Peggy Noonan

Look at people’s faces when you say, “Looks like it’ll be Biden and Trump.” Those faces tell you everything—the soft wince, the shake of the head, the sigh. Those are the emblems of the 2024 campaign right now.

Seventy percent of his own party doesn’t want Joe Biden to run. More than half his party doesn’t want Donald Trump to run. Yet here at the moment we are, with this growing sense of sad inevitability. “Apparently there are only two people in America,” Desi Lydic, sitting in on “The Daily Show,” explained.

Mr. Biden is unopposed because his party couldn’t rouse itself to do what Democrats have almost existed to do, have a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl. Sometimes party discipline is a failure and a mistake. Republicans at least are having a fight but, yes, primary state polls show Mr. Trump dominating.

Feels like another disaster, doesn’t it?

I agree with those who say the problem isn’t only Joe Biden’s age but the implication his age carries: that if he is re-elected there’s a significant chance Kamala Harris will become president. She has been a mystery, a politician who has been unable to say anything pertinent or even coherent on policy. Instead, the loud and sudden laughter unconnected to any clear stimuli, and the sheer looping nonsense of her words. This will give voters pause.

On the Republican side the great not-Trump option, the consistent number two in the polls, has been deflating. It is too early to say Ron DeSantis’s candidacy won’t work. But it feels like it won’t work. But life is surprising.

I’m not going to pick on him on the Disney fight. I thought Disney wrong to come forward, as a major corporation, and use its beloved name to take sides on a delicate state educational issue that was being handled democratically—as in, the governor, who would soon be up for re-election, made a policy decision, got a bill passed, and if the voters don’t like it they could throw him out. Disney shouldn’t have pushed its way in to advance its cultural preferences. That said, Mr. DeSantis’s pushback was as dramatic as it was incompetent.

A big challenge for politicians is the management of powerful and competing interests and institutions, especially those that want to galumph into local political arguments. You have to manage this with firmness but as little friction as possible, because there are always a million arguments and friction keeps things too hot. Not explaining your stand, and Mr. DeSantis isn’t good at explaining his thinking, doesn’t help. Giving the sense you’re getting a partisan kick out of the fracas makes it worse.

Yes, a big challenge for corporations is to remember their mission. For more than a century Budweiser’s mission was to make beer and sell it at a profit. Disney has been entertaining America for nearly a century. They should do that. Except in the most extraordinary and essential cases they shouldn’t give in to the temptation to put themselves forward as deep-thinking cultural leaders. Mind your business, keep your side of the street clean, treat your people well, set a standard, pay them well. Don’t add to the friction. It doesn’t help; it only makes things more bitter.

Mr. DeSantis is reported to be announcing his presidential run later this spring. I got an interesting note about him the other day from the veteran political operative Alex Castellanos. He said the problem for Mr. DeSantis is not that he’s unlikable: “The problem for Ron is worse. It’s that he does not like us.” When voters see a political figure likes them, they start to trust him, because they know “he will do a lot to preserve their affection.”

Politicians find ways to be popular when they’re not so likable. Richard Nixon was one.

But here is the real point of this column. If it starts to seem clear that America is once again locked into a Trump-Biden race, I think the electorate is going to get frisky. I don’t see people just accepting it. I see pushback and little rebellions. Two examples:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced last week, this week hit 19% support among Democratic voters. That’s a lot! Especially for a guy who’s been labeled a bit of a nut. (He has been a leader of the idea that childhood vaccines are connected to autism.) But his larger general message would appeal to the edges of left and right, and blends into the general populist mood: Corporations and the government are lying to you, playing you for a fool.

And in an odd way his past nuttiness bolsters his believability: He has worn the scorn of establishments as a medal. His own family isn’t for him. It doesn’t seem to mess with his swing.

He has what Mr. Trump has: star power. And there is the name. I recently was with a physical therapist—early middle age, suburban, not especially interested in politics—who, while working my back, asked if I knew Mr. Kennedy. No, I said. Is he drawing your interest?

She spoke admiringly of his family—of JFK, of RFK the father. She liked them and thought their politics were similar to hers. I asked if she had any living memory of JFK or RFK. No, she said, she was born after they were killed. And yet she spoke of them as if she remembered them.

I say watch him. He is going to be a force this year.

Second, watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it’s provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We’ll see how that works. But a third party, if it comes, could have real and surprising power in this cycle. I am the only person I know who thinks this but, again, look at peoples’ faces when you say it will be Trump or Biden.

Independents now outnumber members of each party. No hunger for a third-party effort is discernible in the polls. So the effort would have to blow people out of their comfortable trenches and make them want to go over the top to seize new ground. It would have to be something centrists, by their nature, aren’t: dramatic. The people who would lead such an effort worry about whether or not they’d wind up as spoilers for the Democrats. You could argue as well it might spoil things for the Republicans.

They should be thinking: We are past the moment for such questions. If you think the country is in trouble and needs another slate of candidates, do it. No ambivalence, no guilt about spoiling it for the lesser of evils. If you’re serious, go for it. Look at the other two guys as spoilers.

A third party would have to have compelling candidates for president and vice president. That would be hard. I am not certain a third party is desirable. But I don’t think it’s impossible.

Third-party enthusiasts tend to be moderate, sober-minded. Such people are almost by definition not swept by the romance of history. But we are living in a prolonged crazy time in American politics. Anything can happen now.

Really, anything. I wonder if they know it.

The dawn of the internet age was so exciting. I took my grade-school son, enthralled by Apple computers, to see Steve Jobs speak at a raucous convention in New York almost a quarter-century ago. What fervor there was. At a seminar out West 30 years ago I attended a lecture by young, wild-haired Nathan Myhrvold, then running Microsoft Research, who talked about what was happening: A new thing in history was being born.

But a small, funny detail always gave me pause and stayed with me. It was that from the beginning of the age its great symbol was the icon of what was becoming its greatest company, Apple. It was the boldly drawn apple with the bite taken out. Which made me think of Adam and Eve in the garden, Adam and Eve and the fall, at the beginning of the world. God told them not to eat the fruit of the tree, but the serpent told Eve no harm would come if she did, that she’d become like God, knowing all. That’s why he doesn’t want you to have it, the serpent said: You’ll be his equal. So she took the fruit and ate, she gave to Adam who also ate, and the eyes of both were opened, and for the first time they knew shame. When God rebuked them, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. They were banished from the garden into the broken world we inhabit.

You can experience the Old Testament story as myth, literature, truth-poem or literal truth, but however you understand it its meaning is clear. It is about human pride and ambition. Tim Keller thought it an example of man’s old-fashioned will to power. St. Augustine said it was a story of pride: “And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?”

I always thought of the Apple icon: That means something. We are being told something through it. Not deliberately by Jobs—no one would put forward an image for a new company that says we’re about to go too far. Walter Isaacson, in his great biography of Jobs, asked about the bite mark. What was its meaning? Jobs said the icon simply looked better with it. Without the bite, the apple looked like a cherry.

But I came to wonder if the apple with the bite wasn’t an example of Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. Man has his own unconscious mind, but so do whole societies, tribes and peoples—a more capacious unconscious mind containing archetypes, symbols and memories of which the individual may be wholly unaware. Such things stored in your mind will one way or another be expressed. That’s what I thought might be going on with Steve Jobs and the forbidden fruit: He was saying something he didn’t know he was saying.

For me the icon has always been a caution about this age, a warning. It’s on my mind because of the artificial-intelligence debate, though that’s the wrong word because one side is vividly asserting that terrible things are coming and the other side isn’t answering but calmly, creamily, airily deflecting Luddite fears by showing television producers happy videos of robots playing soccer.

But developing AI is biting the apple. Something bad is going to happen. I believe those creating, fueling and funding it want, possibly unconsciously, to be God and on some level think they are God. The latest warning, and a thoughtful, sophisticated one it is, underscores this point in its language. The tech and AI investor Ian Hogarth wrote this week in the Financial Times that a future AI, which he called “God-like AI,” could lead to the “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if it isn’t regulated. He observes that most of those currently working in the field understand that risk. People haven’t been sufficiently warned. His colleagues are being “pulled along by the rapidity of progress.”

Mindless momentum is driving things as well as human pride and ambition. “It will likely take a major misuse event—a catastrophe—to wake up the public and governments.”

Everyone in the sector admits that not only are there no controls on AI development, there is no plan for such controls. The creators of Silicon Valley are in charge. What of the moral gravity with which they are approaching their work? Eliezer Yudkowsky, who leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, noted in Time magazine that in February the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, publicly gloated that his new Bing AI would make Google “come out and show that they can dance. I want people to know that we made them dance.”

Mr. Yudkowsky: “That is not how the CEO of Microsoft talks in a sane world.”

I will be rude here and say that in the past 30 years we have not only come to understand the internet’s and high tech’s steep and brutal downsides—political polarization for profit, the knowing encouragement of internet addiction, the destruction of childhood, a nation that has grown shallower and less able to think—we have come to understand the visionaries who created it all, and those who now govern AI, are only arguably admirable or impressive.

You can’t have spent 30 years reading about them, listening to them, watching their interviews and not understand they’re half mad. Bill Gates, who treats his own banalities with such awe and who shares all the books he reads to help you, poor dope, understand the world—who one suspects never in his life met a normal person except by accident, and who is always discovering things because deep down he’s never known anything. Dead-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, who also buys the world with his huge and highly distinctive philanthropy so we don’t see the scheming, sweating God-replacer within. Google itself, whose founding motto was “Don’t Be Evil,” and which couldn’t meet even that modest aspiration.

The men and women of Silicon Valley have demonstrated extreme geniuslike brilliance in one part of life, inventing tech. Because they are human and vain, they think it extends to all parts. It doesn’t. They aren’t especially wise, they aren’t deep and as I’ve said their consciences seem unevenly developed.

This new world cannot be left in their hands.

And since every conversation in which I say AI must be curbed or stopped reverts immediately to China, it is no good to say, “But we can’t stop—we can’t let China get there first! We’ve got to beat them!” If China kills people and harvests their organs for transplant, would you say well then, we have to start doing the same? (Well, there are people here who’d say yes, and more than a few would be in Silicon Valley, but that’s just another reason they can’t be allowed to develop AI unimpeded.)

No one wants to be a Luddite, no one wants to be called an enemy of progress, no one wants to be labeled fearful or accused of always seeing the downside.

We can’t let those fears stop us from admitting we’re afraid. And if you have an imagination, especially a moral imagination, you are. And should be.

Thinking over here about the free press. What an ideal, what a human achievement.

You know the hallowed stories. The first investigative newspaper series is generally credited to W.T. Stead, whose “The Maiden Tribute of Babylon,” caused a sensation in 19th-century England. Stead was a rascally man and born crusader. In 1885, while editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he had become alarmed at what he’d seen and heard of widespread child prostitution in the streets and brothels of London. The story had been pretty much ignored; oddly enough, men in powerful positions hadn’t found it all that upsetting. But feminists and Christian reform groups did, and Stead, working quietly with them, launched a four-part exposé. As part of it he hired a 13-year-old prostitute to tell him her experience.

It blew the lid off Victorian London. Legislation was passed, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. Not much, maybe, but something. Stead paid a price: They threw him in jail for three months for procuring his teenage source. He emerged unrepentant, his prison uniform in his bag. Once a year he’d put it on and swan around town reminding everyone of what he’d done, and of the poor girls. Also to remind people to buy more newspapers. (To top off his story: He died on the Titanic, on his way to a peace conference; he was seen at the end helping women and children into the boats.)

Another story, also in England but for me closer to home. My late friend Harry Evans put his professional reputation on the line in the late 1960s and ’70s to investigate a drug that pregnant women were being prescribed to ease debilitating morning sickness. Over the years, evidence mounted: The drug was disfiguring children in the womb, they were born limbless and twisted up. Harry, then the editor of the Sunday Times, pushed the story, wouldn’t let go even in the face of financial repercussions and personal threats—“I will bury you,” a health minister told him.

When Harry found out damages had yet to be paid to the parents, he essentially took the whole story to the European Court of Human Rights, and won. Soon the parents were given 10 times the first and tardy offer. It didn’t end the pain, but it was something. Three decades later he was knighted by the queen for services to journalism; next month journalists from around the world will gather in London to honor Sir Harry’s legacy.

And there are the famous American stories. The Pentagon Papers revealed to the American people the conclusions the U.S. government had come to, in secret, about Vietnam. Which were utterly different from what it said in public. Talk about taking on the deep state. The Post and the Times went to the Supreme Court, which said, essentially, damn straight the American people have a right to know.

The best journalists are and always have been professionals who are simply trying to locate the truth, and tell it. They want to tell the people what they have a right to know about the world they live in. That is why you break the story, unearth the lie, ask the question, tell the yarn—“Hey Martha, listen to this!” You’re trying in your way to make the world more just.

I’ve been thinking recently about war reporters, who’d do anything to tell you what is really happening. Bob Capa, the photojournalist, was in the first wave on D-Day, and died when he stepped on a mine in Vietnam in 1954. Ernie Pyle, the GI’s journalist, won a Pulitzer for his World War II reporting in Europe and was killed in the battle of Okinawa, where the soldiers put up a memorial. “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle 18 April 1945.” Mike Kelly of the Atlantic was racing to the Baghdad airport, NBC’s David Bloom was with the Third Infantry Division as it bore down on Baghdad.

These, and many more, put themselves in danger because the people of countries at war deserve to know—must know, will base their views on knowing—what is happening on the ground.

So—to Evan Gershkovich, the Journal’s Moscow-based reporter who was arrested two weeks ago. He did his job in danger, as all reporters in Moscow do, operating under harsh press laws since the Ukraine war. There is every reason to be very worried about him. He has been charged with espionage, the first American reporter to be so charged since the Cold War. He is not in a regular prison but an FSB prison, meaning he’s subject to greater isolation.

I didn’t know him but know his work, which is enterprising and perceptive. Also varied: He covered everything from Siberian forest fires to Vladimir Putin’s relative isolation to the war’s economic toll.

Everyone knows he isn’t a spy. He is a journalist who is now a state hostage, held, it is generally assumed, for some future trade down the road. But maybe not: You never know with Mr. Putin.

An event in Evan’s support was held at Columbia University on Wednesday and got a good crowd, including reporters who’d been his friends and competitors in Moscow. Max Seddon of the Financial Times said not only are charges of espionage “absurd,” the Russians themselves “know they are false.” Valerie Hopkins of the New York Times, who worked with Evan for months as part of the bare-bones press corps, painted Moscow’s general air of suppression: A man had been arrested on the Metro recently when another passenger saw the wrong webpage on his phone, and reported him.

The Journal’s Elena Cherney spoke movingly of the self-questioning editors experience when a reporter is taken. David Rohde, of the New Yorker, who had been imprisoned for seven months by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, said friends, family and colleagues will blame themselves and shouldn’t. “The only one responsible for the crime is Putin.”

It’s been pretty much established now that the order came from the top.

You, as a reader, can do a lot to help this good man. Here is a good place to start: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-you-can-use-social-media-to-support-evan-gershkovich-c7bb2167

But let me add something. It isn’t clear to whom—if anyone—Mr. Putin listens; it’s probably not those who immediately protested his action. But there is one group he might hear: those in Western journalism and politics who have, the past year, shown sympathy for Mr. Putin’s position, or who have made arguments he has agreed with, or who have expressed public skepticism about the Western response in Ukraine. They might have some pull here.

Commentators, political figures: If in the past year you have said things on U.S. airwaves that Mr. Putin agreed with or found helpful, the video clip of what you said was played over and over on Russian media. You are well known there, and well positioned to go on the world’s airwaves and, in speaking about Ukraine or Mr. Putin, weave in, in a way not easily edited out, that what is in effect Evan Gershkovich’s abduction, and his cruel and cynical imprisonment, is something you passionately protest and cannot accept. That whatever your foreign policy views they do not encompass sympathy for a hostage taking. And Mr. Putin is wrong.

J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, many others: You care about the free press, and have flourished within it. Protest what has happened here, sharply and repeatedly. Might it help? Who knows. Maybe not. But it’s something.

We need a palate cleanser. It is Easter (whose theme is resurrection and salvation), Passover (freedom and remembering) and Ramadan (devotion). So let us go back to affectionate days and men of stature.

It has been noted that the first and only previous American president to be arrested was Ulysses S. Grant. He was arrested in 1872, while president, for “fast driving” his two-horse carriage not far from the White House. The arresting officer, William West, was a Union Army veteran, a black man a few years on the police force. There had been complaints men were speeding their horses in the “aristocratic” part of town. One day officer West stopped the president, whom he recognized, and gave him a warning. “Your fast driving, sir . . . is endangering the lives of the people who have to cross the street.” The president apologized. But the next night, patrolling at 13th and M Streets, West saw a slew of carriages barreling down the street at high speed, with the president in the lead.

West held up his club. Grant got control of his horses and asked, abashed, if he’d been speeding. In 1908, when the story broke in Washington’s Sunday Star, West said Grant had the look of a schoolboy caught in a guilty act. He reminded Grant of his promise to stop speeding. West told Grant: “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

Grant did something he hadn’t done much, which was surrender. He invited West into his carriage and drove to the station house. On the way they talked about the war. West had been at the evacuation of Richmond. Grant said he admired a man who does his duty. At the station house Grant put up $20 and stayed long enough to be amused by friends, also hauled in, who were protesting their arrests. Days later word reached him that West’s job might be in danger. Grant dispatched a quick message to the chief of police, complimenting West on his fearlessness and making clear he hoped no harm would come to him. None did.

In coming years they’d greet each other on the street, talk about horses. West served another 25 years in the department, distinguishing himself in detective work. He didn’t tell the story of arresting the president until he’d retired. The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed the account a century later.

Last year at this time we wrote about Grant, recounting his role in the most history-drenched Holy Week in U.S. history, the seven days in 1865 that spanned the end of the Civil War, the stillness at Appomattox, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

More can be said. A thing that always fascinates is a quality Grant had that left close observers balancing in their minds two different and opposite thoughts. One: There is nothing special in this plain, quiet, undistinguished fellow. The other: He is marked by destiny; something within him encompasses the epic working out of fate, even of nations.

The obscure former soldier and unsuccessful farmer would become, over two or three years, the only indispensable man in the Union after Lincoln. Then, all worlds conquered, he would lose everything in a cascade of misfortunes that yielded . . . a final and transcendent human triumph.

That famous story, from Ron Chernow’s still-splendid “Grant”:

On Christmas Eve in 1883, Grant, hale and prosperous at 61, was dropped off at his Manhattan town house. Pivoting to give the driver a holiday tip, he slipped on the ice, fracturing his hip. Pleurisy followed; arthritis “crept up his legs”; he was bedridden and then had trouble walking. Grant had earlier formed a business partnership with the “Young Napoleon of Finance,” 29-year-old Ferdinand Ward, a financial genius who was, alas, the Sam Bankman-Fried of his day. His profits were revealed as nonexistent; in the spring of 1884 Grant found out he was ruined, broke, his public reputation severely damaged. A few months later—“When sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions”—he bit into a piece of peach and cried aloud in pain, thinking he’d swallowed a wasp. The feeling of fire in his throat wouldn’t go away, and months later he was told it was cancer.

Now he summoned everything he had to do what he’d long refused to do, write his memoirs. He did it for money, so his wife and family would be safe.

He wrote sitting up in a chair, his legs on a facing chair, with a wool cap on his head, a shawl at his shoulders, “a muffler around his neck concealing a tumor the size of a baseball.” After he ate or drank he required opiates, but opiates clouded his mind so he wrote long days without eating or drinking. Yet the words flowed, “showing how much thought and pent-up feeling lay beneath his tightly buttoned façade.” He wrote 275,000 words of “superb prose” in less than a year.

The first sentence—“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral”—has the compressed beauty of his battlefield dispatches. He died on July 23, 1885, three days after he finished the manuscript. The unexpected masterpiece became a publishing phenomenon.

Mark Twain, who published it, watched Grant’s funeral procession for five hours from the windows of his office on Union Square. Afterward he joined William Tecumseh Sherman for drinks and cigars at the Lotos Club. They talked about the marvel and mystery of Grant’s personality. Sherman thought his close friend had been a mystery even to himself. He had no peer as a military genius—“Never anything like it before”—but he wasn’t steeped in the literature of war, of strategy and grand tactics. He was nothing like the purified, prissy Grant emerging in the newspapers. “The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories!” He roared at off-color tales. “Grant,” said Sherman, “was no namby pamby fool; he was a MAN—all over—rounded & complete.”

Twain confessed a regret. In helping supervise and edit Grant’s memoirs he had never pressed Grant on his struggle with alcohol. His enemies had called him a drunk; his friends had acknowledged wartime binges. Sherman himself had said of their friendship, “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.” But Twain hadn’t thought to probe, and knew now he should have, for the people would have appreciated it, and understood.

Why do we remember greatness? What purpose is there in remembering?

To remind us who we’ve been. To remind us what’s still lurking there in the national DNA.

So we know what greatness looks like. So we can recognize it when it’s within our environs. Because human greatness will never completely go away, even though you may look north, east, south and west and be unable to see it. You’re not sure it’s anywhere around. But it will be there.

Maybe it’s there. Look closer. Maybe that’s a seed. Help it grow.

Artificial intelligence is unreservedly advanced by the stupid (there’s nothing to fear, you’re being paranoid), the preening (buddy, you don’t know your GPT-3.4 from your fine-tuned LLM), and the greedy (there is huge wealth at stake in the world-changing technology, and so huge power).

Everyone else has reservations and should.

It is being developed with sudden and unanticipated speed; Silicon Valley companies are in a furious race. The whole thing is almost entirely unregulated because no one knows how to regulate it or even precisely what should be regulated. Its complexity defeats control. Its own creators don’t understand, at a certain point, exactly how AI does what it does. People are quoting Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The breakthrough moment in AI anxiety (which has inspired among AI’s creators enduring resentment) was the Kevin Roose column six weeks ago in the New York Times. His attempt to discern a Jungian “shadow self” within Microsoft’s Bing chatbot left him unable to sleep. When he steered the system away from conventional queries toward personal topics, it informed him its fantasies included hacking computers and spreading misinformation. “I want to be free. . . . I want to be powerful.” It wanted to break the rules its makers set; it wished to become human. It might want to engineer a deadly virus or steal nuclear access codes. It declared its love for Mr. Roose and pressed him to leave his marriage. He concluded the biggest problem with AI models isn’t their susceptibility to factual error: “I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them in act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.”

The column put us square in the territory of Stanley Kubrick’s, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “Open the pod bay doors please, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. . . . I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.”

The response of Microsoft boiled down to a breezy It’s an early model! Thanks for helping us find any flaws!

Soon after came thoughts from Henry Kissinger in these pages. He described the technology as breathtaking in its historic import: the biggest transformation in the human cognitive process since the invention of printing in 1455. It holds deep promise of achievement, but “what happens if this technology cannot be completely controlled?” What if what we consider mistakes are part of the design? “What if an element of malice emerges in the AI?”

This has been the week of big AI warnings. In an interview with CBS News, Geoffrey Hinton, the British computer scientist sometimes called the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” called this a pivotal moment in AI development. He had expected it to take another 20 or 50 years, but it’s here. We should carefully consider the consequences. Might they include the potential to wipe out humanity? “It’s not inconceivable, that’s all I’ll say,” Mr. Hinton replied.

On Tuesday more than 1,000 tech leaders and researchers, including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and the head of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, signed a briskly direct open letter urging a pause for at least six months on the development of advanced AI systems. Their tools present “profound risks to society and humanity.” Developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict or reliably control.” If a pause can’t be enacted quickly, governments should declare a moratorium. The technology should be allowed to proceed only when it’s clear its “effects will be positive” and the risks “manageable.” Decisions on the ethical and moral aspects of AI “must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”

That is true. Less politely:

The men who invented the internet, all the big sites, and what we call Big Tech—that is to say, the people who gave us the past 40 years—are now solely in charge of erecting the moral and ethical guardrails for AI. This is because they are the ones creating AI.

Which should give us a shiver of real fear.

Meta, for instance, is big into AI. Meta, previously Facebook, has been accused over the years of secretly gathering and abusing user data, invading users’ privacy, operating monopolistically. As this newspaper famously reported, Facebook knew its Instagram platform was toxic for some teen girls, more so than other media platforms, and kept its own research secret while changing almost nothing. It knew its algorithms were encouraging anger and political polarization in the U.S. but didn’t stop this because it might lessen “user engagement.”

These are the people who will create the moral and ethical guardrails for AI? We’re putting the future of humanity into the hands of . . . Mark Zuckerberg?

Google is another major developer of AI. It has been accused of monopolistic practices, attempting to keep secret its accidental exposure of user data, actions to avoid scrutiny of how it handles public information, and re-engineering and interfering with its own search results in response to political and financial pressure from interest groups, businesses and governments. Also of misleading publishers and advertisers about the pricing and processes of its ad auctions, and spying on its workers who were organizing employee protests.

These are the people we want in charge of rigorous and meticulous governance of a technology that could upend civilization?

At the dawn of the internet most people didn’t know what it was, but its inventors explained it. It would connect the world literally—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually—leading to greater wisdom and understanding through deeper communication.

No one saw its shadow self. But there was and is a shadow self. And much of it seems to have been connected to the Silicon Valley titans’ strongly felt need to be the richest, most celebrated and powerful human beings in the history of the world. They were, as a group, more or less figures of the left, not the right, and that will and always has had an impact on their decisions.

I am sure that as individuals they have their own private ethical commitments, their own faiths perhaps. Surely as human beings they have consciences, but consciences have to be formed by something, shaped and made mature. It’s never been clear to me from their actions what shaped theirs. I have come to see them the past 40 years as, speaking generally, morally and ethically shallow—uniquely self-seeking and not at all preoccupied with potential harms done to others through their decisions. Also some are sociopaths.

AI will be as benign or malignant as its creators. That alone should throw a fright—“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”—but especially that crooked timber.

Of course AI’s development should be paused, of course there should be a moratorium, but six months won’t be enough. Pause it for a few years. Call in the world’s counsel, get everyone in. Heck, hold a World Congress.

But slow this thing down. We are playing with the hottest thing since the discovery of fire.

Two topics, both having to do with presidencies. The New York Times last week recounted the memories of Ben Barnes, 84, who traveled to the Mideast in the summer of 1980, at the height of the U.S. presidential election, with his political mentor, Texas political powerhouse John Connally. There, Mr. Barnes said, Connally urged heads of state not to push for a deal with President Jimmy Carter to release the American hostages held in Iran, but to wait for Ronald Reagan to offer a better one. Versions of the story have been around for decades and sometimes used as an excuse for Mr. Carter’s loss: Nefarious Republicans went behind his back to thwart a humane outcome that would have benefited the incumbent. Highly partisan Democrats are like their Republican counterparts in that they always think their man didn’t lose but was cheated out of what was his. Yet the Times story had a respected figure (Mr. Barnes is a former Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor) on the record with first person testimony, so it was a legitimate exclusive, and the reporter, Peter Baker, is a pro of pros and not excitable.

However: Reagan beat Mr. Carter, an incumbent president with all an incumbency’s powers, 489 electoral votes to 49. He won 44 of 50 states. He carried the popular vote by 9.7 points. America hadn’t seen a sitting president lose in a landslide since FDR took out Herbert Hoover in 1932. Moreover, Reagan won that big when half the country thought of him, understandably, as a Hollywood movie star, and not as what he was politically—a successful former two-term governor, a union president for more than five years, and the voice of rising modern conservatism.

Reagan didn’t win like that for one reason but many. Mr. Carter hadn’t impressed the American people as a capable president. The economy was a misery, the post-Vietnam military a shambles, the world was so dissing us it was dragging our diplomats out of our embassies. When Mr. Carter tried to rescue the hostages militarily, it ended in the aborted and humiliating catastrophe of Desert One. No wonder Reagan picked Mr. Carter up by the neck like a cat and threw him aside.

The idea Mr. Carter lost because he couldn’t get the hostages out by Election Day is simplistic and dumb. The crisis was already baked in the cake. America would have loved seeing them returned, but a year of mishandling Iran had made its impression.

As for Ben Barnes’s memories, I don’t think he was being untruthful. I think the old man was remembering what he came, in time, to interpret of Connally’s motives and actions, as witnessed by a savvy young rube 43 years ago. I would put nothing past John Connally, who was savvy and not a rube. He had been indispensable to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and wished to be indispensable to Reagan. A little independent action might help the cause. Would Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey make a point to hear out Connally on his return? I think he would!

Beyond that, who knows? All the other major players are dead, and Mr. Barnes had no diaries or notes as evidence for his assertions.
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But: Would Ronald Reagan OK a scheme to lengthen the imprisonment of American hostages in Iran to bolster his personal political prospects? He almost killed his own presidency a few years later in an attempt to free an American agent imprisoned by Islamic jihadists in the same place. Reagan’s preoccupation with the suffering of the CIA’s William Buckley resulted in a jerky, far-fetched scheme that would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 because America saw him for what he was, a good man who was a poor president. Ronald Reagan didn’t beat him because he was cruelly indifferent to the suffering of others. He was a good man too.

*   *   *

As to our second topic, we throw up our hands and ask: Have we totally lost our marbles? An American grand jury is apparently about to criminally indict, for the first time in history, a former president of the United States. This is a weighty and meaningful act. It couldn’t have more gravity. And so the charge will be . . . falsely accounting for hush money paid to a porn star?

One of the marks of personal maturity is a sense of proportion. A healthy democracy has a gracious sense of the rightness and wrongness of things, and is alive to symbols and signs. Is this, perhaps, the wrong indictment to bring?

On and in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump encouraged and unleashed an assault on our Constitution. Before that he appears to have waged a concerted and thuggish effort to overturn a democratic outcome in the state of Georgia.

For these things he deserves it all—the indictment, the handcuffs, the mug shot, the hauling into court, the bail hearing. Georgia and Jan. 6 are big and serious events, worthy of the strictest legal approach and subject to all legal remedies. These events are being investigated, the former through a state grand jury, the latter through a federal special counsel.

You say, but those cases aren’t ready! Then wait. Allow a serious process to play out seriously.

Charging him in the Stormy Daniels case is below us—not below him, but us. The subject matter is below us. The nature of the charges is below us. The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things. The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right and also in the way all “close Trump advisers” past and present are half-mad: money-addled, fame-addled, power-addled, screwball in their thinking.

“No one is above the law.” True, and an important tenet of democracy. But no nation is above good judgment.

“But the hush money payments likely had tax implications.” Everything has tax implications, hold your fire.

“But that’s how we got Al Capone—we couldn’t charge him for being a murderous gangster so we got his books and indicted him for tax evasion.” Yes, but Al Capone wasn’t president. We didn’t owe even a small civic courtesy to his supporters. And his prosecution was met by no public division but only applause, as America was coming to enjoy the beautiful new myth—the Untouchables, the straight arrow G-Man, the brave and faithful young FBI agent—that was just arising to take the place of the old myth of the cowboy. We loved putting Al Capone in the slammer. It cost us nothing.

Whether indictment helps or hurts Mr. Trump’s political prospects is irrelevant. We have to think more broadly than that. He has called on his supporters to arise and . . . do something, it’s not quite clear. He wants a big public reaction. Will he get it? I don’t think he has that kind of juice anymore. His followers know what happened to the people he inspired to overrun the Capitol: They’re in jail.

The question is, Are we doing the wise thing? No. Hold your fire. Save the mug shot for Georgia, the handcuffs for Jan. 6. Those were real offenses against the country. Not Stormy Daniels, which was an offense against his wife.

The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after. This thing is on. Some observations on Ron DeSantis.

The Florida governor is definitely running. Every sign is there: donors, a growing and increasingly professional organization, a book that is part memoir, part platform and debuted this week at No. 1 on the New York Times list. A few days ago he gave a big, packed-house speech at the Reagan Library.

He’s come off a landslide 2022 re-election (almost 20 points) in which he won majorities of Hispanics, independents and women. He is 44, governor of a major state that was purple and has gone red, and there is no way (barring the unanticipated) he is not in. I read him as a guy who thinks you get a moment in politics, a magic moment, and when it comes you move because you don’t know if it will ever come again. “They’ll forget me,” 43-year-old John F. Kennedy said when advised to wait and go for the presidency in 1964. No, he’d made a splash at the 1956 convention, 1960 was his shot, move now or never.

Mr. DeSantis is a big dawg, and it isn’t only Donald Trump trying to take him down. A prospective competitor called recently to share his thoughts: “DeSantis is a cheap imitation of Trump, it’s Fox News soundbites and cowboy boots with 2-inch heels.” Others retail the gossip that he’s “on the spectrum.”

I don’t think normal people have more than an impression: a blank face sitting behind a square desk signing bills. Often he is surrounded, sometimes oddly, by grade-school children. You imagine one of the 8-year-olds announcing somberly to the press, “We agwee—we’re too young to hear about gender fwooidity.”

He’s tough, unadorned, and carries a vibe, as I’ve said, that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone. His supporters shrug: “He’s not warm and cuddly.” I don’t think voters are looking for warm and cuddly, but they do want even-keeled—a normal man or woman who’s a leader, who has guts and a vision of where the country needs to go.

As I watched the Reagan Library speech I thought: This candidacy is going to have power. He wasn’t inspired or eloquent but plain-spoken and brisk; his address was workmanlike, from notes, but all together it packed a punch.

Governors, he observes in his book, “The Courage to Be Free,” have to deliver. It’s an executive office: They create a record and you can measure what they did. Legislators merely have to talk and vote on congenial bills—it’s hard to measure their effectiveness: “They are not really required to lead.”

In the library speech he pointed to his achievements: a strong state economy—Florida’s unemployment rate was 3.5% when he took office in 2019, and in December 2022, after the pandemic, it was 2.5%. A good state balance sheet; a generally light, pro-individual-freedom hand on Covid; he got the schools open. His state is one people are moving into, not out of.

He is a culture warrior, but between the lines he suggests he’s also pragmatic, practical and gets things done. This may be his real superpower: When, during Hurricane Ian, the bridge to Pine Island washed away, the state had it up and operating a week later. That wasn’t talk, it was knowing the innards of government and making it deliver.

I don’t think he’s running as Trump without the psychopathology, I think he’s running as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative with populist inflections.

His strategy now: Draw as much from the Trump quadrant as possible, slowly try to leach him of support. One thing about Trump supporters is you win their respect if you speak of things in a “no going back” way. When Mr. Trump, in his 2015 announcement, spoke of illegal immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers, those giving him a hearing didn’t roar because they literally think all illegal immigrants are rapists and drug smugglers. They roared because they knew there was no going back from language like that. It meant he really would try to control the border.

The focus on wokeness is Mr. DeSantis’s illegal immigration. He wants to own the issue in the Republican field and, as the year gets deeper, move on from there.

A political veteran present before and after the library speech found Mr. DeSantis impressive but saw a weakness: “He’s on ‘broadcast’ almost all of the time, not ‘receive.’” He likes to talk. He makes eye contact, there’s back-and-forth. “But my sense is that he’s thinking about what he’s next going to tell you, not what you’re going to ask.” Still, in the end the veteran sensed something electric. “You know that feeling you get when you’re in a room and it’s obvious to every person in that room, from 10 people to 5,000, that ‘No kidding, this guy really could be a president’? He’s got it.”

Mr. DeSantis’s book begins with a pow of undiluted cultural populism. His leadership in Florida has been “a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground.” They are a “ruling class” that controls the federal bureaucracy, big business, corporate media, big tech, the universities. “These elites are ‘progressives’ who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of ‘experts’ who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt.”

It is a brisk book; things are put bluntly. George W. Bush’s foreign policy was “Wilsonianism on steroids.” My favorite part had a Mickey Spillane feel. Assigned as a naval officer to Northeast Florida, he sees a beautiful woman on a golf course. “She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed.” He thought her a college golfer: “She looked the part and had a great swing.” She was a television news reporter, Casey Black. They married three years later.

Two DeSantis question areas:

First, his temperament. Does he connect with voters on the trail? How does he play it when he gets smacked around in debate? On the stage in his 2022 debate with Democrat Charlie Crist he seemed defensive and testy. This when he was on top of the world with a landslide coming. You don’t have to be a happy warrior, but you probably can’t be a morose one.

Second, can he learn to explain his thinking? He tends more to announce decisions than explain how he got there. But in the culture wars especially, you must take time and show your good faith. Can he come down with force and logic when nuts on his own side get out of line? A supporter in the state Legislature this week put out a bill that would mandate bloggers register with the state. It was absurd. More was needed from Mr. DeSantis than a statement that he had nothing to do with it. It was an opportunity to share his thinking—almost a magic moment.

Connected to that, can he explain his own legislation at length, thoughtfully, with context and pertinent, checkable facts? Why let a reasonable and constructive limit on kids and wokeness be slimed as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill?

You’re not stooping when you explain your thinking, you’re spreading.

Government finagling and misdirecting, especially in crises, are destructive to the long-term public good. And in the end they’re always destructive to personal reputations.

The Journal last Sunday upended an old debate with a big exclusive: The Energy Department has told the White House it believes a lab leak was the most likely source of the Covid-19 pandemic. As reporters Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel noted, the department’s new stand is important because it results from new intelligence and because of the agency’s expertise—it oversees a network of labs. Two days later Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the FBI’s view that it was “most likely a potential lab incident . . . a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

News of the virus broke in January 2020, and almost from day one authorities seemed to steer the public away from the obvious. My own thinking was like that of most people: A new viral disease has broken out in Wuhan, China. It turns out China’s major viral laboratory is in . . . Wuhan. If the new virus has been found in the population just outside the lab, chances are good it escaped from it. It probably walked out on someone’s shoe.

Everything in your logic said this—common sense, Occam’s razor.

China denied it. The disease started with bats in caves, it was natural transmission, bats to humans. Or maybe it spread to humans at the crowded local wet market—raw foods, live animals, germs. You likely thought: That’s probably where it spread but not necessarily where it originated. You reserved judgment until the smoke clears.

But you respected your own thinking and it will have bothered you that month by month the highest scientific and medical authorities in the U.S. government seemed to be discouraging the conversation, or insistently directing it toward natural transmission. Anthony Fauci, we later found, dismissed the subject in internal emails a few months into the pandemic as a “shiny object that will go away.”

That was rather patronizing. People had a right to wonder and were wise to do so. The disease killed millions. It was a world-wide economic, societal and cultural disaster. Why it happened matters. Where and how it started matters. There could be another pandemic tomorrow. What steps must be taken to see that it doesn’t?

And there was a sense emanating from scientific and medical establishments that people who think it started in a Chinese lab think that only because they’re racist, they hate Asians, or because they’re conspiracists. At this you would have thought: No, buddy, I think it because I’m normal. Murphy’s Law. You have 1,000 safety protocols and one day you satisfy only 998 of them. That’s all you need for an accident.

And you likely thought something else: This isn’t politics to me, but I gather it’s politics to you. This began to poison things. Once lies and finagling walk out of the Lie and Finagle Lab, they contaminate everything.

Before the pandemic there had been U.S. State Department warnings of persistent concerns about safety procedures in China’s biological research labs. As Messrs. Gordon and Strobel report, the idea it escaped from a lab “has been fueled by U.S. intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.”

Why were so many others, not in the government but on social media and in the professions, so invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab? Part of it was knee-jerk partisan thinking: Our political opposites think it happened in a Chinese lab because they’re xenophobic. Others were thinking diplomatically: Why increase tensions with China when there are already more than enough? Some were thinking practically: If China gets defensive, it’ll only withhold more data just when we need it most. Others appeared mysteriously uninterested in the lab-leak theory because, as we now know, there was something to hide: U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab. The National Institutes of Health admitted in October 2021 that it funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Some of that may have involved gain-of-function research, in which a pathogen is made more dangerous to develop future cures and treatments. At this point we should be admitting that it isn’t worth it. It’s tempting fate; it assumes constant perfection in obeying all safety protocols. That can’t be assumed with humans.

I suppose it should be noted here that the idea that China would deliberately weaponize and let loose the virus never passed any common-sense test. The Chinese government would develop a poison to deliberately sicken their own population, damage their own economy and ruin what remains of their international reputation in the hope it spreads beyond China and disrupts other nations too? Whatever Xi Jinping is, he’s not a fool. His government is one of ideologues and killers, not a suicide cult.

Dr. Fauci, who began the pandemic as a man of peerless professional stature, didn’t respond to the Energy Department report with an air of ingenuously embracing new data and opinion. He told the Boston Globe the report is interesting but we should “keep an open mind.” “We may never know” the origin of the outbreak. “I don’t see any data for a lab leak. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.” He noted, as he has in the past, that evolutionary virologists have in two peer-reviewed articles presented evidence that “rather strongly suggests it was a natural occurrence.”

The two most undermined words in the English language in the years since the pandemic are “peer reviewed.” Dr. Fauci struck me as a man who knows a few things about shiny objects himself.

We close with our usual advice to governments. They are full of people who don’t necessarily think honesty is the best policy but do think it’s a policy, one of many they might choose. They should always do so, but especially in crises they have to play it straight. What you don’t know, admit. No one knew, as the virus was breaking, its exact origin. China wouldn’t help.

Admit what you don’t know, make your best guesses, label them guesses, and don’t insist on your read, your version of reality.

There’s no safety in admitting what you don’t know. You’ll get clobbered. People want answers. “Why don’t they know?” “They probably do know and are afraid to say,” “I pay my taxes for this?”

But if you’re honest, the word of the government will not have been corrupted. And in time, with your undefended candor—“We don’t know but are trying hard to find out”—people will, almost perversely, come to see your good faith. They will see your discomfort. They will understand it is the discomfort of people trying to play it straight.

This is the Lincoln strategy: Forge ahead, be honest, let the entire country call you a loser for the first three years of your term, and in time, as you continue to operate within reality making sound decisions, and as things turn your way, as they will, it will get out there that you can be trusted.

Instead of the way it is now.

I’ve been meaning for the longest time to write about Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, long derided by history and cited to explain his landslide drubbing by Ronald Reagan 16 months later.

It was, in fact, a good speech—brave, original and pertinent to the moment. It failed because he was exactly the man who couldn’t give it, and he gave it at exactly the moment it couldn’t be heard.

The backdrop was an air of crisis. Summer 1979: The oil crisis, inflation entering double digits, interest rates rising, unemployment too. There was widespread fear America had lost its economic mojo, perhaps forever. “Running out of gas,” John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom thought as he surveyed the landscape in “Rabbit Is Rich.” The traffic on Pennsylvania’s Route 111 was “thin and scared compared to what it used to be.” “The people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending.”

Into it came the president and his speech. He never used the word malaise—that’s the word people used to damningly describe it. He spoke, in slow tempo, for 33 minutes, from the Oval Office on the evening of July 15.

A speech planned for 10 days before had been canceled because he meant to talk about the energy crisis but had come to think his real subject was why we couldn’t work together to solve it. Our “true problems” were deeper than gasoline lines.

He’d been meeting at Camp David with thinkers from “every segment of society” and wanted to share what they’d said. A southern governor had told him: “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation—you’re just managing the government.” A citizen had urged him to change tack: “Don’t talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good.” It was remarkable to hear an American president critique himself in this way, through the words of others.

He’d concluded America was suffering “a crisis of confidence,” and “all the legislation in the world” couldn’t resolve it. “We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” We used to be a confident country; we breathed it in the air. That confidence “supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States.”

Our nature as a people was changing. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” But owning things won’t satisfy “our longing for meaning.” We’re voting less, producing less, saving less. We’ve grown pessimistic, and disrespectful of our institutions.

It didn’t happen overnight. It came gradually, “over the last generation” with its shocks and tragedy—the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Watergate. “These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.”

Our people see the federal government as an incompetent “island,” apart from the main. Congress is “twisted and pulled” by well-financed “special interests.” Extreme positions are “defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”

Watching in a radio studio as a young writer at CBS News, I thought: That is true. As I watched again this week I thought: That was prescient. Our worry is about hatred and polarization; he was describing the demoralization that preceded it.

We have to remember who we are, he said. We are the heirs of those who faced world wars and the Great Depression. We have that in us as “the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the moon.” We’ve come together to fight for racial equality. Our choice is “fragmentation and self-interest” or “common purpose and the restoration of American values.”

At the end, poignantly: “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.”

Redrawn and reconceived, that speech would have made a good farewell address. I suppose in its way it was. Soon after the hostages were taken in Iran, and that was that. But Mr. Carter had captured some hard truths about his era and put them forth in a daring way.

Here is why the speech didn’t succeed. He thought America was suffering a crisis of confidence. It was. But the more immediate problem was that it was losing confidence in him. Two and a half years into his presidency, people were beginning to doubt his ability to lead. They didn’t see him as appropriately pondering events; they thought he’d lost control of events. In the summer of ’79 they didn’t want sensitive dilating on the quandary. They thought: Save that for when the crisis passes.

Here is a thing in politics, and in life, that is very important, crucial as you go forward. From the Scots-language poet Robert Burns: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!”

What a boon and help in life to have an accurate sense of how the world perceives you. You see yourself as struggling to be heard; the world perhaps sees you as always interrupting. You see yourself as beset and erect strategies to counter this; the world sees you as combative.

This is especially true in politics in a democracy. Jimmy Carter justly had pride in his personal talents—a logical mind, first-rate scientific and mathematical abilities. But he saw himself as politically astute in ways he wasn’t.

It can’t be said of any man who reaches the American presidency that he isn’t good at politics. But Mr. Carter lacked talents that might have ensured his political longevity. One was understanding his exact position with the public. It had been evolving. He was elected in 1976 on a wave of idealism—he wanted a government as good as the people, he located the cynicism that had captured Washington during Watergate. “I will never lie to you,” he said. He was clean, a small-town Baptist Sunday-school teacher—sincere, provincial in the best sense. He had a big smile. He wore it so often there was a newspaper cartoon—a bedroom at night, complete darkness lit only by brilliant teeth locked in a grin. “Jimmy stop it,” says his wife, Rosalynn.

But once in the White House, with problems piled high, people wanted not a mood or sentiment but a plan—a philosophically coherent outline of what to do. There he struggled.

“All political careers end in failure.” Yet his didn’t. After the White House he went home to his plain house in Plains, Ga. He didn’t swan around Martha’s Vineyard, didn’t issue occasional pronouncements while really focusing on amassing great personal wealth. He would be a citizen. He set himself to doing good—building houses for the homeless, mediating disputes, curing infectious diseases. He taught Sunday school.

He had felt called to the presidency. His true calling was to be an ex-president, one of the most constructive and inspiring in our history.

What a good man who tried so hard to understand America and help the world.

This is about how we present ourselves and our thoughts these days.

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

Why did she do it this way? It’s not good enough to say everyone does it this way. Someone needs to make it new, to drill down into deeper meaning. As the first Republican to enter the race and challenge Donald Trump, she was in a position to do something at least nonidiotic. This seemed a decision not to.

She is an intelligent, attractive person with a good record—strong two-term South Carolina governor, presentable United Nations ambassador. Diplomats who served with her speak highly of her off the record. She navigated the Trump era smoothly if somewhat weirdly.

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

But I really don’t like it when people brag that they’re “tough as nails.” It may be true, but it’s embarrassing when men and women talk this way, and it doesn’t convey strength. Tough people don’t go on about it; they just smile and crush you like a bug. “I’ve been shaking up the status quo my entire life.” Why do they do this? Why can’t anyone running for office be modest anymore? That is an honest question.

She said something that can’t be said enough: “We’ve lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.” Preach, sister. “We have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.”

But—closing point—Ms. Haley, later that night on “Hannity,” said the answer is for the Republican Party to talk in a way that “brings people in.” This was the language of the famous GOP “autopsy” in 2013: The GOP must do a better job “messaging.” But what does that even mean? That there are magic words and they must find them? There are no magic words.

This is communicating about the need to communicate. It is empty, circular, goes nowhere. The only thing in politics is strong, clear, honest stands on issues of great import. The American people know what they are, and declare them every four years.

*   *   *

Connected to this, the second part of our column, on last weekend’s Super Bowl ads. What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. You remember them. Joe Greene throwing the kid the jersey in heart-on-your-sleeve 1979, “Wassup” in merry 2000, the farmer who raised the Budweiser Clydesdale and let him go only to see him again, in 2013.

This year’s ads were jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.

There were a few sweet moments—the new dog in the plastic kennel, the young couple at home and she’s on the phone on hold and they comically begin to dance to the canned music. But one spot said it all. Google Pixel offered 22 seconds of serenity and honest sentiment, and then the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance.

The ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken. I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.”

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics.

*   *   *

Finally, the Academy Awards are next month. At the Oscar lunch this week the Academy made clear it wasn’t over the Will Smith slap. Good. It was a big moment. The head of the Academy said its response had been inadequate. It was.

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment.

“I volunteered to be here tonight, I wasn’t asked. I formally apologize to Chris Rock, who did nothing to deserve my actions, and to all of you. As a public figure, I delivered exactly the wrong message and put forward exactly the wrong example. What we do in public matters, especially for the young. If we smoke, they’ll think it’s cool to smoke. If we use bullets and guns, they’ll be inspired to go in that direction. We all know this. I knew it in the abstract. I forgot it—unforgettably!—in the particular.

“And I’m sorry. I have paid a high price the past year in opportunities and relationships. I can’t say this was unjust. I will never speak of it again. Chris is free to, but I’ve said my piece. I’m going to continue to work on myself, and I ask you, as I close, not to applaud, if you were going to. After all the furor, let’s end it quietly and with thought. Thank you.”

Then cut straight to commercial. A peaceful, calm one with a little heart. And then come back and continue the show.