Peggy Noonan

This coronavirus is new to our species—it is “novel.” It spreads more easily than the flu—“exponentially,” as we now say—and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.

Testing in the U.S. has been wholly inadequate; history may come to see this as the great scandal of the epidemic. “Anybody that needs a test gets a test; they’re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful,” as the president said last weekend, is on a par with “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” as a great, clueless lie.

Because of the general lack of testing we don’t have a firm sense of the number of the infected and the speed and geography of spread. Many people would be working sick, afraid of losing pay or job security if they take time off. Some would be at home, unable for financial or other reasons to see a doctor or go to a hospital.

In the past few days the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The physician used by Congress reportedly said behind closed doors that 70 million to 150 million Americans will be infected. The Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch estimated 20% to 60% of adults world-wide might catch the disease. Cases are rising in Spain, France and Germany, where Prime Minister Angela Merkel warned that 70% of the nation could wind up infected. The president gave a major Oval Office address Wednesday night aimed at quelling fears; it was generally labeled “unsettling.” Immediately after, Tom Hanks announced that he and wife Rita Wilson have tested positive, and the National Basketball Association suspended its season after a player tested positive.

Health professionals and scientists have been on TV explaining what they know, and they’ve been impressive—crisply professional, helpful in conveying the contour of things. This week I spoke to a physician with a small practice on Long Island who’s dealing with problems on the ground.

He spoke of his biggest immediate challenge: Local health authorities are offering little practical information on how to handle patients or receive personal protective equipment—masks, gowns and gloves. “Regular doctors in a regular practice don’t have big numbers of these things,” he said. “The hospital sent out an email saying, ‘Go here if you’re having equipment trouble.’ So I did. And within an hour they said, ‘We can’t help you.’ ”

“At this point we get an email every few days, and what they’re doing is planning a seminar on Covid-19, which is no practical help.” Doctors are already read in on the disease, they know what viruses are, they keep track of what’s happening in the larger sphere.

His biggest worry is that local hospitals aren’t ready—and aren’t readying—for a surge in patients. When he looks at the projections, he fears “health facility inundation and fatigue.” He worries that “routine life-threatening illnesses will not be treated adequately.” He means heart attacks, strokes, infections; he fears such patients won’t receive timely treatment “in overstressed systems.” The great danger to the elderly and immune-compromised is viral pneumonia. “They will need mechanical help, ventilators and ECMO machines”—oxygen pumps. “This system probably doesn’t have enough. Who is thinking about this?”

Hospitals need to “prepare to be inundated,” he says. “When I talk to doctors and administrators, they’re only thinking within their own walls and own offices. They’re not imagining being overrun.”

After we spoke, something came to mind I’d written months after 9/11. Everyone was asking how we could have missed the signs. I remembered the words of astronaut Frank Borman when he was asked in 1967 why NASA had not been prepared for the catastrophic launchpad fire that killed three astronauts. It was “a failure of imagination,” he said. No one imagined such a thing could happen on the ground.

That’s where I think we have been the past few weeks in this epidemic, a failure of imagination.

Scientists and doctors say the next few weeks are crucial, that the virus’s spread must be slowed. We have to slow it. We have to be health hawks.

Bite the bullet, close the schools a few weeks, and see where we are. Cancel celebrations. Marry, but have the wedding party later. Make the birthday bash twice as good next year. Put everything on pause. The need for social distancing may at this point make the difference between a hard time and hell. Work from home if you have a job that allows you to.

Get money to people who are now working sick. This is an emergency, that’s your job if you’re in Washington, make it work.

Get. The. Tests.

The most obvious advice in the world is still the most helpful. Don’t “wash your hands”; wash your hands like Lady Macbeth with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Wash your face. Carry hand sanitizers and use them after every interaction. Wear protective gloves—don’t be embarrassed. If you can’t get gloves, don’t touch keypads and screens at the bank or store without covering your finger with tissue. Try to cough or sneeze into two or three tissues. If you don’t have them, do it in the crook of your arm, as they say, but stop patting the other person’s coat sleeves affectionately when you don’t shake hands. That’s where their germs are.

Sometimes paranoia is just good sense.

Is all this an overreaction? If it is, we’ll recover. If we’re too cautious we’ll realize after a while and we’ll all get angry at the economic cost of it and have big arguments and fights. But we’ll be here to argue and fight.

I wrote in February that I believed the coronavirus will be bad, that it will have a bigger impact on America than we imagine, and that a lot of people will be exposed and a significant number endangered. I was beaten up a bit and fair enough—to make a prophecy is to summon animosity, especially when men are scared and especially when they see everything as political. My assertions were based on a long reading of history and a close reading of what had happened in China, then Italy.

Now it’s time to lose the two most famous phrases of the moment. One is “Don’t panic!” The other is “an abundance of caution.”

“Don’t panic” is what nervous, defensive people say when someone warns of coming trouble. They don’t want to hear it, so their message is “Don’t worry like a coward, be blithely unconcerned like a brave person.”

One way or another we’ve heard it a lot from administration people.

This is how I’ve experienced it:

“Captain, that appears to be an iceberg.” “Don’t panic, officer, full steam ahead.”

“Admiral, concentrating our entire fleet in one port seems tempting fate.” “We don’t need your alarmist fantasies, ensign.”

“We’re picking up increased chatter about an al Qaeda action.” “Your hand-wringing is duly noted.”

“Don’t panic,” in the current atmosphere, is a way of shutting up people who are using their imaginations as a protective tool. It’s an implication of cowardice by cowards.

As for “abundance of caution,” at this point, in a world-wide crisis, the cautions we must take aren’t abundant, they’re reasonable and realistic.

Reason and realism are good.

No one has seen anything like it. It will live in our political lore. There’ll be some bright 32-year-old kid running a campaign in 2056 and his guy will be down three in a row and the elders will take him to the Marriott bar and tell him, “Ya gotta get out, handwriting’s on the wall,” and he’ll nod, slump-shouldered. Then he’ll get this steely look, this young-wild-James-Carville look, and he’ll say, “Joe Biden was over in ’20. Nothing is written.”

There were many elements to what happened. Democrats love to say they’re not members of any organized political party, they’re Democrats; they love to say Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. That’s their self conception and their story line and it’s mostly malarkey, as someone would say. You don’t get these staggered endorsements and coordinated statements without organization, power centers and money lines.

But this is about the human part, the historic part, the speech Rep. Jim Clyburn gave that saved Mr. Biden. It was Wednesday morning. Feb. 26, in the College Center at Trident Technical College on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, S.C. Mr. Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, spoke without text or notes, just a man at a mic with a blank wall behind him.

He spoke of his late wife, Emily. They met as students at South Carolina State after both were arrested at a civil-rights demonstration. “I met her in jail on that day.” Their marriage lasted 58 years. “I remember her telling about her experiences, walking 2½ miles to school every morning, 2½ back home every afternoon.” She lived on a small farm. “She learned how to drive in a pickup truck. She came to South Carolina State in that pickup truck, with her luggage on the bed.”

Her father walked town to town in the off season, 15 miles a day, to cut pulp wood. “We talked about what our parents sacrificed for us and what we owed to our children and all other children similarly situated.” They often talked about American leaders. “There’s nobody who Emily loved as a leader of this country more than she loved Joe Biden, and we talked about Joe all the time.”

He’d wrestled with whether to make a public endorsement. Then a friend died. He arrived early to the funeral and walked around talking to people he hadn’t seen in a while. “There was an elderly lady in her upper 80s sitting on the front pew of the church, just a few seats away from the coffin. And she looked at me and she beckoned to me. Didn’t say a word, just beckoned.” He joined her. “She said, ‘Lean down, I need to ask you a question.’ And I leaned down. She said, ‘You don’t have to say it out loud, but you just whisper into my ear. Who are you gonna vote for next Saturday? I been waiting to hear from you. I need to hear from you. This community wants to hear from you.’ I decided then and there that I would not stay silent.”

He quoted Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote that “he was coming to the conclusion that the people of ill will in our society was making a much better use of time than the people of good will, and he feared that he would [have] regret—not just for the vitriolic words and deeds of bad people but for the appalling silence from good people.”

He said, “South Carolina should be voting for Joe Biden, and here’s why.” Because the purpose of politics isn’t lofty and abstract but simpler, plainer: “Making the greatness of this country accessible and affordable for all. We don’t need to make this country great again—this country is great, that’s not what our challenge is.” The challenge is making greatness available to everybody. Are people able to get education, health care, housing? “Nobody with whom I’ve ever worked in public life is any more committed” to that goal “than Joe Biden.”

They got to know each other “doing TV stuff together,” he said. “I know Joe. . . . But most importantly, Joe knows us.” They used to talk a lot about Brown v. Board of Education, which consolidated five lawsuits against school segregation. One was from Joe’s Delaware. They went over it a lot. “That’s how well I know this man. I know his heart. I know who he is. I know what he is.”

Mr. Clyburn said that during his day in jail, “I was never fearful of the future. As I stand before you today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my daughters.” We have to “restore this country’s dignity, this country’s respect—that is what is at stake this year.” And there is “no one better suited, better prepared,” for the fight “than my good friend, my late wife’s great friend, Joe Biden.”

It was beautiful.

He wasn’t just giving Mr. Biden an endorsement, he was giving him a template: This is what to talk about, this is your subject matter.

It was a speech about the price you’ll pay to stand where you stand. In outlining his life he was saying: I didn’t talk the talk; I walked the walk, and on that basis I claim something called authority.

But what would the impact be? America is in a crisis not only of leadership but of followership. Leaders in all areas—business, the church, politics, other institutions—don’t know if they have the clout anymore to guide and advise their constituencies, they don’t know if they have the heft, the sway. Surely Mr. Clyburn wondered too.

And what followed was astounding, a throwback. What needed saying had been said, and spread. Three days later South Carolina didn’t endorse Joe Biden, it gave him a wave that wouldn’t break, that swept across the South and beyond.

After Super Tuesday, some progressives on social media clearly resented the black vote and the Biden wave. I detected in a few of them a whiff of “Who are these old Southern black ladies to be calling the shots?” It took me aback.

You couldn’t carry their sandals, sonnyboys.

A shooter came to Charleston a few years ago and they were in the Bible study. He kills, and they go to the bail hearing and, in the great incandescent moment of the last decade, say “I forgive you.”

They make everything happen; they’re the ones who’ve long made the prudential judgments on which way the party will go.

For half a century it has been telling them, “We feel your pain, we’re going to save you.” On Tuesday, after coolly surveying the facts and the field, they said to the Democratic Party, “Honey, you’re confused. We see your pain and we’re gonna save you.”

And they did. It was something—a turning of the tables, a doing what others up North and out West couldn’t quite do, and that was saying, “We are not socialists, we’re Democrats.”

The party should thank its lucky stars. It should kiss those ladies’ hands.

Punditry 101: It’s bad when you don’t write about what you’re thinking about. All week I was taking notes knowing I’d be looking at South Carolina, Super Tuesday and this week’s debate. I was thinking about polls and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s beautiful remarks in support of Joe Biden. They were beautiful because they were highly personal without being manipulative, which is now something unusual in American politics. But my mind kept tugging in another direction. So I’ll write what I’m thinking, and it may be ragged but here goes.

I’ve got a feeling the coronavirus is going to be bad, that it will have a big impact on America, more than we imagine, and therefore on its politics. As this is written the virus is reported in 48 nations. We’ve had a first case with no known source, in California, and the state is monitoring some 8,400 others for possible infection. Canada has 13 cases. There have been outbreaks in Iran and Italy; in Rome, there are worries because Pope Francis had to cancel a Lenten Mass due to what the Vatican called a “slight indisposition.”
The Biden Resurgence/Is the Coronavirus the New Russia?
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There’s a lot we don’t know but much we do. We know coronavirus is highly communicable, that person-to-person transmission is easy and quick. Most who get it won’t even know they’re sick—it feels like a cold and passes. But about 20% will get really sick. Among them, mortality rates are low but higher than for the flu, and higher still among those who are older or impaired.

So it’s serious: A lot of people will be exposed and a significant number will be endangered. And of course there’s no vaccine.

We live in a global world. Everybody’s going everyplace all the time. Nothing is contained in the ways it used to be. It seems to me impossible that there are not people walking along the streets in the U.S. who have it, don’t know it and are spreading it.

Americans are focusing. If you go to Amazon.com you famously find that the best face masks are no longer available, but check out the prices of hand sanitizers. They appear to be going up rather sharply! (Note to Jeff Bezos: if this turns bad and people start making accusations about price gouging and profiteers, public sentiment won’t just be hard on manufacturers, they’ll blame you too. Whatever downward pressure can be applied, do it now, not later.)

If you limit your focus to politics, to 2020 election outcomes, you find yourself thinking this: Maybe it’s all being decided not in the next few weeks of primaries but in the next few weeks of the virus, how much it spreads, and how it’s handled.

If coronavirus becomes a formally recognized world-wide pandemic, and if it hits America hard, it is going to change a lot—the national mood, our cultural habits, the economy.

The president has been buoyed the past few years by a kind of inflatable raft of good economic news and strengths. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 8,581 points from the day he took office to the beginning of 2020. Unemployment is down so far it feels like full employment. Minority employment is up, incomes are up. He’s running for re-election based on these things.

But the stock market is being hit hard by virus-driven concerns. If those fears continue—and there’s no reason to believe they won’t—the gains the president has enjoyed could be wiped out.

As for unemployment, if the virus spreads people will begin to self-distance. If they shop less, if they stay home more and eat out less, and begin to cancel personal gatherings—if big professional events and annual meetings are also canceled—it will carry a whole world of bad implications.

What I notice as a traveler in America is the number of people who make a traveler’s life easier, and whose jobs depend on heavy travel—all the people in the airport shops and concessions, and those who work in hotels. There’s the woman whose small flower shop makes the arrangements for the donor reception at the community forum, and the floor managers, waiters and waitresses at the charity fundraising dinner. Local contractors, drivers, the sound man who wires the dinner speaker. Many are part of the gig economy, operating without the protections of contracts and unions. If the virus spreads and events are canceled, they will be out of jobs. And that’s just one sliver of American life.

In a public-health crisis the role of government is key. The question will be—the question is—are the president and his administration up to it?

Our scientists and health professionals are. (I think people see Tony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health as the de facto president on this.) Is Donald Trump? Or has he finally met a problem he can’t talk his way out of? I have written in the past questioning whether he can lead and reassure the nation in a time of crisis. We are about to find out.

Leaders in crises function as many things. They are primary givers of information, so they have to know the facts. They have to be serious: They must master the data. Are they managerially competent? Most of all, are they trustworthy and credible?

Or do people get the sense they’re spinning, finagling, covering up failures and shading the facts?

It is in crisis that you see the difference between showmanship and leadership.

*   *   *

Early signs are not encouraging. The messaging early this week was childish—everything’s under control, everything’s fine. The president’s news conference Wednesday night was not reassuring. Stock market down? “I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democratic candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves.” “The risk to the American people remains very low.” “Whatever happens we’re totally prepared.” “There’s no reason to panic, because we have done so good.”

It was inadequate to the task.

I wonder if the president understands what jeopardy he’s in, how delicate even strong economies are, and how provisional good fortune is.

If you want to talk about what could make a progressive win the presidency it couldn’t be a better constellation than this: an epidemic, an economic downturn, a broad sense of public anxiety, and an incumbent looking small. Especially if the progressive says he stands for one big thing, health care for everyone.

The only candidate to bring up the threat of coronavirus at the Democratic debate the other night was Mike Bloomberg. This is how you’ll know the fact of the virus has hit the political class: Politicians will stop doing what they’ve done for more than two centuries. They’ll stop shaking hands. It will be a new world of waving, nodding emphatically, and patting your chest with your hand.

Some kinda world, when the pols can’t even gladhand.

It would be extremely reassuring if a temporary armistice were called in the cold war between the White House and congressional Democrats. If the virus is as serious as I think it is, no one will look back kindly on anyone who acted small.

If you love national politics and follow it closely, there’s always the debate you imagine in your head and the one that later happens on the screen. Before Wednesday’s Democratic debate I made a list of the bare, bottom-line message I thought each candidate had to deliver.

Mike Bloomberg: You can stomach me.

Bernie Sanders : You can stomach socialism.

I tried to imagine how each would deliver it. For Mr. Bloomberg: I’m a businessman. I was mayor of New York. I am a liberal in every way but I’m not insane. I’ve got the resources to meet and surpass Donald Trump’s fundraising powerhouse. I’m not fancy and I’m no poet, but I can lead and I can win. You’re right I can’t buy the nomination. That’s why I’m here on the trail every day, asking for your support. His affect: up for the battle, happy to be in the fight.

For Mr. Sanders: You know there’s something wrong with the economic system and has been a long time. The inequality is wild, the injustice all around us—you can feel it, and it’s cowardice to say there’s nothing we can do about it. In his affect: I’m the last lion. You know my roar and you know something else—I have the power of the man who means it.

This is how it unfolded:

It was hands down the best presidential primary debate of the cycle and maybe in decades. It was riveting. The veterans on stage were on fire and at the top of their game.
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It is being called a very bad night for Mike Bloomberg. It was not. It was a catastrophe. The only question is whether it is recoverable. Can he turn it around in the debate next week, and after? Is it possible to recover from a night so bad?

The mystery is the surprise of it. What were the mayor and his aides and advisers, professionals of high caliber, thinking? He was on mute and seemed not to anticipate what was coming. Maybe they were thinking: Play against type, don’t be the entitled billionaire, shrug it off, let the others exhaust themselves with their tiny fisticuffs. In the end you’ll be the last grownup standing. If that was the strategy they mistook the moment. The Democratic base was meeting him, either for the first time or in a new way, and he had to engage and win them over.

They also mistook the challengers, who were angry as hell. “Who is this guy to buy a party?” Bloomberg strategists think he has to kill Bernie now, before Super Tuesday. But all the other candidates think they have to kill Mike now, before he makes a good impression. So there was going to be blood. You have to wade in, in a human way, and throw and take punches. No one’s above it all.

There’s a bigger, more important mystery.

Surely the former mayor and his men and women understood this: Through Mr. Bloomberg’s longtime targeted philanthropy, through his relationships, quiet alliances, generosities and personal loyalties, he has a lot of leaders—mayors, other local politicians, people who run museums and civic organizations, who speak for ethnic, racial and professional groups—who support him. But those leaders don’t fully control their own followers and constituencies. Everyone who’s a leader of any kind now is in crisis: They don’t have a complete hold on their people, and wind up following them as often as leading them.

The followers and constituencies—they want to be won over; they want to back you as much as the boss does, but you have to give them the rationale of a solid performance. You have to give your leaders and influential friends cover with a good performance. Mr. Bloomberg didn’t do that.

Bad news/long-shot good news: It was the worst performance in recent debate history—but if he can turn it around it will be the biggest comeback in modern primary history.

What should he do now? From our Department of Unasked-For Advice: Show candor and humility. Admit he blew it and ask for another chance. His competitors were good and he was unprepared. “I tanked and I’m asking for another look, I’ll see you next week.”

To me, Elizabeth Warren won the night. She was good, hot and sharp right out of the box. Standing next to Mr. Bloomberg she tried to freak him out by constantly shooting up her arm to speak, almost waving it in his face and getting in his psychic space. It was as if she was saying, “You nap, buddy, while I show you who’s in charge. Go play possum and see how it works with Sugar Ray.”

Ms. Warren is a bit of a mystery too—a great political athlete whose candidacy the past six months lost steam. But she is a highly disciplined performer and she has thought it through. She took off the table the issue of what the female candidate wears by wearing the same uniform each day, like a guy. She took hairdos off the table by having one and never changing it. She took her age off the table by having more energy than a 40-year-old on Adderall. I always thought she’d slip into the space between Bernie the socialist and the moderates, hold on and rise. That she’d be a lefty but a less doctrinaire one. Then she fell into banning private health insurance and suddenly was doctrinaire. And if you want doctrinaire why not pick the real thing, the socialist?

But Wednesday night she was full of fight, tricky and full of mind games. At one point she dodged a question on banning health insurance by accusing her competitors of dodging specifics on their plans. She got away with it. That’s talent! She slammed Amy Klobuchar one minute and rescued her the next. She was playing everybody. It was kind of fabulous. Someone on Twitter caught her essence: “She shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

Mr. Sanders was alive, forceful, Bernie-esque. He did nothing to harm himself with his followers, if that is possible, and tried hard to make himself look inevitable.

Joe Biden came alive. Mr. Bloomberg got his Irish up. Or maybe columns like this one, saying he’s over. Anyway his Hibernian was heightened and his performance was “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” We nod with respect.

Pete Buttigieg made a mistake in patronizing Ms. Klobuchar for forgetting the name of Mexico’s president. “Are you trying to say I’m dumb? Are you mocking me here, Pete?” He lectured a senator who is a generation older than he, more accomplished and a woman. It revealed a certain Eddie Haskell smarm. Later, she said to him: “You’ve memorized a bunch of talking points.” It was like Chris Christie going at Marco Rubio.

The Democratic race is better with Mike Bloomberg in it. The party’s got to have that fight about socialism and start it now, however long it takes. But he and his people had better get serious. It’s not only a money game, politics, it is a human game.

But the debate was a reminder: You never know what’s going to happen. You make your guess but you never know.

The surprise of politics—it’s a thing that can still make you feel romantic about it.

You have to start here: We are immersed in a freakish and confounding political era. Anything can happen. Surprise is built in. Guy on a lark takes an escalator ride down to a rally and the system is changed forever. “Expect the unexpected.”

That is the context. Within it, consider this: We are misreading Mike Bloomberg’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The headline right now is not “Billionaire Tries to Buy Party,” and not “Former Republican Struggles With Stop-and-Frisk History.” The headline is: “He Could Do This. Uphill, but He Could Win.”

Take Mike Bloomberg seriously.

Bernie Sanders is the front-runner. He’s a real power with a real base. He finished first or second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire, and if his margins were down a win is a win.

But his nomination would split the party. Too many Democrats want a new and deeper liberalism but not socialism. They don’t want a revolution, they want a nicer country. The suburban women everyone is supposedly fighting for? When that affluent liberal mother in Summit, N.J., finds out socialism isn’t just progressive social policy, she’s going to find herself saying a sentence she never thought she’d say: “We worked hard for this, you know.” Bernie Sanders has the power to turn her into Barbara Bush.

Only a fool would say America will never go socialist. America could turn on a dime in a time of widespread want or unease. But it’s unlikely to become socialist in an era of full employment, rising wages and a stock-market boom. Democrats know this.

Joe Biden isn’t the answer. The whole point of his campaign was that he can beat Donald Trump. He can’t beat Pete Buttigieg. He’s never been good at running for president; in three tries he hasn’t won a primary. Under pressure he renounced the lifetime stands that had made him Moderate Joe. And people age at different speeds. Mr. Biden is not a young 77.

It won’t work. At some point he will drop out. An energized Amy Klobuchar and a focused Pete Buttigieg will fight long and hard as they can, but they’re not likely to go the distance.

Which leaves you thinking about Mr. Bloomberg. What’s there? It’s not too soon, three months in, to call his campaign clever and capable. If he got the nomination Democrats would likely suffer a peeling off of the progressive left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Bernie Bros would walk out. But it wouldn’t break the party, not quite, not yet.

There’s the money, Bloomberg’s solid rocket booster. People say he could spend $1 billion, maybe $2 billion. He’d spend more if he has to. In for a penny, in for a pound. He didn’t enter this to preserve his fortune.

His social media is witty, weird, dryly subversive. That would mean little except for what it implies, that the people hired to do it are allowed to be creative and daring. The campaign is not playing tight but loose, which you do only when you’re confident.

His strengths: resources, relationships and a real biography. For 12 years he was mayor of New York. He governed the ungovernable city that is a microcosm of the world. It is noted that as mayor he was a Republican. No one in New York thought he was a Republican, he was a Democrat who could get only the Republican nomination. After he won he treated Republicans collegially and with respect, which wasn’t hard as a New York Republican is essentially a Democrat with boundaries.

Before that he invented a business product that first seemed useful, then necessary. He created a company that became a huge national brand. He is one of the world’s great philanthropists.

He is what Mr. Trump claimed to be and probably wishes he were. And he isn’t afraid of the president. Whatever he says, Mr. Trump, who respects money more than anything, would be afraid of him.

When Mr. Biden leaves the race, where will his supporters—many of whom feel increasingly outside the party they grew up in—go? Quite possibly Bloomberg.

This week’s Quinnipiac poll suggests that may be right. In past polling, self-described moderate Democrats and Democratic leaners backed Mr. Biden “by a wide margin.” In this poll they still gave Mr. Biden 22%. But Mr. Bloomberg was next, with 21%.

Among all Democrats and leaners, Mr. Biden is in second place and leads the former mayor 17% to 15%. Only two weeks ago Mr. Bloomberg was at 8%. He nearly doubled his support, quietly, while everyone was looking at Iowa and New Hampshire.

After Mr. Biden got drubbed, political experts on TV kept saying black voters, long assumed to be his impermeable base, are in fact “fiercely practical” and “strategic” in their political decisions. To me this sounded like code for “they’re breaking off Biden” and “they’ll shock you by considering Bloomberg.”

This week a 2015 video went viral of Mr. Bloomberg speaking, in blunt terms even for him, of his support of stop and frisk, which he has now disavowed. It was assumed to be deeply damaging with black voters. But denunciation from black leaders was almost uniformly muted. There was talk of reflecting on mistakes, how it’s good to admit them, and those who do deserve forgiveness. You picked up an air of, “I will lambast him in a perfunctory manner but I won’t enjoy it because really, he’s been a friend.”

And he has. The black pastors of New York, who lived through those days with him and a decision they disagreed with, seem to like him a lot. He’s been making friends for a long time. His philanthropies have been generous for a long time. And this is not only local—watch for the Pastor Effect down South, where there will be a big push. This is what they’ll say: Mike has been a friend. He worked well and closely with us. And he stayed close—when he left office six years ago he didn’t turn his back.

Mr. Bloomberg is being endorsed by mayors and members of Congress. Endorsements don’t mean much unless the candidate has muscle behind it, an organization or a machine. Mayors do. A lot of them know him from the yearly national meeting of mayors put on by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

His challenges? Elitist, billionaire, charmless. “He’s not one of us.” “Hide your soda, the nanny is coming.”

He has to perform in debates, where he’ll be the target of the other candidates’ focused and sincere resentment. With the press suddenly noticing him he can’t totally tank on Super Tuesday. (We’ll start writing our “Bloomberg Mirage” stories.)

But he’s got a big army that can grow and advance as opportunity presents. If the race goes a long time he can last a long time.

I have known him more than a decade and consider myself a friend, an admiring one. We’ve sparred a bit on national issues; we don’t share the same stands, or even worldview. But this isn’t written out of affection or regard. It’s what I think I’m seeing.

Take Mr. Bloomberg seriously. Uphill, but he could pull this off.

Democrats, when they’re feeling alarmed or mischievous, will often say that Ronald Reagan would not recognize the current Republican Party. I usually respond that John F. Kennedy would not recognize the current Democratic Party, and would never succeed in it.

Both men represented different political eras but it’s forgotten that they were contemporaries, of the same generation, Reagan born in 1911 and JFK in 1917. They grew up in the same America in different circumstances, one rich, one poor, but with a shared national culture. By the 1950s, when JFK was established in the political system and Reagan readying to enter it, bodacious America had settled into its own dignity. It had a role in the world and needed to act the part. Both men valued certain public behaviors and the maintenance of a public face. It involved composure, coolness, a certain elegance and self-mastery. They felt they had to show competence and professionalism. They knew they were passing through history at an elevated level, and part of their job was to hold high its ways and traditions.

Their way is gone, maybe forever. Democrats blame this on Donald Trump, and in the area of historical consciousness he is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.

Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.

Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious. The lack of professionalism, the incompetence is the kind of thing that not only shocks a party but shadows it. They can’t run a tiny caucus in a tiny state but they want us to believe they can reinvent American health care? Monday night when the returns were supposed to be coming in, it was like the debut of ObamaCare when the website went down.

Iowa, which for almost half a century has had a special mystique, has lost it. It will never be first-in-the-nation again. The candidates, who worked so hard for so long, were denied their victory moment. Did the movers, operatives and networkers who were behind the app and the technology have any consciousness of what they were changing, of the history they were changing, if they failed? The professionals were detached from their own voters, and not invested enough to give them a functioning primary.

You know what Iowa really tells us? Anything can happen now—anything. Because rigor in politics is waning, the old disciplines are not holding, old responsibilities are being thrown off. It was a failure of competence by people who were just passing through and burnishing their personal brands.

What a disaster.

And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.

“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.

She introduced him rudely, without the usual encomiums. Oh, snap.

The classy lady was not classy. She forgot she has a higher responsibility than to her base, but—yes, how corny—to her country, the institution, the young who are watching and just getting a sense of how to behave in the world.

If she was compelled to show symbolic fealty to the “resistance” she should have taken it outside the chamber. That place is where Daniel Webster debated; she occupies the chair of Henry Clay and “Mr. Sam.”

And she set a template: Now in the future all House Speakers who face presidents from the opposing party at the State of the Union will have to be rude fools.

Remember those videos that used to be all over the internet, with members of the Korean congress punching each other in the face on the floor of the legislature? Man, we used to laugh. Now in the future that can be us.

This is how a great lady becomes just another hack.

Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” Those who came slouched angrily in their seats, looking down, refusing to rise for all the heroes in the balcony. Why do they think that is a good look?

Those who didn’t come were unprofessional, but it was also a practical failure. They abandoned the field and let the Congress of the United States look like one big, cheering, unified bastion of boisterous Republicans, with a few grim women dressed in white in the corner. That’s what you want America to see?

The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute. There were the usual boasts: “The unemployment rate is the lowest in half a century”— but they had force in the aggregate. The policy that was emphasized (opportunity zones, expanded vocational education, neonatal research combined with a call to ban late-term abortions, expanded child credits) combined with the heroes in the balcony (a Border Patrol agent, a kid trying to get into a charter school, the brother of a victim of crime) was powerful and rich in inference.

More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.

This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.

Yes it was bread and circuses, and yes it was like a reality TV show. There should be a word for “I know I’m being manipulated but I am moved anyway.” We need that word because it is the essence of our entire media/entertainment/political culture. But if you weren’t moved by the mother of the baby born prematurely and the 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman there’s something wrong with you, and in your attempts to maintain a fair minded detachment you’ve become distanced from your fellow humans.

Republicans in the Reagan era used to say, and think, that we were the Main Street party, not the Wall Street one. In the three decades since, small-town America has fallen apart and Main Street disappeared into broken up, lonely, ex-urban places. Mr. Trump is saying he’s for the people who live there, in Main Street’s diaspora.

Whatever happens with him, that is the party’s future. Whatever happens with the Democrats they cannot afford another week like this.

Here is something small but big that happened this week and speaks of a generation gap within journalism. I write from the perspective of having worked the overnight shift at CBS News when I started out, choosing stories off the wires to lead hourly newscasts. I was young, and I sometimes got it wrong in terms of news judgment.

Last Sunday, when Kobe Bryant died, when word was just spreading, a political reporter for the Washington Post tweeted a link to a Daily Beast report from 2016 detailing a charge of sexual assault against Bryant. The 2003 case was settled out of court; it looked ugly and seemed believable in the broad outlines. The Post reporter apparently wanted people to remember that Bryant’s was not a blameless life and that the abuse of women is real.

The internet erupted and the reporter said she received death threats. The editor of the paper (hello boomer) emailed her that she was damaging the Post and should take her tweet down. She was put on paid suspension. Hundreds of Post staffers signed a letter protesting her punishment for merely tweeting out a news story. She was reinstated.

All this received big coverage in the press. Here is an aspect I haven’t seen mentioned. It has to do with moral imagination and respect, with empathy and the essence of tragedy. These are things it can take time to know.

Bryant had just died. The wreckage was literally still smoking. People were just learning what had happened. It was a national shock—a helicopter falls out of the sky and this 41-year-old sports hero and his beautiful 13-year-old child and seven of their friends and colleagues were suddenly taken from life, snatched away. Fans in Los Angeles, with nothing to do with their grief, spontaneously gathered at the Staples Center, where they wept. In the news reports you could see people grappling with that very modern question: Why am I sobbing at the death of someone I never met? What was it that he meant to me, how did a stranger reach into me so?

Part of the grief was surely about how life can turn on a dime: nothing is guaranteed, “You know not the hour.”

But the point: The wreckage was still smoking. People were absorbing. And, as Americans used to say, “There is a time and a place.” That is not the moment to send out on social media, from an account that includes the great name of your journalistic institution, your reminder of perhaps the worst thing Kobe Bryant did in his life.

In newsrooms they were preparing his obituary, working hard to get all the facts right, to capture his athletic greatness, to get at his hold on the public imagination, and to make it all hang together in a way that has force and sensitivity.

In the obit of a public figure you must absolutely include information on the subject’s major scandals or embarrassments. This is a journalistic and even historical necessity. There is no “speak no ill of the dead” in journalism. Often you must. Sometimes it’s the lead. Sometimes it’s the entire story.

But usually it’s not. Here is how the tweet struck me. It was like you go to a wake for a neighborhood man who suddenly died, and everyone’s grieving, and some guy walks up to the family and says, “Sorry about your loss. But let’s face it, he did embezzle funds from the bank.”

The reporter apparently has a cause, and it’s #MeToo (hello millennial), and she has written of her own memories of abuse, and she appears to be quite the warrior. (It was probably better for journalism when reporters hid their causes, but that’s another piece.)

It is good to have respect for your own trauma, and your causes, but of course what happened Sunday wasn’t about her but about the dead, and the grief that was washing over millions.

All this is connected to something larger, a more difficult question we have trouble getting right in the age of causes. It is that you can’t judge somebody’s life by the worst thing he ever did. The worst thing he ever did is part of the story but it’s not “the story.” It’s too strict a standard, it’s not realistic, and though it pretends to be unblinking, it is really unknowing. A life, even a small one, is a big, dense, effortful thing, a real drama that can’t always be easily resolved.

Those who threatened and crudely insulted the reporter were idiots, and in a nation of 330 million you’ll have a lot of them.

But for those who were offended, it’s not that they’re stupid and blind. It’s not, “They’re men and don’t want to hear the truth of what men do.” It’s that they take it as assaultive when you smack them while they’re weeping. And they rightly resent it when they sense you are opportunistically using a painful national event to score points for your cause.

It would strike them as cold.

*   *   *

We end with what is ending, the impeachment trial.

We’ve written of the need for Senate witnesses, especially John Bolton and Joe Biden. The question may be settled before this column goes to print. If, as expected, the Republicans refuse more witnesses, the French saying will be true: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.”

They will pay a high reputational price, and the president’s position will be further clouded: “Sure he got off—in a rigged trial.”

The impeachment rested on a charge against the president. The Democrats insisted he did it. The Republicans had said he didn’t. Now a Republican insider has apparently come forward with an unpublished book that says, “He did it.”

It would be wrong not to subpoena him and get him under oath. This is a trial. Mr. Bolton has key evidence. It cannot be justly ignored.

It is that simple, and history will condense it down to that.

The rationales for refusal don’t hold. “It would take too long.” It doesn’t have to if the president, the Republican majority and the chief justice agreed it should happen. If the president were wise he would waive executive privilege, make a great show of welcoming more testimony, take the blows, and emerge—as he knows he will in any case—acquitted.

And if it took longer, so what?

“We want to get this thing done, make it go away.” It won’t go away, the president’s impeachment is in the history books.

“The House should have done it.” That’s a process argument, not a justice argument. You’re supposed to be the steadier, more mature chamber.

“It will only help the Democrats.” But you never know what is going to happen in testimony. Mr. Bolton would hurt the president, surely. Would Mr. Biden? His presence would get Republicans showily and for the first time where Trump supporters want to go: to families cashing in on proximity to power, to swamped-up Washington and its nefarious ways.

That wouldn’t hurt Republicans—it is their subject matter.

“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” It will be a cloud over those who made it.

We must take our satisfactions where we can. It is not terrible for the young that they witness a certain gravity emanating from Congress. There’s a lot to be learned and reminded of when we speak of the genius of the Founders and quote Hamilton, Madison and the others as they created the political arrangements by which we live. These were not shallow men. It’s good to be reminded that for all our flaws as a nation and a people, we came from something magnificent and are the heirs of that magnificence. It is good for the young to see our representatives enact, sometimes actually model, personal dignity. Impeachment manager Rep. Zoe Lofgren, we’re looking at you. It’s good to see those hallowed halls actually seem hallowed.

Scott Fitzgerald, near the end of his life and bruised at thinking his work was forgotten, wrote to his daughter that when he considered, objectively, his gifts and the price he paid to realize them, he thought he saw in his career “some sort of epic grandeur.” That is what we too can see, objectively, when we bother to look at our career as a nation, and a people.

I see all this as an unanticipated side benefit of the impeachment proceedings this week. And it seems to me there’s something new to be gained.

I believe the president is guilty of shaking down the government of Ukraine for personal political gain, that he has rightly been embarrassed for this, and that the fit final punishment with an election coming was censure, not impeachment. But we are where we are, and the proceedings can be enriched if both parties unclench and let this thing broaden out.

The key to deepening things, capturing the essence of the argument and satisfying the majority of the people is three words: Witnesses, witnesses, witnesses. History deserves them; the public wants them, according to polls, and will not be fully served without them.

On this, the parties are at loggerheads, in stalemate. Senate Democrats would like certain witnesses but not others. They think they’ve made their case—why open it to unexpected hazards? You never know what will be said in testimony. Republicans don’t want new witnesses. The House had plenty of them, questioned them, drew up the articles based on their testimony. The Senate is here to weigh them, not develop new evidence. Also there are aspects of executive privilege.

Both parties are thinking of their own needs, which is what parties do. But when you open the door to impeachment, there’s a third party in the room, History. It too has its needs, and they are less selfish than those of the political parties. History wants information. It wants data and testimony. It wants as near as possible to know and understand the story.

It will be surprising if the president doesn’t come around to backing more witnesses. As the Democrats make their case against him, he will begin to seethe: I want more people defending me! I want my guys! He’ll have a conversation with Mitch McConnell, and we’ll be off to the races.

And why not? Take the time. Throw everything against the wall, let historians sort it out.

How many witnesses? Four major ones in four days would not be unreasonable.

John Bolton and Joe Biden? Yes.

Mr. Bolton was Donald Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. He was in the thick of it but apparently apart from it. He spoke of the Ukraine scheme disparagingly, is said to have called it a drug deal. He called Rudy Giuliani, the apparent instigator, “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” according to the testimony of Fiona Hill, the president’s adviser on Russia and Europe.

Mr. Bolton is a central fact witness. The story is incomplete without him, and his testimony could prove crucial. He is respected among conservatives, who know him from Fox News; he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If you want to break through to Trump supporters who think this whole case is a big, ginned-up hoax, get him. He has already said he will testify if called.

As for Mr. Biden, it is fair to ask: What does he have to do with this? He’s not a fact witness. He wasn’t a participant in the scheme; he was its intended victim. Donald Trump apparently thought he was the likely Democratic 2020 nominee. So he muscled Ukraine to embarrass Mr. Biden by publicly announcing an investigating of his son Hunter. Mr. Trump apparently thought then-Vice President Biden had pressed for the firing of a Ukraine prosecutor who he thought was moving against Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian company.

Mr. Trump’s great defense is that he was simply pressing the new government of Ukraine to be harder on corruption in general than it had been in the past. Is it unfair to ask Mr. Biden to testify on his approach to and actions on Ukrainian corruption when he was vice president? Is it unfair to ask how he viewed his son’s job with the company of a nation on which the senior Mr. Biden held portfolio? No. And it would satisfy half the country: “Good, we’re finally talking about the swamp and its corruptions.”

Mr. Biden was a U.S. senator for 36 years. He knows that chamber, his friends are there. He’s a public figure of long standing. It would not be unduly burdensome or overwhelming for him to be invited into that arena to expand the public record.

It would be high-risk, high-reward. If Mr. Biden bobbles it when he’s questioned about Ukraine, its country’s corruption and his son, it could ruin his presidential candidacy. On the other hand if he brings it to Mr. Trump, if he makes the case he has been the object of calumnies and speaks in defense of the career public servants the president abused, such as Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who lost her job in the Ukraine scheme—well, that could make Joe Biden president.

This would be pretty exciting. Hunter Biden shouldn’t be hauled in. He has never sought public office and is portrayed in the press as in perpetual personal crisis. Compelling him to testify would be not thoroughness but sadism.

The Democrats should want—History would want—the testimony of Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, also in the center of things during the Ukraine scheme. He isn’t known to have attempted to thwart the president’s actions. Did he? If not, why not?

In return for Mr. Mulvaney, Republicans should want Rudy Giuliani. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters hope for a colorful, even intemperate defense of the president. Rudy’s their man. If Ukraine was a drug deal, it looks as if he ran the cartel. Get him in and under oath. First question: What were you doing?

Then end this. The 67 votes needed to convict won’t materialize. Scrub this saga as thoroughly as possible and then leave it to history, which will find in it valuable material as to the ways and mores of early 21st-century American politics.

Impeachment is moving forward and going nowhere. There is new information but it doesn’t really tell those who’ve paid attention anything they didn’t know. Putative administration operative Lev Parnas said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday that the president knew everything about efforts to lean on Ukraine. But this was clear in testimony throughout the impeachment hearings. His own ambassador to the European Union said it! The ambassador to Ukraine knew she was being schemed against, lost her job because of it, and spelled it out under oath.

It’s icing on a cake that’s already sagging. The president will be acquitted for a host of reasons, from partisanship to a prudential judgment that his actions don’t warrant removal with a presidential election 10 months away.

What did Speaker Nancy Pelosi gain by playing her monthlong game of peekaboo, waiting to send the charges to the Senate? She withheld from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell papers he didn’t wish to receive and she saw that as leverage? It appears she was playing for time as investigators tried to develop more evidence. But again, for what? The president couldn’t look more guilty.

Meantime impeachment as a dramatic and distinct event lost all momentum. In the month after the House vote the story lost lift, then got lost in the Iran drama. This second stage feels not like the continuation of the first but a brand new second impeachment, which a lot of people will experience as overkill.

On the creepiness of the signing ceremony for the impeachment articles: Modern presidents have always held such ceremonies and signed big, happy legislation with many pens. Lyndon B. Johnson liked clutching bunches of them in his thick, meaty fist and handing them out personally. But the impeachment of a president is a grave and unhappy event. It’s not celebratory. Enacting triumphalism was shallow and looked like a tell. Why pens, why not a scalp?

Serious people understand the implications of things. Impeachment has now been normalized. It won’t be a once-in-a-generation act but an every-administration act. Democrats will regret it when Republicans are handing out the pens.

To the Democratic debate Tuesday night in Des Moines.

It contained my favorite panel-candidate moment of this cycle.

Bright young woman journalist: “Sen. Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the election?”

Sanders: “That is correct.”

BYWJ: “Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”

Warren: “I disagreed.”

It was like Judge Judy on drugs:

“Ernie, did you hit Peggy on the head?”

“No, of course not.”

“Peggy, how did you feel when Ernie hit you on the head?”

The moment went uncorrected. This is why people hate the press.

I found myself watching Elizabeth Warren. She has proved she can take a punch and throw one (“Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections.”) Of the candidates in their 70s she’s the highest-energy and most indefatigable. Actually she’d have high energy for a 50-year-old. All candidates now have to be actors but she’s a good one, telling her stories over and over, her voice growing husky at the moving parts.

Her challenge is not that she’s a woman, it is her policies, and maybe something else. I watched the debate with a man who’s sophisticated observer with no dog in the fight. Ms. Warren was doing her magical thinking about how universal Medicare won’t cost people a thing, it’s all savings with a few small tax increases on people we don’t like. I asked aloud, “Does she believe what she says or does she know it’s make-believe?”

He considered: “She did.” he said. That sounds right, that she started with belief but at this point sees the holes in what she’s saying. She’s caught, because she’s said it too often and now can only repeat it.

Bernie Sanders has the same magical thinking about the cost of things, who’ll pay, and what effect that will have on the nation’s life. But he gets away with it because he’s a declared socialist. His supporters don’t want realism and his foes don’t expect it. Ms. Warren says she’s a capitalist with a critique, so she faces a different burden.

There was also in the debate a kind of detachment from real life. A voter asked: “How will you prioritize accessing quality affordable child care?” The candidates were indignant that women can be held from the workforce by the high cost of child care. Pete Buttigieg vowed to get “federal dollars” involved, and spoke of stunted careers. Ms. Warren said, “My plan is universal child care for everyone.” She told of how she was almost forced “off track” by child care problems. Mr. Sanders said, “Every psychologist in the world knows 0 through 4 are the most important years of human life, intellectually and emotionally.”

No one spoke with compassion for parents, for mothers who forgo the earnings and status (“I have a job”) and relationships (“I’m not lonely all day”) of having a job to stay home with kids under 4. No one said that actually a lot of parents think the most important thing is to stay home and raise the kids, that many struggle to do it, and we might want to help them. No one noted we don’t give any particular honor to those who stay home, even though our culture depends on them.

What seemed to guide all the answers was a technocratic assumption that it’s best for little children to be raised by well-compensated strangers as mom is absorbed into the workforce, where she’ll finally achieve full self-actualization.

It was all so . . . cold. And detached from real life as many live it.

Meanwhile in full-employment America, Donald Trump is taking out terrorists with drones and announcing trade deals with China and seemingly weathering every storm. In the China ceremony Tuesday, in the East Room, after a booming “Hail to the Chief,” with a palpable sense of triumph filling the room, with the golden frames of the great portraits shining, Mr. Trump rolled off the names of the CEOs in the audience. There were a lot! It was in a way a fabulous celebration of the riches produced by capitalism. But it also seemed an almost sinister declaration of the intimate ties between great U.S. corporations and the federal government. The CEO of Boeing is here, the chief of eBay. “How’s General Electric doing, Nels?” “Ryan Lance, ConocoPhillips, you’re doing fantastically well!” “I made a lot of bankers look very good, but you’re doing a great job.” “Ken Griffin, Citadel, what a guy he is.”

It was reminiscent of the scene in “The Godfather: Part II” where Fulgencio Batista hands around the solid gold telephone. “I’d like to thank this distinguished group of American industrialists for continuing to work with Cuba for the greatest period of prosperity in her entire history. Mr. William Shaw, representing the General Fruit Company . . . Messrs. Corngold and Dant of the United Telephone and Telegraph Company . . . and of course our friend Mr. Robert Allen of South American Sugar.”

We all think our breathless recitations of the latest revelations matter but I don’t know, it keeps feeling like 2016. Only this time with full employment.

So far our recent encounter with Iran looks as if it ended pretty well, or as well as it could have. At the moment it looks like we’re more or less where we were before Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was killed, only he’s gone and that’s good. There is no particular reason to believe Iran has been chastened, but it might have been tempered, reminded that there are limits. For the first time in 40 years, since the hostages were taken in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the Iranian government took a hard jab from America right in the face. This appears to have left them surprised, rocked back on their heels.

It’s not terrible that that government be put on the back of its heels.

How will Americans see it? I don’t care what instant polls suggest, they’ll say, “A monster was killed and nothing bad happened? OK, good.”

Now we’ll see where it all goes. Iran will likely continue what it always does, mayhem through cutouts, machinations and subterfuge. Maybe it will increase its efforts at mayhem sharply. Maybe, unlikely but who knows, its rulers will decide a readjustment in their general approach is in order, what with a plummeting economy and America led by the Great Mental Case.

I didn’t experience President Trump’s speech Wednesday as others seem to have. Observers were appropriately relieved he didn’t announce an escalating response to the Iranian missile strike. They called it conciliatory. But it wasn’t, it was stark. He repeatedly referred to Iran’s rulers as a “regime,” not a government, and he slammed their “destructive and destabilizing behavior.” He said Soleimani’s hands “were drenched in both American and Iranian blood” and he “should have been terminated long ago.” Mr. Trump damned the rulers as scoundrels who abuse and murder their own countrymen, including, recently, 1,500 antigovernment protestors. The people of Iran, on the other, hand are great and have “enormous untapped potential.” “Iran can be a great country.”

I think I discerned an attitude shift. Washington’s previous longtime common wisdom has held that Iran is split and divided; the young, moderate and liberal, hate their government and its repressions and despise the mullahs. So we should let this internal resistance spread, rise and deepen as economic sanctions make life harder and the government’s position less secure. Do nothing to get in the way, to ruffle things or encourage Iranians’ love of country to transfer to loyalty to government. Play it cool.

From what I heard, Mr. Trump thinks: No, don’t be cool. Heighten the tension between the people and their government. Make them decide. Force the crisis.

You have to wonder how this will play out, considering that the Iranian resistance just saw the mullahs embarrassed and exposed in a new way.

All this had me thinking about the poignant pictures that flood the internet whenever Iran is in crisis. They are of men and women on the streets of Tehran before the shah fell and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. They all look so modern, it’s all Western dress—men in sharp suits, women in bouffants driving cars. No one looks feudal or shrouded. They could have been in America. Iran has never figured out how to be both modern and moral—well, no one has—and chose a particularly reactionary and clenched form of nonmodernism. Iranians are a brilliant people from a dazzling culture saddled by the cultural stylings of medieval clerics.

Writers knocking about in New York and Washington over a few decades meet or bump into the diplomats of the world, and though they are individuals you get a general sense of their country’s attitudes through them. The Chinese are courtly and careful; they radiate a sense of “We are a great and sober people who mean business.” The Russians have lost respect for America but maintain form and are businesslike. They’re also more fun than they once were. Their old defensiveness about America is gone because they don’t think we’re great anymore, which has relaxed them. The Brits are professionals who sometimes do hale and hearty but often treat an acquaintance like a ferociously probing BBC interviewer; they suck out whatever view or data occupies your brain because they’re so desperate to fill their weekly diplomatic dispatch and show Whitehall they’re in the mix and in the know. The French never seem desperate and preserve the old well-tailored élan. The Germans have European self-deprecating modesty down.

The Iranians are altogether different. They don’t bother to arrange their face into a friendly look and don’t care what you think of them. They do not mind if you notice their contempt for us. They kind of like it! They enjoy a stony-faced recital of our sins.

For 40 years they’ve been riding high. They’ve enjoyed scaring everybody. They just got pushback they didn’t expect. We’ll find out with time if the decision was wise or helpful. But it’s hard to feel bad about it. Actually I feel as I did about the Pakistanis after the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It took place on their soil. They weren’t alerted. They were embarrassed. But they’d allowed him to live there for years without telling us. So too bad. You had it coming.

*   *   *

Under the heading, “Men more frequently need to be reminded than informed”:

If the past few decades have taught us anything it’s that you should never accuse those who question a U.S. military action of lacking patriotism. Sometimes the greatest patriotism is to stand against the crowd to protect your country from ill-thought-out actions. That is one of the harder forms of patriotism. Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, charged Monday ”leading Democrats” were “mourning” the loss of Soleimani. No one mourned his loss, everyone knows he’s a bum, and that was cheap. They questioned the decision and the reasons behind it.

No administration should tell the people’s representatives to refrain from questioning or criticizing a decision because it might signal dissension in the American ranks. It is true the world is always watching. It’s also true they expect the Americans to disagree among themselves. It’s part of our fabulousness. Our friends in the world become anxious only when the disagreement doesn’t fully occur, or is repressed, as in the run-up to the Iraq war.

We all know that top positions in the government are still not fully staffed, and some key positions are staffed by those without deep experience. The past week would have gone better if the administration were sufficiently alarmed by and attentive to its personnel problems. Lines of communication would have been clearer and the sense of alarm lessened by more reliable information. It is fair to say they made a good decision to take out Soleimani, and fair to say that for much beyond that they were lucky duckies.

Administrations that get lucky in one drama tend to get cocky and begin new dramas. How would this administration look if it were feeling cocky? The way it looks every day. What would be good to see now is modesty—the modesty of serious people who know they got lucky.