaza this week, it was a revealing drama. Many thought Israel was responsible for a simple reason: Israel had been bombing Gaza, and a hospital in Gaza was bombed. Hamas is experienced and talented in propaganda, and it immediately pumped out the word: Israel targeted and bombed the hospital. What used to be called the Arab street exploded with demonstrations. Within a day or two the preponderance of evidence and intelligence showed it wasn’t Israel but an errant terrorist rocket.

It matters who was responsible because it matters who killed innocent people. But it is in the nature of what is under way in Gaza that there will be large-casualty events down the road. People will immediately blame Israel because they wish to, and because Israel is in Gaza. The propagandists will do their instant work. Shortly after the hospital explosion Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted: “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that.” She and her friends in the Squad are quickly becoming America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader who’d grown so extreme and anti-Semitic in his rhetoric—he called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends”—that in 2020 he was thrown out of the party.

A Gaza invasion will be brutal, too, for Israeli troops. The other night in New York a great retired American general spoke of trying to hold such places—of the effect on soldiers, the psychic and emotional price, and the attrition, with time, of their capacity, as they go room to room to clear them. “How many rooms are there in Gaza?” he asked.

Finally, a Gaza invasion marks a historic gamble on the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Will people have confidence in his judgment? This week the liberal newspaper Haaretz reported the families of the Israeli hostages have organized and begun a worldwide media campaign, with pro bono legal and media advisers. Amazingly, it reported, the families have even hired their own hostage negotiators—formerly high-placed veterans of Shin Bet, the security service, and Mossad who are believed to have “deep contacts in the Arab world.” “That’s how low their confidence is in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.”

It is hard to lead a successful long war when that’s where you’re starting from.

I hope Israel digs deep, refortifies, and devotes its focus to making itself stronger than it seemed on Oct. 6.

We are again in a new place. What has happened in Israel the past week is different. I have spent much of my life as you have, hearing regular reports of fighting in the Mideast, so when news broke last Saturday of what was happening near Gaza my mind started to process it as a continuation of the past. Within hours, as the facts of the October horror began to emerge, I understood no, wait, this is a new thing. And I felt a foreboding.

We must start with what was done. Terrorists calling themselves a resistance movement passed over the border from Gaza and murdered little children; they took infants hostage as they screamed. They murdered old women, tormented and raped young women, targeted an overnight music festival and murdered the unarmed young people in cold blood or mowed them down as they ran screaming. They murdered whole families as they begged for their lives; they burned people alive; they decapitated babies.

There is no cause on earth that justifies what these murderers did. There is no historical grievance that excuses or “gives greater context” to their actions. Spare me “this is the inevitable result when a people are long abused.” No, this is what happens when savages hold the day: They imperil the very idea of civilization. They killed a grandmother and uploaded pictures of her corpse to her Facebook
page. They cut an unborn child from a mother’s body and murdered both.

This wasn’t “soldiers morally brutalized by war who, in a frenzy, butchered people.” Butchering people was the aim. It is what they set out to do. This wasn’t cruelty as an offshoot; it was cruelty as an intention.

This sadism was strategic. It’s meant to force something.

I have been troubled by, angered by, Israel for years—expanding settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s high-handedness with American political leaders, his party’s embrace of an ignorant populist nationalism. I feel no shame at this and am certain I am right. But you can’t see what we have seen this week and not feel—how to put it?—a reawakened sense of affiliation with this suffering people, a sympathy reborn; as an American Catholic I am experiencing it as a renewed sense of loyalty to kin. And if you can’t feel any of these things, or appreciate how they might be justified, and if you instead use this occasion to say Israel deserves it as the price of its sins—sorry, wrong word, they don’t even know what sin is—then you are a walking, talking moral void.

I’m not going to dwell on The Squad, or the Ivy League student groups that declared support for Hamas. Except to say, about the latter, we seem to be raising a generation whose most privileged and educated members appear to be incapable of making moral distinctions. They made me think of the Oxford Union vow, in 1933, not to fight for king and country: High-class dopes always get it wrong. In Oxford’s defense, when World War II came many of them did their part. These guys are apparently upset they might not get jobs on Wall Street. What cold little clowns.

I will only quickly say of Mr. Netanyahu that I think of him as I thought of Boris Johnson, a bad man who is bad because he thinks politics now is beyond bad and good; you don’t even have to make a choice, there’s nothing in being “good”; it’s all about you and your quest for power and greatness. It never occurs to them not to be selfish because the self is all. This is how he divided his country over domestic questions, alienated his armed forces, stigmatized functioning establishments, and left his country vulnerable to the epic intelligence and security failure that is now his legacy.

“Nothing is the same in Israel as it was two days ago,” read a Monday Haaretz headline on a column by Linda Dyan. “Everyone trusted that the state would protect us,” she wrote. Everyone thought Israel was as strong as in the past. But its enemies saw it wasn’t.

I am worried for Israel. Here I speak of my fears.

It is impossible to me the savagery was not the strategy. The sadism the terrorists delivered was intended to do something, elicit a particular response.

What? We can’t be sure, but there are many possibilities. Maybe the terrorists and Iran, their masters, want to leave Israel with no choice but to go at Hamas by pummeling, then taking and occupying Gaza. That will be a terrible battle—a wracking and, in the end, a hand-to-hand, door-to-door fight. Maybe the point is to bleed Israel there, focus it there, and allow the world in coming weeks and months to absorb the gruesome pictures that will surely follow, as innocent people, including children, are among the collateral casualties. Almost half the population of Gaza is under 18.

Maybe they hope to see Israel preoccupied in Gaza while they open second and third fronts, with Hezbollah moving in from Lebanon, or the West Bank suddenly engaged.

Here is what I hope: that Israel be deliberative, farsighted, cautious. If that means slow, then slow.

Caution isn’t rousing or bold, and it certainly isn’t satisfying. It doesn’t bestow on the grieving any sense of justice. But the famously dangerous neighborhood has never been more so, and one senses Israel’s enemies think this is their moment. Israel must make itself safer and move against Hamas without starting World War III.

The Israelis should reach out in every way, including diplomatically, in their grief. Is the peace deal with Saudi Arabia still gettable? Do everything to get it. Might Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman enjoy saving them? Let him.

They must look to internal stability and security—fortify, build up defense positions, firm up security and intelligence on the borders and internally. Replenish arms and ammunition, continue making arms available to the people. Israelis have to begin feeling secure in their homes again. Do everything possible to proceed in attempting a return of the hostages. Be frank about this.

Continue to unmuddy the moral waters. What Hamas did was stone evil. Tell the world and show the world, over and over.

For now they must bury the dead and mourn. But something else. There is something Israel has shown to a heroic degree each day since that terrible Saturday morning.

It has led with its heart.

On a Zoom call this week a man living with his family in Israel told Americans a story. One of the young women killed at the rave was from Brazil. Her mother and sister flew in for the funeral. But someone on WhatsApp sent out word, a fear that no one else would be there to mourn. So the man’s teenage son jumped in his car and drove, and he had to stop 25 minutes from the site, traffic at a standstill, because . . . 7,000 or 8,000 people showed up, having heard that the family might be alone. My eyes filled as I heard it, and fill again as I write.

What a people. Hearts like that can awe and move the minds of the world.

I want to respond to the toppling of Speaker Kevin McCarthy with the gravity appropriate to a signal event that carries such immense implications (America’s reputation for stability once again weakened, a government shutdown looming, no replacement in sight).

Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.

The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh.

Mr. Gaetz is so small, he makes decadence look banal. Almost everyone believes he was driven by personal motives: An ethics investigation, launched in 2021, went forward in the House, and Mr. McCarthy didn’t stop it. (An earlier Justice Department probe was dropped without charges.) It involves allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, misuse of campaign funds and sharing inappropriate images on the House floor. (Mr. Gaetz has denied the allegations.) The day of Mr. McCarthy’s fall, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who served in the House with Mr. Gaetz, told CNN that when accusations surfaced in the now-concluded Justice Department probe involving Mr. Gaetz and a 17-year-old girl, “there’s a reason why no one in the Congress came and defended him.” The reason? “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor,” of women with whom he claimed to have had intimate relations. Mr. Mullin said Mr. Gaetz found fame nine months ago when he opposed Mr. McCarthy’s bid for the speakership. Now “he got this last moment of fame.”

I hope it is his last moment of fame. I doubt it.

As for Mr. McCarthy, part of what led to his fall was that some of his biggest supporters were ambivalent about his leadership. He wasn’t the most thoughtful or substantive member of the conference; he valued his job and the institution; he was certainly better than his enemies—but on Jan. 6-7, 2021, he voted to sustain objections to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. In the weeks that followed, he personally went down to Mar-a-Lago to resuscitate Donald Trump who was drowning in the polls. And when he ran for speaker, he desperately, suicidally agreed to lower to one vote the threshold needed to trigger a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. He wanted the job too much. This column said at the time that when you want it bad you get it bad, and he did.

What happened in the House this week was irresponsible and destructive, a classless move by classless people for low and shallow reasons. Finding a new speaker won’t be quick; it will be a painful, destructive winnowing that will make America look worse.

What GOP members need is what they don’t have. They need a leader who, through the force of his presence and with an awesome competence, can listen to everyone, reach out, heal—and instill sharp stabs of terror in the hearts of his lean and hungry legislators. He needs to be feared. They need a ruthless Mama Cat who can pick the kittens up by the scruff of the neck and throw them in the box. They need Nancy Pelosi. Who, somebody once said, has a Glock in that Chanel bag.

On Wednesday, feeling bleak, I reckoned that demoralized Republicans had two options. First, they could pick as speaker a nut from the nut caucus that did Mr. McCarthy in, and then wait for it to all blow up. It would within months, because they can’t govern. They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist. But picking one of them and watching him flail might break some of the fever.

Or the conference could pick someone normal, someone who connects with moderate Republicans and the nuttier quadrants. The nuts themselves might support someone like that now. They’d think it would show they were always sincere and it was never personal. They’d follow that vote with a party at which they talk about how the new speaker has better personal relationships than Kevin, and his word is more reliable. Then, after a few months or a year, they’d try to kill him.

But a few days later I thought there’s hope in this: There are 221 Republicans in the House, and only eight of them voted, with all the Democrats, to remove the speaker. That number was decisive, it carried the day, but it was small.

The normal Republicans and conservatives who numerically dominate the GOP conference have to assert themselves in a new way. The Gaetz Eight should be shunned and Mr. Gaetz expelled from the conference. He thinks he’s such a big freelance power, let him be freelance.

Members who took a constructive part should stand together. They have to stop seeing themselves as victims of those who make chaos. They should spy an opening where it exists. What’s happening in the GOP isn’t a civil war but a split on the Trumpian right. Mr. Gaetz sent out a fundraising email this week saying Mr. McCarthy was “Democrat-owned,” lies to conservatives and cut deals with Democrats. Right-wing radio star Mark Levin immediately shot him down on Twitter: “But Marxist Democrats unanimously backed you, moron.” He suggested Mr. Gaetz should vacate his own seat after his “shameless serial lies to conservatives.”

That split is an opening, exploit it. And don’t allow the next speaker to agree that in the future it will only take one vote to vacate the office.

There are tens of millions of normal Republicans and conservatives all over this country, and they too should be pushing back against the chaos.

The Democrats have nothing to be proud of. Every member of their caucus voted to do Mr. McCarthy in, even though his deal with them to avert a government shutdown triggered his ouster. People trying to protect America would have taken a longer view and not let the House dissolve into public chaos. They could have saved the day against their own immediate interests. It would have been moving if they had. But they’re rough and tough. And small, puny, and thinking no more of the big picture than Matt Gaetz does.

I don’t know. The central fact of the two parties now is that one is dominated by a policy cult (extreme stands on crime and illegal immigration) and the other by a personality cult (Donald Trump). People in cults don’t think, they only defend against whatever seems a threat or exploit what they think a gain. Something has to come along and break through this stasis. Something will, but I don’t know what.

I meant to write on the debate this week but found the event unsatisfying in a way I couldn’t characterize. Twenty minutes in I wrote my first note: “Is there such a thing as boring bedlam?” All the candidates seemed to be doing their best in predictable ways, but nothing came together. I thought Nikki Haley strong, as usual now, and Ron DeSantis impressively and almost poignantly dogged. Mike Pence has a sad, kind face, and there’s something reassuring and poignant about him, too. Vivek Ramaswamy’s self-confidence is grating. He rudely interrupts. He’s grown his hair so high that at one point I half-glanced his way and thought it was Lincoln in his stovepipe hat. Is that a branding experiment?

On the president’s polling problems, in which major national polls found that he was running even with or losing in a landslide to Donald Trump and that everyone is concerned about his cognitive decline, I think we have the emphasis wrong as we consider the reasons.

Joe Biden is old, but policy is his problem. I believe the majority of Americans don’t like current Democratic policies on major issues. They don’t like the party’s position on crime, which comes down to the idea that crime is bad but we can’t just arrest people and throw them in prison if they’re convicted, it’s more societally nuanced than that. Or its position on illegal immigration, which is that the number and boldness of the past few years’ surge is unfortunate, but we’re not sure it’s happening at really high levels, or why, and the latter question demands more study.

They don’t like Democratic stands on gender issues—boys on the girls’ team, men in the women’s locker room, and all of this enforced in the schools by some Right Think Mechanism whose source can never be traced back. They don’t like the party’s preoccupation with climate concerns to the point that all economic decisions must revolve solely around that issue.

The polls are bearing this out. This week’s Morning Consult poll found that by a 9-point margin voters see the Democratic Party as more “ideologically extreme” than the GOP.

The opposing argument: Heck no, the voters elected a Democrat as president only three years ago, with a popular margin of seven million. So they must kind of like Democratic policies! And they elected Barack Obama twice!

They do like some Democratic policies. But Mr. Biden’s election was about one big thing, the urgency of ridding America of Donald Trump. Voters largely understood Mr. Biden, with his long history, to be a man of the moderate left. As for Mr. Obama, yes, but his party has gone further left since he departed the White House, and it’s a particular kind of leftism, the abstract and academic kind. It’s theory-laden, detached from life; it is the left of the innermost sanctums of the faculty lounge and “The Groups,” interest groups that are big, well-funded and dug in at major Democratic power centers, and which focus on identity politics of all kinds, and climate change.

The president is getting no credit as a high-spending lunch-pail populist, but is seen as a high spender who services The Groups. That’s why he went to the picket line in Detroit, to get some lunch-pail cred.

His policy problem feeds his persona problem. When you don’t like policies, you take a tougher look at the man who carries them forward. You’re quicker to name his flaws. You don’t feel affectionate and forgiving—“My uncle Mike was slowing down, getting spacey, but he had a decency that time couldn’t change. The night of the fire, he’s the one who saved everything.” Instead people say of Joe Biden: He’s gaga, he’s senile, and the son—jeez, ya think the father was in on it? They’re less forgiving than they were two years ago, when he was also in decline and the laptop was already famous.

Some other points on the polls. There is no way half the country misses Donald Trump, but far more than half the country misses 2019.

Twenty twenty changed our country. Pandemic, George Floyd, riots. That last, not the demonstrations and marches but the riots, which weren’t reported or officially labeled as what they were, hardened things in America. If it’s true that racial minorities are detaching from the Democratic Party, the reason can be traced back to then, when the party and big media refused to see the shopkeeper’s agony.

Donald Trump finally left the presidency in January 2021, humiliatingly thrown from office. But the repercussions of 2020 continued to develop, or burrowed in, after he departed. Crime is so bad that big chain stores are leaving cities and neighborhoods, everything in the drugstore is locked behind plexiglass. No one stops the criminals. No one wants to be a cop anymore; as a profession it’s been demonized. If a bad guy is, against the odds, arrested, he’s out the next day. Inflation came; illegal immigration started surging. Among Mr. Biden’s first acts on his first day as president was to sign an executive order making it easier for them to come.

Political professionals, being highly sophisticated and having come to regard themselves that way, forget or don’t notice that regular people are pretty sophisticated too. They see trend lines. They smoke them out quickly and make connections. They look at crime and see that even if the government changed its ways and started arresting, holding and trying street criminals, it would take years for that to show any real impact on the streets. They know that it will be years before America can get control of its southern border and convince would-be lawbreakers not to come, and show the drug cartels they no longer have the upper hand.

Both are long-term problems that weren’t problems in 2019. Now they’re crises.

As to inflation, former Rep. Vin Weber said something arresting the other night on one of Mark Halperin’s online Wide World of News conversations. It was off the record but Mr. Weber later gave permission to use it. His thought was that the inflation we’re now experiencing came suddenly. In past inflationary times it was gradual—think Gerald Ford and Whip Inflation Now, followed by Jimmy Carter’s inflation worries. But this time people have clear and recent recollections of lower, stable prices. Thus they don’t take comfort that inflation is “easing.” They want prices to go back down.

Someone else, it’s unclear who, followed up: It takes time for inflation to build and come out of a system. Once you let the genie out it takes time to get it back in.

People will think: To the extent inflation is caused by high government spending, well, that isn’t going to end tomorrow. To the extent it’s the supply chain, any number of shocks could knock it further off track. To the extent it’s human greed, good luck overcoming that.

So crime, illegal immigration, inflation—it’s not only that they’re here, it’s that no one expects them to go away soon.

That’s the president’s enduring problem: People see trend lines.

For years I’ve had a thought whose expression I could never get right, but it applies to our subject this week, so here goes:

Since the triumphant end of World War II, America has come to enjoy greatly the idea of its pre-eminence. We’re “the leader of the free world,” we dominate science, medicine, philanthropy. We teach emerging nations the ways of democratic governance; we have the biggest economy and arsenal; we win all the medals, from the Nobel Prizes to the Olympics. This has been the way of things for nearly 80 years, and for much of that time we brought to the task of greatness a certain earnestness of style. We had a lot of brio and loved our wins, but we politely applauded for the other teams from the Olympic stands, and our diplomats and political figures—JFK, Reagan—walked through the world with a natural but also careful dignity.

Which was good, because pre-eminence always entails obligations. You have to act the part. You have to present yourself with dignity. You have to comport yourself with class.

For some time—let’s say since the turn of this century—we’ve been at a point in our power where we still love to insist on the pre-eminence—USA! USA!—while increasingly ignoring the responsibilities.

That is the thought I want to express: We want to be respected but no longer think we need to be respectable.

We are in a crisis of political comportment. We are witnessing the rise of the classless. Our politicians are becoming degenerate. This has been happening for a while but gets worse as the country coarsens. We are defining deviancy ever downward.

Two examples from the past two weeks. One is the congresswoman who was witnessed sexually groping and being groped by a friend in a theater, seated among what looked like 1,000 people of all ages. The other is the candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates who performed a series of live sex acts with her husband on a pornographic website, and the videos were then archived on another site that wasn’t password-protected. She requested money for each sexual act, saying she was “raising money for a good cause.” Someone called it a breakthrough in small-donor outreach.

It was within this recent context that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did something that isn’t in the same league in terms of shock but nonetheless has a deep institutional resonance. He quietly swept away a centuries-old tradition that senators dress as adults on the floor of the Senate. Business attire is no longer formally required. Mr. Schumer apparently doesn’t know—lucky him, life apparently hasn’t taught him—that when you ask less of people they don’t give you less; they give you much, much less. So we must brace ourselves.

His decision is apparently connected to the desires of Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who enjoys parading around in gym shorts and a hoodie. Why would his desires receive such precedence?

Because he has political needs. He must double down on his brand. He imagines that dressing like a slob deepens his perceived identification with the working class. But this kind of thing doesn’t make you “authentic”; it just makes you a different kind of phony. Mr. Fetterman, born into affluence and privilege, reacted to criticism of Mr. Schumer’s decision with an air of snotty entitlement. He mocked critics, making woo-woo monster sounds to reporters and telling a House critic to “get your s— together.” He said Republicans were “losing their minds” and ought to have better things to do.

Here are reasons John Fetterman, and all senators, should dress like an adult.

It shows respect for colleagues. It implies you see them as embarked on the serious business of the nation, in which you wish to join them.

It shows respect for the institution. “Daniel Webster walked there.” And Henry Clay, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. The U.S. Senate is the self-declared world’s greatest deliberative body.

It shows a mature acceptance of your role, suggesting you’ve internalized the idea of service. You are a public servant; servants by definition make sacrifices.

It reflects an inner discipline. It’s not always easy or convenient to dress like a grown-up. You’ve got to get the suit from the cleaners, the shoes from the cobbler. The effort means you bothered, took the time, went to the trouble.

It reflects an inner modesty. You’d like to be in sneaks and shorts but you admit that what you’d like isn’t the most important thing. It shows that thoughts of your own comfort aren’t No. 1 in your hierarchy of concerns. Also, you know you’re only one of 100, and as 1% of the whole you wouldn’t insist on officially lowering standards for the other 99.

It bows to the idea of “standards” itself, which implies you bow to other standards too, such as how you speak and what you say.

It shows you understand that America now has a problem with showing respect. We can’t take a seat on a plane without causing an incident, can’t be in a stadium without a fight. You would never, given that context, move for standards to become more lax.

It shows you admit to yourself that you’re at an age and stage when part of your job is to model for the young how to behave, how to be. It shows you’re not a selfish slob who doesn’t know what time it is.

It shows you don’t think you’re better than others or deserving of greater rights. News reporters outside the hearing room operate under a general dress code; citizens who testify before Congress do so in business dress. The old dress code still applies to Senate staffers. They don’t show up in torn undershirts and sandals. Why are you better than they are? Conversely, why would their dressing like you make anything in America better?

It shows, finally, that you understand that as a high elected official of the United States you owe the country, and the world, the outward signs of maturity, judgment and earnestness. That isn’t asking too much. It is a baseline minimum.

Also, the least people could do in public life now is make everything look a little better, not a little worse.

I hope Mr. Fetterman’s colleagues don’t join him in taking another brick out of the Capitol facade but quietly rebuke him, and Mr. Schumer, by very clearly not joining in, by showing up for work in your sober, serious best.

I leave you with a picture of some dark day in the future. China moves on Taiwan, and perhaps the White House, whoever’s in it, bobbles, or is unsure, or makes immediate mistakes. Everything is uncertain, anxiety high. All of us, and much of the world, will look for voices in Congress who can steady things—voices of deliberation and calm. And we’ll turn our lonely eyes and see . . . the congresswoman from the theater, the senator in his play clothes.

That will be a bad moment.

How people bear themselves has implications greater than we know. It’s not about “sartorial choice.” It’s about who we need you to be—and who you asked to be when you first ran.

It’s been a week of “step away” stories for President Biden, the most significant of which came from the normally sympathetic David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His argument was clear and gently put: Mr. Biden is an admirable figure who’s won great victories, but age has taken too much from him. His supporters can see this, most privately admit it, and he should refrain from putting himself forward as his party’s nominee.

The tempo of such advice is increasing because time is running out for other candidates to gain purchase, raise money and organize campaigns. Some urgency comes because even though he’s under increased scrutiny as a teller of untruths, Mr. Biden unleashed a whopper this week, on 9/11, after the morning’s commemorations, when he claimed in a speech that he’d rushed to Ground Zero the day after the attack. He hadn’t, and the White House quietly admitted as much; he visited the site with a congressional delegation on Sept. 20, 2001.

Stories like this are so instantly checkable you wonder, again, why Mr. Biden would court embarrassment. After 22 years memory might scramble things, but CNN followed up with a report on other recent false claims, citing three in a single speech last month, one of them “long debunked.” It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.

Last December I hoped the president’s advisers would take him aside and use some friendly persuasion. The age problem will only get worse, but it also offers a chance to cement his legacy. They could tell him, “You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.” He could go out an inspiration, announcing he wouldn’t throw his support behind any one candidate but would trust the party to decide.

I still think that’s the way to go. But only Joe Biden can remove Joe Biden. And there’s every sign he means to hang on—even past 82, and after more than 50 years operating at the highest levels of public life, and having achieved all the glittering prizes.

In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. Second terms are disaster sites, always now. He isn’t up to it; it will cloud what his supporters believe is a fine legacy and allow the Kamala Harris problem to fester and grow. She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.

Obviously if the president took himself out of the 2024 race, chaos would follow. Democrats would immediately commence a hellacious fight, sudden and jagged. A dozen governors, senators and congressmen would enter the race. There would be no guarantee it wouldn’t produce a repeat of the 2020 Democratic primaries, when the party flag was planted so far to the left on such issues as illegal immigration that it thoroughly tripped up the eventual victor’s first term, and may account for his eventual loss.

There is no guarantee a man or woman thought to be essentially moderate, who would therefore be attractive to independents and centrists in the general election, would emerge, as Mr. Biden did in 2020. There is no guarantee the eventual nominee would be able to beat Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polls suggest it’s no longer assumed Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump.

But it would be a fight fought by a party newly alive, hungry and loaded for bear. It would be turning a page from the endless repetition we’re caught in. It would introduce an unknown factor for Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee. And presumably it would unveil a candidate who could wage a vigorous and physical campaign. The closer the election gets, the less you can imagine Mr. Biden commanding a real re-election drive, one with enough energy and focus, while Mr. Trump, who looks physically worse than Mr. Biden, seems in his brain to be exactly what he was in 2016 and will continue with his mad vigor.

I close with the fact that whenever I think of Mr. Biden’s essential nature and character I think of “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s great history of the 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s first. This, as I have written, annoys me because I found Cramer a rather tricky and light-fingered fellow. He was also an indefatigable reporter with a gift of gab and a real voice who produced a classic of modern politics. Thirty years after publication, it presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.

For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie. . . . And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.

He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a back yard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?”

His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important.

“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”

A lot of hungers, resentments and future actions were embedded in that speech by Joe Biden, Syracuse Law, class of ’68. They aren’t the words of an unsophisticated man but of a man who wanted things—houses, power, the glittering prizes—and who can’t always be talked out of them.

Joe Biden is in one of those seasons in which people are noting, again, that he often tells stories about his life that aren’t true. This is bubbling around largely because the week’s polls indicate his own party’s voters think he is too old to be president, and its donors and officials are frustrated he shows no sign of stepping aside to allow some fresh, brisk candidate to take his place.

He has often claimed or suggested that his son Beau, who died of brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 2015, died in Iraq, where he had served six years before. The president has claimed he graduated in the top half of his law school class when he didn’t, and has over the years made unsubstantiated claims as to his extremely high measurable intelligence. He’s said that as vice president he awarded his uncle a purple heart, and that he was arrested in a civil-rights protest. There are many such stories, including the enduring one of Corn Pop, the bad dude from a bad gang who threatened a young Mr. Biden with a switch blade until Mr. Biden, bearing metal chains, forced him to back down.

What these stories have in common is that they are cinematic. They’re pictures—the glistening scholar, the rumble. This is in line with the fact that Biden, born in 1942, lived his early life during the rise of movies as an art form and as the primary way America explained itself to itself. I understand and am of this cohort and have a kind of felt memory of the old American West from spending a Long Island childhood watching John Ford movies on channel 9. On the other hand, I don’t think I am Liberty Valance.

Mr. Biden has always taken it too far, and here is a small theory on why he tells lies. It is not only that, in terms of his nature and personality, he likes to make up stories and to be at the center of them. It is that he entered national politics in 1972, before the age of mass-media saturation. That’s when he ran for U.S. Senate. In those days, trying to build his brand—it was then called the image—he’d go to the local Kiwanis Club in Wilmington, Del., and speak to the guys at lunch, and he could tell them anything to make himself memorable and keep things lively. We know from all the reporting and biographies over the years that he’d talk about what a sports star he was and how he got triple honors at school.

Audiences would enjoy it. Stories of other people’s lives are interesting. And even though he was bragging, occasionally perhaps subtly, I’m sure he wove in some modest jokes at his own expense, at which the audience would have chuckled even while thinking: Son, you’re not big enough to be self-deprecating.

Mr. Biden became a pol before everything was on tape, so you could make up pretty much anything and not get caught. This was true of others in his political generation. Hillary Clinton got in trouble in 2008 for claiming she’d come under fire in a diplomatic visit to Bosnia. She didn’t; there was videotape. But she started out before videotape was accessible and ubiquitous.

What is peculiar is that they don’t change when times change, and they get caught. This is testimony to the power of habit, but also connects to the old world of politics as a school of entertainment. Fifty and 100 years ago politicians were supposed to entertain you. One way to do it was through rousing and sentimental stories.

Here we mention Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” a history of the first two years of the Biden administration, published this week. Mr. Foer touches on the tall tales: “A good Biden story often gets better with time.” The president has a “heroic self-conception.”

“Grieving was his expertise. If there was one thing that everyone agreed Biden did more adroitly than any other public official, it was comforting survivors.” I disagree. From what I’ve observed Mr. Biden has a disconcerting habit of turning all conversation to his grief, not yours, and this is not quite empathy but the work of a needy and glommy ego.

“The Last Politician” isn’t a fully satisfying work. Its virtue is that it gives readers some sense of the inside of the Biden White House in its first two years, and of those who peopled it, which is an underreported story and seems here reported responsibly. Sometimes it’s fun, if confusing. The newly inaugurated Vice President Kamala Harris tells the White House she doesn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race, but she needs her office to be majority-female and to have a black woman as her chief of staff. Mr. Foer presents the following as if one might understand it: “She asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia.” She sounds like Connor Roy from “Succession.”

The section on Afghanistan is valuable as a tick-tock but provides no deep access to the thoughts of the many players in that crisis. And the book can be frustratingly double-minded on the meaning of things. Mr. Foer asserts as a reporter that there were reasons to believe schoolchildren were damaged educationally and emotionally by pandemic school closings. He reveals what was happening in the White House as that issue came to a boil: First Lady Jill Biden’s primary interest was to make sure the new education secretary wasn’t a school-choice supporter. While mayors are trying to get the unions to return to school, she celebrates the heads of the two leading teachers unions. “As she sat with the heads of the union, Jill Biden didn’t even nod in the direction of the tensions. Instead of pressing the union chiefs, she paid tribute to them, reserving her highest praise for [Randi] Weingarten.” Later the president calls Ms. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at her New York home to buck her up when she came under fire over shut schools: “I am not abandoning you on schools. I want you to know that.’”

Mr. Foer: “For the sake of avoiding conflict . . . the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail.” That “was the price of peace.” This seems well-reported and yet weirdly without judgment. This is what you do to keep a major constituent and donor group in your tent? You sacrifice a generation of kids?

I don’t see what will change Mr. Biden’s mind about running. You get the strong impression, in the book and outside it, that he likes the job and sees himself as a great man, indispensable, or at least the right man for the moment.

Many in his party wish he would move on. They can’t make him, don’t have the power; it’s a fractured party broken in pieces, just like the Republicans. The old bosses—Tom Pendergast, Richard J. Daley—are long gone, with their smoke-filled rooms. There are seasons when I miss them. This is one of them.