Peggy Noonan

Congress and the White House are trying to overhaul police practices. By tradition in such efforts the obvious will likely be overlooked, so here is the obvious:

Violent crime is rising in almost every major American city, after decades of falling. Police departments are in crisis, battered by charges of abuse, targeted for cuts, many struggling under recent bail-reform laws. Officers are demoralized. From the New York Post one month ago: “More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020—a 75 percent spike from the year before.” In Philadelphia they’re struggling with a shortage of recruits and a similar surge in retirements. “People don’t want to be police anymore,” a local chief told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All this happened after America watched the cellphone video of the extinguishing of the life of George Floyd one year ago, by an officer, Derek Chauvin, who posed through much of the tape with his hand on his thigh, the picture of brute nonchalance.

An incident so horrifying can and will stop America in its tracks, causing nationwide convulsion—protests, riots, burning of businesses.

One bad cop can stop a great nation in its tracks. A plumber, an accountant, a movie star can’t kick America off its axis. A bad cop can.

Which means police officers are more important than ever in our history. And we are not fully seeing this.

We train them almost as an afterthought. You’d think men and women so crucial to domestic tranquility would be trained deeply and carefully, spending years in the police academy, but no, we train them for four to six months.

There are thousands of departments in the U.S., each with its own standards and policies. The Los Angeles Police Department provides six months of training for those who qualify. So does Miami. Smaller forces train less. The state of California mandates 664 hours of training, but the San Jose Mercury News last year quoted a criminal-justice reform advocate noting the state requires more training for cosmetologists than for police. On some forces, a high-school diploma or GED is enough to qualify. Some cities require two years of college or military service.

But almost all forces offer four to six months to learn everything: how to use gear, from the radio and body cam to firearms; how to control crowds, de-escalate situations, deal with the violent mentally ill, talk to citizens in a traffic stop. First aid, the law, the use of force, tactics—four to six months to absorb all that and more.

Doesn’t it strike you as mad? We ask our cops to be diplomats, to resolve domestic disputes peacefully. We ask them to have the law at their fingertips, and to treat everyone, including drunk 23-year-olds spoiling for a fight, with respect. At the same time we want them steely-eyed and sure if someone pulls a gun. We ask them to act proportionately. We ask them to control stray dogs. And all this while year by year society’s problems escalate, including a mental-health crisis and a drug crisis.

We are asking them to be a combination of Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama and John Wayne. All after four to six months of training.

If they get it innocently wrong—if they misjudge a situation in real time, or panic—it’s all there on cellphone video, and if they are judged guilty they lose their jobs, their benefits, their pensions; and their families will be left vulnerable. So now instead of doing something when bad things are happening, they feel the temptation to do nothing—to stay in the car or turn away from trouble. Street criminals know that. Not all criminals are stupid—that’s a myth. They are calculating, constantly judging who has the upper hand. They know we are entering a golden age of street crime, with local laws relaxed, systems changed, judges deactivated, streets full of guns, and cops on the defensive.

No one says “defund the police” anymore; it doesn’t poll well. Instead they play verbal games and say “redirect resources.” Which means funnel money away from the police and toward whatever programs they dream up to be part of solving the crime problem. The head of New York’s Police Benevolent Association told the Post he saw in this a strategy: “Abolition through attrition.” Get rid of the police by denying them what they need.

Considering their importance, we are underfunding the police. They need to increase recruitment, train new cops longer and deeper, and retrain veterans regularly to keep up with changes in the law and equipment. This will be expensive. But Washington is in a spending mood, and it’s less expensive than riots.

It’s not only that good policing is more important than ever. It’s that we think in categories and our minds tend to leap to clichés. In some part of our minds we think “cop” and imagine a big Irish Catholic family circa 1970, or Tom Selleck in “Blue Bloods.” Or the black longtime chief whose father and son were on the force. But this is 2021, today’s recruits were born in 2000, or the 1990s, and they came from our modern society, which means chances are good they came from a considerable amount of brokenness. Many were not raised closely, tidily, didn’t have generations of a family’s values guiding them. They come from all-broken-up America. They came from us—a jangly culture that put its emphasis on screens and how things look, as opposed to thoughts and how things are.

We are putting it all on the frail shoulders of the guy who was born in 2000 and spent visitation with his father playing “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.” And the girl without a father who came from a chaotic home. They are the academy’s new recruits.

We are lucky to have them. But our culture hasn’t given the young enough clues, enough guidance, about how to be in the world. For instance—this is hilariously small, but not really small—we haven’t done a good job teaching what used to be called manners. It hardly matters if a kid at Harvard who’s going to a hedge fund is loutish and lacking in sympathy, it’s almost expected. But cops need kindness and dignity to do their tense and sensitive work, to defuse situations. To live in the world of criminals is to live in a world of male pride. That is a sensitive place.

My bet: We can give the police the training and resources they need. Or we can endure a rising tide of crime for five or 10 years or longer, and then give them what they need. Why don’t we do it now?

I close with the words of William Bratton, former police commissioner of New York, Los Angeles and Boston, in an interview a few weeks ago. I asked him what cops are, what their role is, why we should care. “They are the glue that literally holds society together,” he said. “They are an essential element of a successful democracy.”

They are. And God bless them as they make their way through Memorial Day weekend 2021.

Here is journalism as a true and honest public service: Carol Leonnig’s new book, “Zero Fail,” about the rise and fall of the Secret Service. It is just terrific, to use a phrase from the 1960s, when the service became universally admired. The Washington Post reporter interviewed more than 180 people including current and former agents, directors and other officials, and worked under some pressure: Secret Service leaders and alumni had vowed to attack her work, she says, on the grounds she meant only to embarrass the institution. But she is “in awe of the agents and officers” who do what they do each day. It’s clear she means to save the agency from many forces, including itself.

The service’s reputation has been battered the past two decades by embarrassing scandals involving agents and managers, but the greater problem is that it is no longer keeping the president safe. “Agents and officers gave me a guided tour, showing me step by step how the Secret Service was becoming a paper tiger,” weakened by bad leadership, underfunding, an insular culture and declining professionalism. It is painful reading because Secret Service agents have been unique among government workers in that everyone knew of them and admired them. They live in the American imagination as what they’ve long been and still often are: focused, ethical, no-nonsense, alert. Dwight Eisenhower called them “soldiers out of uniform.” When I worked with them, they were the pros on the premises; they were dashing even when they weren’t dashing.

Their primary job: to keep the president safe and if necessary take a bullet for him. That is literally what agent Tim McCarthy did during the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. There too was agent Jerry Parr, who bundled the seemingly unhurt Reagan into the car and, after seeing pinkish, oxygenated blood on his mouth, countermanded an order and got him straight to the emergency room. (Wonderful arcana included by Ms. Leonnig: When Parr was a kid he saw a 1939 movie, “Code of the Secret Service,” which made him want to be an agent. The central character, fearless agent Brass Bancroft, was played by Ronald Reagan, whose life Parr saved some four decades later. Life is full of strange, unseen circularities.)

If you remember the JFK shooting you remember agent Clint Hill running to the president’s car when he heard the first shot, jumping on the back step as the car sped up, stumbling, hauling himself over the trunk and situating his body so if there were more shots they would get him instead.

What lore, what a tradition of valor. But the 21st century has been pretty much a disaster for the service; that is when the deterioration of the institution really began to show. There was a major expansion of duties, new missions and responsibilities, plus poor leadership, bad management and growing unprofessionalism. And it was always underfunded. In 2002 U.S. News & World Report revealed serious misbehavior in the highest ranks. The Secret Service was humiliated in 2012 when a dozen agents and officers were accused of turning a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia, “into a kind of Vegas bachelor party, complete with heavy drinking and prostitutes.” Men and women of the service had been known for “tireless and selfless vigilance.” Suddenly they were becoming known for “blackout drinking, bar brawls, and car accidents.”

In the Obama years the service was scrambling to cover up security breaches. Someone took shots at the White House. An uninvited couple waltzed past guards to attend a presidential dinner. In 2014 a mentally ill veteran jumped the fence—he was the fifth jumper that year—and got as far as the East Room. He was carrying a knife. “In 29 seconds [Omar] Gonzalez had made his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women.”

It doesn’t seem to have helped that after 9/11 the service was removed from its longtime home in the Treasury Department and blended into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security. The idea was a wholesale reorganization of the government’s separate security agencies, which Senate Democrats pushed for and the Bush White House went along with and finally took the lead on. A new civil-defense agency would be created from parts of 40 different ones. It would, then, have 170,000 employees. The service didn’t really resist, Ms. Leonnig writes: “DHS might be their ticket to larger budgets.”

The intent of such reorganizations is always to make management and the flow of information more coherent, actions more coordinated. It looks good on paper, but something’s always sacrificed. More meetings with less institutional pertinence, more managing up. Less accountability because there are more closets in more corridors in which to hide more mischief. And less esprit, less a feeling of singularity, of lore and tradition, less pride. You’re not part of a mission, you’re an office drone within a beast.

There are heroes in the book. In 2005 uniformed officer Charles J. Baserap, assigned to the White House compound, was asked by superiors if he had any ideas on how to improve security. He was new, honored to be asked, wrote and signed a memo pointing out real security flaws. His superiors didn’t take it well. The day before he reached full career status, he was let go. But service members still pass around dog-eared copies of his memos. To them he’s a legend.

And there’s Rachel Weaver, staff director for Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. After Cartagena she tirelessly dug into what was going on at the Secret Service and uncovered a history of abuse and misbehavior.

In 2011 Julia Pierson, who would become the first female director, told the Office of Management and Budget her agency was “bankrupt.” Budget cuts led to understaffing and waves of uniformed-officer resignations. Ms. Leonnig: “Officers were fleeing simply because they were tired of working more than half of their days off, with no end in sight.” Agents on the president’s detail, due to be rotated out after years in the pressure cooker, were forced to stay so the agency could save relocation costs.

Some of the understaffing was due to a new hiring system. In the past, agents in field offices would recruit new agents: They knew what it took and could tell who’d wash out. But they mostly recruited beings like themselves: white men. Greater fairness and diversity were needed. So now people applied on the federal government’s USAJobs website. But field officers found themselves overwhelmed, having to interview hundreds of applicants who couldn’t meet basic fitness and security standards—physically or emotionally impaired, obese, oblivious. Applicants showed up in gym shorts. “Some said they couldn’t agree to a required home interview because their roommates didn’t like having cops around.”

Here is the ground this book breaks: its deep reporting reveals a decline not only in the service’s reputation but in its reality.

Something bad is going to happen if officials fail to act. Congress and the White House live in a world of emergencies, but if they don’t focus on the Secret Service, quickly, they’re going to have big trouble.

There’s a lot to build on. Save that old thing.

What is to become of the Republican Party? It will either break up or hold together. If the latter, it will require time to work through divisions; there will be state fights and losses as the party stumbles through cycle to cycle. But in time one side or general tendency will win and define the party. Splits get resolved when somebody wins big and nationally. Eisenhower’s landslides in 1952 and ’56 announced to the party that it was moderate. Reagan’s in 1980 and ’84 revealed it was conservative. The different factions get the message and follow the winner like metal filings to a magnet.

The future, according to this space, is and should be economically populist and socially conservative.

The future GOP, and the current one for that matter, is a party of conservatism with important Trumpian inflections. The great outstanding question: Will those inflections be those of attitude—wildness, garish personalities and conspiracy-mindedness? If so, the party will often lose. Or will the inflections be those of actual policy, in which case they will often win?

In terms of policy the future GOP will be more Trumpian, meaning more populist and nationalist. High spending will continue (and will not much be acknowledged!) but it will be high spending with a more conservative bent—more for cops, for instance. The party will be preoccupied neither by the capital-gains tax nor by what’s good for corporations. It won’t cut entitlements.

Skepticism about great international crusades will continue. The modern GOP has been internationalist and interventionist. (The Democrats too.) The future GOP will be internationalist up to a point—the world has a way of forcing you to think about it; trade deals need to be made. But it won’t be like it was, all flags unfurled.

Conservative social thinking—against what used to be called political correctness, against being pushed around by faculty-lounge Robespierres—will continue. It will be antiradical on race. Republicans are and will be with Sen. Tim Scott : America is not a racist country, but can always benefit from remembering that racism is a sin and a vice of the ignorant. The argument against wokeness is powerful: We are our souls and our character; we are not only our color and our country of origin.

Do Trump supporters even care to institutionalize their policy ascendance, or do they just want to obsess on the sage of Mar-a-Lago and insist people bow to him? Never mind Liz Cheney, why do they insist on putting him at the immovable center of things? Some part of it would be that they interpret respect for Donald Trump to be respect for themselves. They may be “the deplorables,” but they changed the priorities of a great party. There’s something to that.

But if they are serious they have to wake up. They can’t win elections without classic GOP voters. They can win with Trumpism, but they’ll lose with Trump. As they just did.

He is a waning figure. It is the way of things that a former leader becomes former, even him. He pays the finaglers around him to tell reporters how powerful he is, and reporters are only too eager to headline it, but how true is it, and for how long? He is distracted by investigations, lawyers, age and golf. His new social-media empire is a blog. What power he has is wielded brutishly but not cleverly or thoughtfully.

One of the scoops of the Cheney drama was when the Washington Post reported that in a briefing at an April GOP retreat the National Republican Congressional Committee hid from its members polling information on battleground districts. That information showed Mr. Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones: “Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.” Bad numbers had been covered up before. Ms. Cheney concluded party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid acknowledging the damage Trump could do to Republican candidates.

An NBC News poll last month had only 32% of respondents with a favorable impression of Mr. Trump. More interesting, it had his numbers falling among Republicans themselves. Only 44% of them said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “of the Republican Party”; 50% said the other way around.

Mr. Trump’s trend is downward. He is losing air, like a deflating Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon that’s going to wind up wrapped around a light pole.

House leaders should stop being mesmerized by this guy and building him up in their heads. They are way too dazzled by his supposed powers. They shouldn’t be going on missions to Mar-a-Lago. He’s merely a force to be factored in.

They think Ms. Cheney should pay him less attention. They should pay him less attention.

It was good for the party to have someone who opposed him, and said it, in the leadership. It didn’t cause trouble in America, and made those who noticed what she was doing feel represented. If Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hadn’t been so afraid Mr. Trump would come for him too, he would have stood by her and averted a crisis.

As I’ve written, in running in fear from him, they are running from a corpse. Because the insurrection changed everything. They say, “Trump got 74 million votes,” but many Republicans held their noses and voted for him. Jan. 6 forced many of them to say Basta!—“Enough!” It’s not true 74 million are Trumpists. You could as well call them 2020’s Not Democrats.

If the Republicans don’t take an honest stand on 1/6, they’re saying what happened that day was allowable, and there will be more attempts to overthrow elections. An honest stand on what happened after the election separates the party from evil. It’s not a question of aligning with Mr. Trump, it’s a question of aligning with that. Not being truthful invites half your base to go live in Crazytown and never come back, not even to vote in your elections.

What could help the Republicans unify? Normally it would be the Democrats. Their policies are always the GOP’s great unifying factor. The Biden administration is doing a good job of providing the issues. Inflation is rising; the southern border has been ruptured. The administration is silent in the face of the progressive cultural revolution with its antipolice fervor, and silent about teachers not having to teach because they have a powerful union. All this is part of the reason the Republicans may still take back the House.

You’d think a healthy party could oppose all that with documents that are thoughtful, stands that are clear, votes that are pertinent. Instead of just going on cable and scoring points off Ms. Cheney.

This week more than 100 former Republican officeholders and activists signed a letter suggesting they might form a third party. Their grievances are real but it won’t work. At the end of the day our two big incompetent behemoths function as a unifying force in a nation with too few. You’re a Democrat or a Republican, take your choice and find your place in the coalition. Give people three parties and they’ll take seven, and America will fracture.

Grit your way through this hard time. Stay and fight.

It all comes back to the Capitol insurrection. It’s at the heart of the battle that is, four months later, tearing the House GOP apart. Increasingly, Republicans paint 1/6 as a rowdy and raucous event, an arguably understandable but certainly embarrassing one in which hundreds of people illegally marched into the Capitol and, for a few hours, occupied its halls. There was some unfortunate violence; it should be prosecuted. But you don’t endlessly, ruthlessly and for political reasons bring governmental force down on members of a crowd that got carried away. America is a nation in which crowds get carried away. They didn’t tear the place apart, as street rioters did last summer. It was goofballs dressed in antelope horns. So get a grip, maintain perspective.

There is some truth in this. But it dodges the larger, defining and essential truth.

That has to do with the expressed aim and intention of many rioters. It wasn’t to roam the halls and yell. It was something grave and dark: to disrupt and prevent the constitutionally mandated counting of the Electoral College votes in the 2020 presidential election. That was scheduled to occur in Congress that day. That act of tabulating is more than two centuries old, formalizes and validates the election outcome, physically represents the peaceful transfer of power, and has never been stopped or disrupted. What happened on 1/6 was an attempted assault on the constitutional order.

It was instigated by a lie, the one Donald Trump told his supporters starting the day after the election: that it had been stolen and was fraudulent. And, in time and implicitly, that the certification of results could be thwarted.

After the election every attempt to prove it was stolen failed. Recounts failed, more than 60 court challenges failed, some before Trump-appointed judges. Dominion Voting Systems launched lawsuits against those who slandered it. The nutty Trump lawyers dummied up and scrammed.

The former president is undeterred. He insisted in a statement this week that the idea that he lost the 2020 election is “THE BIG LIE!” Rep. Liz Cheney famously responded in a tweet: That the election was stolen is actually the big lie.

Under attack by House colleagues she will almost certainly be stripped of her leadership position next week.

Why did she take the bait of this slowly waning figure, Mr. Trump, and the gravy-train operatives around him whom others in Washington call “the unemployables”? Because, as she wrote days later in the Washington Post, if the former president is allowed to keep telling his lie unchecked and unresisted it will only dig in and spread, and the foundations of the Republic begin to crack. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people.”

And so the latest battle in the Republican civil war. The pro-Trump side is believed to have the larger ground force, while the anti-Trump side has greater air cover, in terms of media support.

Members of the House Republican Conference should breathe deep, cool down, and think twice. There will be great cost to the party if it removes the only woman in the House leadership and the only one pushing back against Mr. Trump. Ousting her for saying the obvious puts the party on the side of a lie. That’s never a healthy place to be in the long term.

The Republicans like to call themselves a big tent. Ms. Cheney is in that tent, a woman who isn’t in the boys club and yet has been respected by the boys. If they throw her out she looks like Churchill, and they look like little men with umbrellas. It will make the party look stupid and weak, as if it can’t tolerate dissent. Republicans like to call for diversity of thought on campuses. What about in the Republican Conference? Giving her the boot places Mr. Trump at the center of things, and is a gift to President Biden, taking all the heat off his programs and policies.

House Republicans keep repeating that Donald Trump won 74 million votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate ever. But Joe Biden won 81 million votes. There was historically high turnout in a divided country. The Democrat won by seven million votes. That’s not something for Republicans to brag about.

In a move the men who run the House GOP take to be sophisticated, they hope to replace Ms. Cheney with a woman, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. It will haunt the rest of her career if she allows the boys to swap her for a woman who stood where she stands at a cost and for principle. A former member of Congress said this week: “When you’re replaying ‘All About Eve,’ you don’t want to play the part of Eve. You want to be Bette Davis. ” You don’t want to be the conniving understudy who takes out the star. Whoever replaces Ms. Cheney will be elevated by a conference that booted a woman for telling the truth but has expressed little criticism for, say, Rep. Matt Gaetz, reportedly being investigated by federal agents to determine whether he had sex with a minor (he’s denied it). Odd, isn’t it?

More oddness: The truth in this case isn’t really at issue. Ms. Cheney’s colleagues are ejecting her not because they think she’s wrong on the facts. They know she is right. They know Mr. Trump lost the election and Mr. Biden won. Most of them know it’s not good if embittered generations of voters turn on the system and come to feel no fidelity to democratic outcomes.

They just don’t want her to say it. They don’t want to antagonize constituents who believe the election was stolen. They think Ms. Cheney is doing so, pointlessly. They think the way out is to be quiet and hope the fever passes. Here is a fact of our current political life: The fever never passes. It has to be treated. By not pushing back they create more crazy.

And it’s not an argument about policy. Ms. Cheney supported Mr. Trump on policy issues, in many cases more often than her opponents did. In any case, Trump supporters aren’t all about policy. They want to close the border to illegal immigration; their inflection is populist and nationalist, but mostly they believe in standard Republican things, such as that taxes and spending should be lower.

The Cheney drama has an underappreciated subtext, however. She has called hard for a Jan. 6 commission to investigate formally what happened that day, which is a problem for some Republicans, not because they don’t want to relitigate the past but because there are members who are uneasy about what such a probe might unearth about their own actions.

Here is the problem of House Republicans: No matter how pro-Trump they show themselves to be, there will always be someone back home who’s Trumpier. They’re jumpy and scared, fear a primary challenge, and probably know deep down the inquisition won’t stop with Ms. Cheney.

In times of high heat, get cool. They shouldn’t do what they’re going to do next week.

Those were two very different speeches Wednesday night, but both were effective and each will have an afterlife.

President Biden’s address, with its distancing, masks and half-empty audience, at first didn’t feel like the convening of a great nation’s Congress. It felt insubstantial and goofy, like they were playacting Pandemic Theatre.

Mr. Biden turned that strangeness into a virtue. His speech was conversational, unhurried, not like somebody talking to a big room and waiting for applause but more intimate. His self-presentation was that of well-meaning and peaceable man with a heart for the poor and a natural identification with working men and women. In mostly plain words he painted historically high spending and taxing as a simple and legitimate attempt, one well within the boundaries of American political tradition, to increase the nation’s quotient of happiness. “No one should have to choose between a job and paycheck, or taking care of themselves and a loved one, a parent, spouse or child.” We must help each other, isn’t this common sense? There were populist notes.

It helps Mr. Biden that nobody hates him. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were hated; Donald Trump was passionately hated; Bill Clinton, or at least “the Clintons,” were hated by the end. It’s early, but Mr. Biden is an exception to the recent rule. Not being hated is a power now.

His program has been characterized so often, by left and right, as a sweeping progressive agenda that we hereby give it that title. The SPA offers expanded child care and healthcare subsidies, preschool for all children, more family and medical leave, free community college, heavy spending on infrastructure, programs to address climate change. Nobody seems to know what the numbers are. Is it $4 trillion in new spending or $6 trillion? Four trillion in new taxes?

The president said again he is eager to negotiate with Republicans. There isn’t much evidence of this, but here are the reasons he should be treating them with respect and as equal partners. It would be good for the country to see the Senate actually working—negotiating, making deals, representing constituencies. It would be good for the Democrats to show they’re not just playing steamroller and flattening the Republicans; they’re reasoning because they’re reasonable. Also they need Republicans to co-own legislative outcomes because whatever they are they’ll be very liberal. Negotiation and compromise would suggest the increasingly powerful but relatively unpopular progressive left isn’t driving everything. Finally, it would help get the support of moderate Democrats. It isn’t only Republican voters the president was trying to persuade over the heads of Republican senators; it was moderate Democrats over the head of Bernie Sanders.

It is not good for the administration that it is increasingly seen as in the pocket of the progressive left. In a virtual town hall last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was highly enthusiastic. The Biden White House has “exceeded expectations progressives had,” she said. “I think a lot of us expected a much more conservative administration.” The White House’s willingness to work closely with progressives has been “very impressive.” “There has been a lot of openness and willingness and flexibility in incorporating many of our goals, requests, demands, etc.”

That was saying the quiet part out loud.

On the other hand, the president isn’t looking or acting as if he’s been dragged left. He seems to enjoy no longer having to be a moderate in sync with the Delaware of the 1980s and ’90s. The pandemic has been hard. He’s letting his inner Fighting Bob LaFollette out and having fun being popular with people in the party who never liked him. He reportedly bragged to cable anchors this week that no one thought he could unite his party, but he has.

The SPA has been called a gamble, and of course it is. Will a majority of Americans back it in the end, will it produce inflation or other harmful effects? Republicans, understandably and legitimately, warn against high spending and high taxing and anticipate big voter pushback. That’s how it’s always been: Mr. Clinton raises taxes in 1993 and gets a brutal midterm in ’94; Mr. Obama invents ObamaCare in 2009 and gets clobbered in ’10. Amy Walter of Cook Political Report says watch the suburbs: Liesl Hickey, a GOP strategist, has been involved in qualitative research on suburban voters in battleground states, and college-educated men and women there are “cautiously optimistic” about the future because the country is “correcting,” returning to normal. But “higher taxes and spending” are big concerns.

All this sounds right, and yet. I’m not sure things are as predictable as in the past. The chess pieces are moving all over the board. My eyes and ears tell me that in the past year America began a deep reconsideration of how it lives, and how things have always been. The process of the big rethink will become clearer in the next few years, but I sense the young, those in their 20s and 30s and maybe older, are questioning that oldest American tradition: ambition. Hunger to make your own circumstances better. They’re questioning what “better” means, how it is defined and what price you are willing to pay to rise. I think I sense a hunger for something new, less driven, more communal. If I’m right that hunger will play out, in part, in the political sphere. But something happened during the pandemic. We’ll find out what in the next decade.

Republicans shouldn’t assume what has been true the past 40 years will be true now. I see more support for governmental spending in general, and some not fully formed feelings about the taxing aspect. No one loves the megarich. If Mr. Biden’s tax increases don’t clobber the middle and upper-middle classes, I wouldn’t count on all the old pushback.

Maybe the SPA is not only a gamble but also a mystery.

*   *   *

As for Sen. Tim Scott’s response, he’s been on the rise in the party for a while now and his speech was strong because it offered a perfect balance of public-policy realism and faith. On race: “I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I’m shopping.” “I get called Uncle Tom and the N-word by progressives, by liberals.” “Our healing is not finished.” He has written police-reform bills, which Democrats blocked because they wanted the issue active, not resolved. He threw down a gauntlet: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” The left exploded on social media and insulted him exactly as he said they do. This mild man never tries to own the libs, but he owns them the minute he walks in the room.

He ended with words a lot of quiet Americans would hear and deeply appreciate: “Original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls and not for the nation. The real story is always redemption.” Broadcasters missed the meaning, thinking it was just some sweet Christian talk. No, it was about the heart of the human drama, the heart of this nation’s drama. It was about the reason to keep trying. Republicans are going to remember this speech.

We witnessed something good this week. To my mind it was a kind of triumph.

America had been through a horrible time: a gruesome murder on a Minneapolis street, seen on tape nationwide and showing an act that could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was, the cruel extinguishing of a human life. It shook people. It was followed by civic convulsion—mass protests, riots with innocent people hurt and shop owners burned out. All during a pandemic, with the country in lockdown.

All this has been going on since Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd early in the evening of May 25, 2020, 11 months ago. It was a lot for a country, a people, to take in and process.

This week the verdict. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), who has talked in this space about driving while black and legislating while black, summed it up: “George Floyd died because Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck and stopped him from breathing for more than nine minutes. There is no question in my mind that the jury reached the right verdict.” This, he said, should give renewed confidence in the justice system, but bad cops cannot be allowed to define all officers, “the vast majority of whom put on the uniform each day with integrity and servant hearts.”

What did the verdict mean? It meant that black lives matter, George Floyd’s life mattered, the police aren’t above the law, the system worked. It meant a jury of your peers confirmed what your eyes saw. It meant the American nation, which spends so much time putting itself down, retains something that has long distinguished it: a conscience to which an appeal can be made. The entire nation saw that video and did not look away.

There were elements of inspiration. It was a unanimous verdict from a diligent jury that had spent the trial taking notes. Members were varied in every way—race, ethnicity, sex, profession, neighborhood. Relatives of cops, admirers of Black Lives Matter. Their ages spanned from the 20s to the 60s. They came to peaceful and emphatic agreement and spoke with one voice.

The three dozen witnesses were impressive in their earnestness, their seriousness of purpose. The EMT worker, the eyewitnesses, the cops who came forward—the chief of police who said no, Mr. Chauvin wasn’t going by the book, this didn’t have to happen. The girl, 18-year-old Darnella Frazier, who’d held her phone steady to tape what she was seeing, who’d been on her way to the store for a snack. “He was in pain. . . . It seemed he knew it was over for him,” she testified. “He was suffering.”

Excellent citizens who take who they are and what they do seriously. They were inspiring.

And now we’ve got to get the other hard part right. The story shifts to Washington. Congress and the White House are engaged in trying to put together a bill to overhaul and regularize police practices—banning some, limiting no-knock warrants, maybe imposing more liability risk on officers for misconduct. Mr. Scott is the Republican point man. He’s been working on legislation since Floyd’s death, has said he was thwarted by Democrats in the election year, but is trying to forge a bipartisan agreement.

It is important that this be done right. There is a crisis in policing and it’s healthy to acknowledge it.

But what happened the afternoon the Floyd verdict came in is instructive. In Columbus, Ohio, officers responded to a request for help in a family disturbance. A policeman shot a 16-year-old girl, Ma’Khia Bryant, to death. This was followed by uproar and accusation—another black youth killed by the police. But body-camera video showed a more complicated picture. Bryant had a knife in her hand and was attacking another girl. The officer made a split-second decision. It’s under investigation.

If you are a cop you know that in the current atmosphere you are going to be assumed by the press and others to be guilty whatever you do, because the police are the Official Foe now. Everyone talks about the blue wall of silence, but do police officers think anyone reliably has their back?

The most important words spoken in the Columbus altercation were in the 911 call from the house where the fighting began. The voice sounds like that of a young woman. There’s a scream in the background. The caller says someone is “trying to stab us” and “we need a police officer here now.”

People living stressed lives need the police most. It is the police they rely on when things turn bad.

We aren’t being sufficiently sensitive to the position of the police after decades of being accused of reflexive brutality and racism. We should be concerned about demoralization—about officers who will leave, about young people who could have become great cops never joining the force, about early retirements of good men and women. We should be concerned that more policemen will come to see their only priority as protecting the job, the benefits, the pensions for their family, so they’ll quietly slow down, do nothing when they should do something. That they’ll put on the uniform each day not only thinking “I protect the public” but also, “I must protect myself from the public.” Which means they won’t be good at their jobs anymore, and the stressed will suffer.

America swerves too much now, it gets its remedies wrong, it unthinkingly overcorrects. Years ago our great corporations swept internal allegations of abuse under the rug. Now, having been shamed in the press, they have human-resources departments immediately launch investigations on single-source accusations, or vague charges with murky motives, and put careers under clouds. We go from serious reflection on racism to accusing all whites of being privileged oppressors, and force schoolchildren to grapple with societal dilemmas they are incapable of understanding.

We get all tangled up in our desperate attempts to get it right. Washington should realize how demoralized the police are, and how much normal people depend on them.

If I ran the world, we wouldn’t be diverting funds from the police; we’d be spending more to expand and deepen their training—literally lengthen it by a year or two, deepen their patience, their sense of proportion, their knowledge. Because they are so important to us.

Some of our policing problem is connected to a problem that affects everything: They came from us. Our police come from modern America, that jittery, jacked-up, broken place. They don’t really come from health and stability but from families that are fractured and a culture that is crude and violent, from hypermedia and videogames, from a society that doesn’t cohere. They don’t come from something boring and solid like the cop on the beat 50 and 100 years ago did; they don’t come from a world that went out of its way to teach them manners, morals, faith. How to act.

All the cops, and the perps, they came from us.

They need more from us, not less. And good cops need more respect, and gratitude.

We have been thinking about the Republican Party and how it can come back—worthily, constructively—after the splits and shatterings of recent years. The GOP is relatively strong in the states but holds neither the White House, House nor Senate and in presidential elections struggles to win the popular vote. Entrenched power centers are arrayed against it, increasingly including corporate America. But parties have come back from worse. The Democrats came back from being on the wrong side in the Civil War.

Some thoughts here on Republicans and immigration.

From Pew Research’s findings on U.S. immigrants, published in August 2020: America has more immigrants than any other nation on earth. More than 40 million people living here were born in another country. According to the government’s 2020 Current Population Survey, when you combine immigrants and their U.S.-born children the number adds up to 85.7 million. Pew estimates that most (77%) are here legally, including naturalized citizens. Almost a quarter are not.

Where are America’s immigrants from? Twenty-five percent, the largest group, are from Mexico, according to Pew. After that China at 6%, India just behind, the Philippines at 4%, El Salvador at 3%.

America hasn’t had so many first- and second-generation Americans since the great European wave of the turn of the last century. The political party that embraces this reality, that becomes part of it, will win the future.

Here I jump to a political memory. A few weeks before the 2012 election I was sitting on a step watching Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, walk by. It was their annual street fair. The whole world was there. I’m from Brooklyn and had parts of my childhood there; much of the world was there back then, too. It really is the place where America keeps getting made. But that day in 2012 just seeing everyone—young Asian kids, Arab teenagers, people from Russia, Ukraine, Central America, Mexico—I had, not for the first time, an epiphany. “The entire political future of America is on this street,” I wrote. In part because so many were young, I felt they were politically up for grabs. The Democrats were trying harder, though. There was a political booth, with a sign that said “Democrats for Change.” There was no Mitt Romney booth, because Brooklyn is New York and New York wasn’t in play. But I felt then and feel more strongly now that in 21st-century America everything is in play. You have to have imagination, and confidence, to see it.

It’s my belief that the immigrants of America the past 40 years are a natural constituency of the Republican Party. When I say this to Republican political professionals they become excited or depressed. The excited say yes, we made progress in the last election with Hispanics; if we could become more liberal on illegal immigration, we could start to clinch the deal. The depressed say no, Republicans can’t win them because we’re too tagged as the anti-immigrant party.

To them I say when a whole class of people think you don’t like them, they are probably picking up a signal you don’t know you’re sending. Which leads us to Donald Trump, and the signal he did know he was sending. In opposing illegal immigration he opposed—he insulted and denigrated—immigrants themselves. His supporters didn’t mind because they recognized it as burn-your-bridges language: It meant he wouldn’t go to Washington and sign some big, lying, establishment-driven comprehensive reform like all the rest.

What he said did a lot of damage and caused a lot of just resentment. But he’s gone right now, and something new, day by day, is being built in his place.

The GOP should continue as the anti-illegal-immigration party, because illegal immigration is a violation of law and sovereignty, takes jobs, depresses wages, and is an abuse of all who came here legally. It will continue as a grinding crisis and in time be appreciated as a burden that cannot be forever borne locally or nationally. But the Republican Party’s attitude toward illegal immigrants themselves—toward all immigrants—should be sympathy and respect: They’re looking for a job and a better life. So was your great-grandfather!

A friend of mine, a businessman in New York, a big taxpayer, a moderate conservative, always smiles when he talks about illegal immigration. He’s against it. Then again his grandfather 100 years ago, an Italian seaman, found himself in a ship off America, liked what he saw, and jumped. He made his way to Brooklyn. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime, Balzac said. No, but in America a lot of fortunes started with a jump from a ship in the night.

The approach of the Republican Party should be one not of distance and guilt but of affinity and identification. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are tough. They’ve often had hard lives. They left everything, even the sound on the street of their old lives, to come to this different place. “I made myself lonely for you” is something almost all of them can say to their children.

No one who comes here from El Salvador really wants it to become El Salvador. People don’t flee Nicaragua so America can turn into Nicaragua. This is where Republican policies come in. There’s no reason to believe the bulk of immigrants to America the past 40 years want to tax people to death or see an economic system they risked so much to enter radically altered. They don’t want small businesses to be subject to the endless shakedowns of state and local government. They don’t want to defund the police, they depend on the police. The riots of 2020 would have shocked and repelled them, and may prove to have been a turning point.

Identity politics is powerful but not as powerful in the long term as here’s-where-we-stand politics. Republican officials ought to be going to America’s immigrants and saying: We might have had a rocky road but we are seeing the world the same way. The appeal must be to the brains and wisdom of their audience, not some patronizing babble on Republican Hispanic Voter Night.

The GOP donor class hasn’t liked restrictions on illegal immigration. More workers keep wages down. But great parties know who their base is. The GOP’s should be the working and middle class of all colors. Workers already here need backup. It’s better to lose campaign contributions than voters.

The Democratic Party is increasingly in thrall to a progressive left whose most impressive accomplishment has been communicating an air of its inevitable triumph. Under their pressure Democrats will make a lot of mistakes. They already are.

During the Bush immigration debates, when the base of the party rebelled against his comprehensive reform bill, a mostly unspoken accusation emanated from the president’s operatives. It was that the new Americans, including illegal immigrants, were kind of better than the existing American working class, harder-working. This was situational snobbery: The operatives themselves had left the working class behind, but daily rubbed shoulders with newer Americans at home and at the club. That snobbery helped break the party.

But I’ll tell you what is true. We do have the best immigrants in the world. I so want the Republican Party to know this, embrace it. Embrace them.

No one likes the Republican Party. Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it—the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the nonprofit world. The young aren’t drawn to it.

The party is split, if not shattered. The opposition has a new presidency, almost a Senate majority, the House, albeit by a hair. The president nearing his hundred-day mark and deeply committed to showing energy in the executive, has yet to make masses of voters crazy with rage. His approval numbers are steady.

Everything’s against the Republicans nationally, even many of their leaders in Washington, many of whom don’t trend toward brightness.

What would constitute an active civic and political good in America in 2021? Helping to bring that party back. It is worth saving, even from itself. At its best it has functioned as a friend and protector of liberty, property, speech and religious rights, an encourager of a just and expansive civic life, a defender of the law, without which we are nothing, and the order it brings, so that regular people can feel as protected on the streets as kings. At its best it has been Main Street, not Wall Street, a stay on the hand of government when it demands too much. At its worst it’s been—worse! But let’s dwell on the good, which can function as a guide in rebuilding.

Some Republicans the past few years have talked of breaking from the two-party system and starting a third. But that’s not the way to go. Better to strengthen the system that for more than a century and a half has seen us through a lot of mess. In its rough way the two-party system, even without meaning to, functions as a unifying force: At the end of the day, for all our differences and arguments, you have to decide if you were a constituency of Team A or Team B. The parties, in their rough and inadequate way, had to be alive to your interests. Things proceeded with a sense, an air, of majority rule. With a third party you can win the presidency with 34%. That won’t help national unity. And this being America, once we have a third party we’ll have a fourth and a fifth, and everything will be chaos, with a loss of any feeling of general consensus.

Two parties are better for the country, and better for the Democrats. A strong Republican party keeps them on their toes. As Oscar Hammerstein once said, liberals need conservatives to hold them back and conservatives need liberals to pull them forward. One side should stop the other when it goes too far, or boost it when it fails to move. Hammerstein was a cockeyed optimist, but this isn’t a bad time for that.

I know a little about the modern Republican Party, have known its meaning, its reason for existing and what it has been as it traveled through history. Back in the 1980s when I was a new worker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, I told a friend that the American people looked at us and saw some very good things, but there was an air about Republicans also that they were in some private club, a country club, and it gave the party an impression of snobbery, exclusivity, social superiority. The phrase made its way into columns, and a concept was born.

During the 1984 election I set off on a mission to do outreach to Democrats, because I felt so many of them wanting to vote for Reagan but needing to know they weren’t being disloyal or leaving the team but were in fact joining something that was more like them. I was thinking: you shouldn’t be held back by old historical categories when new categories are being born—when you, Reagan Democrat, are that new category. You didn’t have to come from the country club to be a Republican. President Reagan spoke high and sincere praise of admirable Democrats— Henry Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman. And of course it was natural to Reagan, who’d been an ardent New Dealer, a Democrat into his 40s.

The country club is mostly Democratic now, and rougher places trend Republican. Things change.

I left the Republican Party at some point in the 2000s. I didn’t like a lot of what I was seeing. I began to say, honestly, that I was a political conservative but not a Republican. Readers could see it in my work, and I heard from them a lot. I reregistered to vote in a Republican primary in New York City, and have kept it that way, maybe for reasons of orneriness.

But I’ve done a lot of mourning over it the past 15 years, shed literal tears over the GOP. There were a lot of break points. Iraq was one: If that wasn’t the country club at work, what was? People to whom nothing much bad had ever happened, so they expected good fortune to follow their decisions. Immigration was another, with the elite decision makers of the party not caring at all how the unprotected see and experience life. It was a total detachment from their concerns accompanied by a claim of higher compassion. Sarah Palin was another. I felt her choice as a vice presidential candidate degraded a good insight, that an ability to do the show business of politics is important—FDR, JFK and Reagan knew that—but you can’t let politics degrade into only showbiz; you need the ability to think seriously about issues. It is wrong to reduce politics to a subset of entertainment. There were more.

But now, at a time when the Grand Old Party is at the bottom, I find myself more loyal than I meant to be, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams. If the party is going to go forward and be a healthy contributor to the democratic future, it will have to figure out why it exists, what its meaning is, its purpose in the 21st century. It’s going to have to be alive in some new way to who exactly is going to join it and save it in the next few years. It will have to see all the new categories. Especially: the immigrants to America of the past quarter-century, people who fled something bad or limiting and don’t want to see those things instituted here, people who have businesses, who want freedom and peace and the possibility of flourishing.

It is a badly divided party. It will have to work through a great deal. It can’t keep existing only to own the libs, manipulate the distracted, monetize grievance, and plot revenge against those who spent the past few years on the wrong side.

Sometimes you have to look to who will follow you if only you take right and serious stands aimed at helping the people of your country.

The exact nature of the new Democratic Party now emerging will help the GOP find an agreed-on mission, but it won’t be enough. What you favor is as important as what you oppose. There will be a lot of thinking along the way in this space on what those things should be.

The Covid relief bill President Biden signed March 11 weighed in at almost $2 trillion. This week’s infrastructure bill also comes in at almost $2 trillion, and in a few weeks there will be a companion bill of the same magnitude. It’s all big and bold, and you can see it making a million possible messes, from the usual (How much ideological mischief is hidden in there?) to the existential (Don’t debt and deficits matter anymore? Isn’t inflation something to worry about?). But yes, the White House is in a New Deal state of mind, they’re rocking the Casbah, they feel they’ve got the wind at their back, and at this point they’re more or less right. But this is a whole lot of spending and taxing in the first hundred days. It’s a big political gamble.

The Infrastructure bill, according to the White House, will include $621 billion for infrastructure, $400 billion to increase care for the aging and disabled, $580 billion to boost manufacturing, and $300 billion for affordable housing. The public won’t dislike those goals. There’s a lot more shoved in there too. The plan to pay for it is to raise the tax on corporate profits (from 21% to 28%) and corporate foreign earnings. There will be individual tax increases also, to be announced in the coming bill, but the president repeated Wednesday what he’d said on the campaign trail: “I start with one rule: No one—I’ll say it again—no one making under $400,000 will see their federal taxes go up, period.” It’s unclear if that is individual or household income.

Since roughly 2000 we’ve been used to the federal government spending a lot and not worrying overmuch about it. But this White House’s approach is different. It’s not furtive and shaded, it’s formal and declared: Big money is about to be pumped into the economy and big money is about to be extracted, that’s how we roll. If it works it’s going to change a lot of assumptions in American politics. If it doesn’t, it will be a cautionary tale. That makes it a big gamble. In a small, tactical way you can imagine they’re thinking a big economic story will take the heat off the border crisis. But that wouldn’t be all they’re thinking.

There wasn’t much pushback against Covid relief—it was big and sloppy but we’re in a pandemic, let it go. Nobody will mind infrastructure either. We’ve been talking about our falling bridges, corroded tunnels and general civic ugliness for 25 years. If this bill actually turns out to be about building roads and tunnels and railways and undergirding bridges, people will like it. I will like it. If people can see it happening—if on the two or three days a week they commute into the city, big crews of human beings in safety vests and hardhats are out there building things—they’ll like it a lot.

Some part of my mind thinks it will be received as the first gesture of national self-respect in a long time, a visual counter to wokeness and critical race theory. We may hate our history, our ugly beginnings and our hypocrisy but apparently we still have enough confidence to build a soaring bridge we can use, and to make the highways look better. As if we still have some self-regard. But if the whole scheme begins to look like some dumb boondoggle featuring photo-ops with Democratic donors who own companies that make solar panels, people won’t like it.

Related to that, a question: About 15 years ago politicians began promising big infrastructure bills, and they’d say it’s all shovel-ready; give us the money and we’re good to go. Nothing happened. President Obama was big on infrastructure and included funding in the 2009 stimulus bill. Yet little came of it. In 2010 Mr. Obama admitted “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” It got all tied up in permits, red tape, public hearings, environmental challenges. I always wondered if Mr. Obama just failed to get environmental groups to bow to his will. Are we shovel-ready now? How did that happen? Will it all work this time?

I think there is considerable public openness and support for more spending, and believe this bill would be more supported if it were aimed at more-conservative ends—infrastructure plus things that will help our country become more culturally coherent.

I think there’s considerable tax-the-rich fervor among centrists and independents too, but I think when people imagine this they’re thinking billionaires on vast estates. Instead, it may come down to a couple with three kids in Westfield, N.J. Husband works full-time, wife part-time; together they bring in $500,000 a year. Pretty plush. But with federal, state and property taxes, sales taxes, mortgage payments, the kids’ braces, the babysitter, maybe private-school tuition, they don’t experience themselves as rich. During the Trump administration they lost the ability to deduct most state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. So they’d be feeling pretty clobbered if they’re targeted now for higher tax rates. They are also among the affluent suburbanites who joined the Democratic Party during the Trump years. A lot will depend on whether their congressman, in negotiations, can win back the state-and-local deduction, or at least part of it. That may have important political implications.

If there’s such a thing as cautious boldness, it would be a good attitude for the administration to adopt as it completes its first hundred days. It’s a heady thing to win a White House.

Why not see to what has to be seen to—the economy, Covid? There’s an immediate crisis at the border, and I suspect the only way out is something the president won’t do: Say he moved too quickly to improve the system, and warn in credible terms that if you come illegally we won’t let you in, we have a pandemic and unemployment and we can’t do that to our own citizens. So no, if you want to come to America you must do it the legal way.

If he can’t say something like that because his progressives will kill him, his progressives have gotten too powerful. It would probably do him some good to beat them back.

Beyond that there’s the long-term crisis with China, on which there’s no real American governing strategy because we haven’t yet defined the full contours of the challenge. We need a correct and unblinking definition of what China represents in this era—what it wants, what drives it, what its ultimate intentions are. We need a George Kennan-like Long Telegram on China, followed by a broad strategic decision.

“Every crisis is an opportunity!” But some crises are just crises, and the administration already has plenty. “We can only accomplish things in the first two years. We’ll get killed in the midterms!” Maybe, maybe not.

Sound stewardship means a lot at time like this. If they can improve the economy and the pandemic, stop the crisis at the border, negotiate a sound infrastructure bill, and seriously focus on China, that wouldn’t be a bad few years.

It would be a good few years. And people would notice.

We’re seeing some Grade A, first-class, brass-knuckle politics in the state of New York. Wednesday there was an event in Harlem ostensibly to publicize a pop-up vaccination clinic at Mount Neboh Baptist Church, where the embattled governor, Andrew Cuomo, was vaccinated (the Johnson & Johnson one-shot). It was really a planned and raucous rally for a governor under impeachment threat and accused of sexual harassment and nursing-home deaths.

Civil-rights veterans, clergy and politicians rallied ’round the governor, who for the first time in many weeks seemed in a bouncy mood, in part because he’d banned the press—his office claimed “Covid restrictions”—which kept them from asking questions that got in the way of the message, which was: The people are with Andrew. Former Rep. Charlie Rangel, who’d been dean of New York’s congressional delegation, said, “When people start piling up on you . . . you go to your family and you go to your friends because you know they are going to be with you.” Hazel Dukes, president of the state NAACP, called Mr. Cuomo her son. “Thank you, governor, for all you have done, we stand with you.”

It was one of those moments when politics has real human energy. But the crowd, while pumped, was not numerous, and the speakers were old. Mr. Rangel is 90, Ms. Dukes 89. I wondered what kind of pull they have in this young city.

Still, it was a shot fired back when you thought he was all out of ammo.

Some thoughts on Mr. Cuomo from a long time observing him:

He is in politics. He wants to win and he wants to be the man in charge and he wants everyone to know his power and bow to it. He is a Democrat because he inherited it from his family and neighborhood, and anyway Republicans have cold hearts, except for liberal Republicans, with whom you can make a deal and who in many ways are preferable to Democratic pols except they have a blindness, they act as if politics is an earnestness contest. It’s not, it’s a game! But that’s their problem.

He was late to see what the coronavirus was. In his statements in early March he warned against “inordinate fear” and said what happened in Europe probably wouldn’t happen here because we have the best hospitals. Weeks later, when New York was the epicenter of the virus, Thomas Frieden, former head of both the New York City Health Department and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said if New York had moved two weeks earlier its death toll could have been cut by 50% to 80%.

But once Mr. Cuomo understood what the pandemic was, he moved. It gave him a cause, a focus, a role—savior in a crisis. And there was a vacuum to fill.

The White House wasn’t capturing the moment, they were fleeing it—it’s no big deal, no worse than the flu, tests are available to everyone, maybe you can inject disinfectant, buy in the dip. They gave up all verbal leadership.

Mr. Cuomo seized it. None thought him sweet, but it takes a mean man to beat a mean virus. He used the same tools Rudy Giuliani used after 9/11: specificity, eloquence and daily briefings. Specificity implies you actually know things. Every day he’d make news—number of infections, deaths, new cases, how many hospitalized, how many in intensive care. It was granular—where the state is getting ventilators, the complexities of competing with other states for personal protective equipment. He joined this with wholly theatrical and fully welcome arias about the meaning of family, what love is, who New Yorkers are.

In the week of April 3, the height of the crisis, he announced America’s nurses were on their way: “Twenty thousand health professionals said, ‘I’ll leave my home and come to your state.’ ” New York would “systemize that volunteerism, systematize that generosity, that charity and that expertise, and that’s how we beat this damn virus as it marches across the country.”

Those briefings were spectacular. Someone had to seem in charge, someone had to rouse and rally.

He deserved the stupid Emmy.

Now, nemesis: his ego. He’d grown popular, even beloved. A Siena College poll in late April put his overall favorability among New Yorkers at 77%.

It went to his head. Having won plaudits for taking control, he took more. His plans on openings and closings were increasingly complicated. The whole system began to look arbitrary and nutty. He started going from sincere papa to authoritarian nincompoop. (It happened to Gavin Newsom in California, too.)

Then news began to filter out that while he was leading verbally he had made a harrowing behind-the-scenes mistake—mandating that nursing homes accept those known to be infected. When he had said from the beginning that he knew the old were most vulnerable.

He would admit nothing, but his top assistant did, in a conference call. The state attorney general broke the story open with a lacerating report and announced an investigation.

Then, one by one, seven women came forward with charges of sexual harassment, some of which, they alleged, were committed during the pandemic year. Every reporter in town started to write about the secret that isn’t a secret: He’s a bully who surrounds himself with toxic enforcers. An impeachment effort is under way.

So with all this trouble, Mr. Cuomo must be finished. But early polling is surprising. Even after the nursing-home scandal, and the women, a majority don’t back his removal. Maybe it’s impeachment fatigue, maybe it’s not wanting more big change after Covid, but maybe too it’s connected to this: The state’s budget is being negotiated. The Legislature, increasingly under the sway of the progressive left, wants sharply higher taxes on income, capital gains, estates. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t want big increases because he doesn’t want the rich fleeing New York.

Congress’s Covid relief act buttresses his position: There’s a lot of money in there for New York. But progressives want the hikes anyway, because they believe in it and because they grew up in a rich country and state and can’t imagine anything they do could make them less so.

The move against Mr. Cuomo the past few months has come from the left, not the right; from the young, not the old. Albany Republicans don’t mind him much; Albany progressives do. He’s in their way. Some would be pained by what happened in the nursing homes, some by the testimony of the women, but all want him weaker in the budget fight. Or gone, replaced by a new governor with no time to build a wall of competence.

It’s interesting Mr. Rangel and Ms. Dukes came out against them.

Mr. Cuomo won’t resign because he doesn’t care what you think. He really isn’t interested!

Thursday I watched his daily briefing. He’s got his mojo back. He was laughing, philosophizing. He’s opening things at a speedier clip than in the past. Time for baseball! “It has been a long dark winter . . . Spring is upon us.”

He can’t, he’s said, take questions on the scandals anymore: They’re under investigation, the process must take its course.

He is playing for time and has come to believe he’ll escape with his life. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But that’s why he’s smiling.