Peggy Noonan

Let’s think about the broader, less immediate meaning of our political era.

This is how I read it and have read it for some time:

The Democratic Party is going hard left. There will be stops and starts but it’s the general trajectory and will be for the foreseeable future. Pew Research sees the party lurching to the left since 2009; Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped 23 points since 2000. But you don’t need polls. More than 70 Democrats in the House, and a dozen in the Senate, have signed on to the Green New Deal, an extreme-to-the-point-of-absurdist plan that is yet serious: Its authors have staked out what they want in terms of environmental and economic policy, will try to win half or a quarter of it, and on victory will declare themselves to have been moderate all along. The next day they will continue to push for everything. The party’s presidential hopefuls propose to do away with private medical insurance and abolish ICE. Three years ago Hillary Clinton would have called this extreme; today it is her party’s emerging consensus.

The academy and our mass entertainment culture are entities of the left and will continue to push in that direction. Millennials, the biggest voting-age bloc in America, are to the left of the generations before them. Moderates are aging out. The progressives are young and will give their lives to politics: It’s all they’ve ever known. It is a mistake to dismiss their leaders as goofballs who’ll soon fall off the stage. They may or may not, but those who support and surround them are serious ideologues who mean to own the future.

None of this feels like a passing phase. It feels like the outline of a great political struggle that will be fought over the next 10 years or more.

Two thoughts, in the broadest possible strokes, on how we got here:

The American establishment had to come to look very, very bad. Two long unwon wars destroyed the GOP’s reputation for sobriety in foreign affairs, and the 2008 crash cratered its reputation for economic probity. Both disasters gave those inclined to turn from the status quo inspiration and arguments. Culturally, 2008 was especially resonant: The government bailed out its buddies and threw no one in jail, and the capitalists failed to defend the system that made them rich. They dummied up, hunkered down and waited for it to pass.

Americans have long sort of accepted a kind of deal regarding leadership by various elites and establishments. The agreement was that if the elites more or less play by the rules, protect the integrity of the system, and care about the people, they can have their mansions. But when you begin to perceive that the great and mighty are not necessarily on your side, when they show no particular sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens, all bets are off. The compact is broken: They no longer get to have their mansions. They no longer get to be “the rich.”

For most of the 20th century the poor in America didn’t hate the rich for their mansions; they wanted a mansion and thought they could get one if things turned their way. When you think the system’s rigged, your attitude changes.

On the right the same wars, the same crash, and a different aspect. In the great issue of the 2016 campaign it became unmistakably clear that the GOP elite did not care in the least how the working class experienced immigration. The party already worried too much about border security—that’s the lesson the elites took from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, according to their famous autopsy. They appeared to look after their own needs, their own reputations: We’re not racist like people who worry about the border! They were, as I’ve written, the protected, who looked down on those with rougher lives. The unprotected noticed, and began to sunder their relationship with establishments and elites.

Donald Trump came of that sundering. He was the perfect insult thrown in the establishment’s face. You’re such losers we’re hiring a reality-TV star to take your place. He’ll be better than you.

Conservatives regularly attend symposia to discuss the future of conservatism. Republicans in Washington stumble around trying to figure what to stand for beyond capitalizing on whatever zany thing some socialist said today.

But isn’t their historical purpose clear? Their job—now and in the coming decade—is, in a supple, clever and concerted way, to save the free-market system from those who would dismantle it. It is to preserve and defend the capitalism that made America a great thing in the world and that, for all its flaws and inequities, created and spread stupendous wealth. The natural job of conservatives is to conserve, in this case that great system.

I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism. Republicans and conservatives need a more capacious sense of what is needed in America now, including what their own voters need. The party needs a tax-and-spending reality that takes into account an understandable and prevalent mood of great need. They need to be moderate, peaceable and tactful on social issues, but firm, too. This is where the left really is insane: As the earnest, dimwitted governor of Virginia thoughtfully pointed out, they do allow the full-term baby to be born, then make it comfortable as they debate whether it should be allowed to take its first breath or quietly expire on the table. A party that can’t stand up against that doesn’t deserve to exist.

All this must be done with a sense of how Americans on the ground are seeing things. What they see all around them cultural catastrophe—drugs, the decline of faith, the splintering of all norms by which they’d lived, schools that don’t teach and that leave their kids with a generalized anxiety. They want more help to deal with this. If you said, “We’re going to have a national program to help our boys become good men,” they would be for it, they would cheer. If you said, “We’re going to get serious and apply brains and money to what we all know is a mental-health crisis in America,” they wouldn’t care about the cost—and they’d be right not to care. They think as a people we’ve changed, our character has changed, and this dims our future. Make things better on the ground now and we’ll figure out the rest later.

These are not quaint nostalgists pining for the past, they are realists looking at ruin. They know some future crisis will test whether we can hold together as a nation. Whatever holds us together now must be undergirded, expanded.

Much will depend on how the Republican Party handles this epic era, because the Democrats are not only going left, they will do it badly. They will lurch, they will be spurred by anger and abstractions, they will be destructive. They really would kill the goose that laid the golden egg, because they feel no loyalty to it.

Republicans, save that goose. Change yourselves and save capitalism.

You are thinking, “My goodness, that’s what FDR said he was doing!”

Yes.

Someday this White House will face a sudden, immediate and severe foreign-policy crisis. It’s almost a miracle it hasn’t happened already. George W. Bush had 9/11 less than eight months into his tenure; John F. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs three months into his presidency and the Cuban missile crisis the following year. In two years Donald Trump has faced some turbulence, but not a full-fledged crisis.

Such good fortune won’t continue forever. I sometimes ask past and present officials of this administration their thoughts on a crisis, and how the White House would handle one. They are concerned.

What might such a crisis look like? History resides in both the unexpected and the long-predicted. Russia moves against a U.S. ally, testing Washington’s commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty; a coordinated cyber action by our adversaries takes down the American grid; China, experiencing political unrest within a background of a slowing economy, decides this is a good time to move on Taiwan; someone bombs Iran’s missile sites; Venezuela explodes in violence during a military crackdown; there’s an accidental launch somewhere.

Maybe it will be a wild and deliberate act that brings trouble, maybe not. The historian Margaret MacMillan said a few years ago in a radio interview: “I think we should never underestimate the sheer role of accident.”

What does it take to handle a grave crisis successfully, beyond luck?

Everything depends on personnel, process and planning. The president and his top advisers have to work closely, with trust and confidence, quickly apprehending the shape of the challenge and its implications. There must be people around him with wisdom, judgment, experience. They must know their jobs and be able to execute them under pressure. Clear lines of communication are key between both individuals and agencies. The president and his advisers have to maintain high focus yet pace themselves—you never know how long a crisis will last. They would have to keep their eyes on the million moving pieces, military and diplomatic, that comprise a strategy. As Navy veteran JFK said during the missile crisis, “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.”

How would this White House handle a grave crisis? It is right to feel particular concern. We know from every first-person account, from the histories, memoirs and journalism, that it’s a White House frequently at war. They don’t get along, they leak, they don’t trust each other. There is unusually high turnover, a constantly changing cast of characters, a lack of deep experience. During the Berlin airlift, thought at the time to be the height of the Cold War, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who’d been Army chief of staff during World War II, was asked how worried he was. “I’ve seen worse,” he replied. He had. No one around this president has seen worse. When Jim Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster left the administration, a cumulative 123 years of military and diplomatic experience left with them.

The president is famously impulsive, uninterested in deep study, not systematic in his thinking. His recently leaked schedules give no sign he spends a lot of time forging deeper relationships with advisers and agency heads on whom one day a great deal may depend. There is a marked lack of trust between the intelligence community and the White House—and intelligence is front and center during a crisis. The National Security Council is not fully staffed.

What would happen if they suddenly faced heavy history? “No administration is ready for its first crisis,” says Richard Haass, who was a member of George H.W. Bush’s NSC and is author of “A World in Disarray.” “What you learn is that the machinery isn’t adequate, or people aren’t ready.” First crises trigger reforms of procedures so that second ones are better handled. “This administration is not populated by people who’ve been through a crisis of the first order.” Mr. Haass notes that the national security adviser must see himself not only as counselor to the president but a coordinator of the interagency process. He’s got to make sure it works.

There is no way, really, to simulate a crisis, because you don’t know what’s coming, and key people are busy doing their regular jobs. And all administrations, up until the point they’re tested, tend to be overconfident.

What can they do to be readier? Think, study, talk and plan.

For a modern example of good process, personnel and management, there is the Cuban missile crisis. Because of its nature—two nuclear powers poised eye to eye—the stakes couldn’t have been higher. The threat of miscalculation was ever present in JFK’s mind. He feared a so-called spasm response—a knee-jerk reaction from Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev if he felt cornered or provoked. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss says “a big part of Kennedy’s job was to keep an eye on every aspect, big and small—where planes are flying, where troops are moving”—so that Krushchev “could get no false impression.” Kennedy had learned during the Bay of Pigs disaster that a president can’t do it alone. He created an executive committee of a dozen trusted advisers to help him achieve consensus and devise strategy. “He needed expert help to ride herd on the bureaucracy, including the military bureaucracy.” He often absented himself so members weren’t tempted to tailor their advice to his perceived preferences. In time he brought in Congress. House Majority Whip Hale Boggs was famously summoned by a note in a bottle dropped from an military helicopter as he fished on the Gulf of Mexico. Personal emissaries were sent to Paris, Bonn and London. When former Secretary of State Dean Acheson met with Charles de Gaulle, the latter famously waved away photographic proof of the Soviet missile sites. A great nation like America would not act without proof, he said.

“It was,” says Mr. Beschloss, “a triumph of management.”

He notes that President Trump doesn’t seem to think homing in on details is a big part of his job: “For one who touts himself as a spectacular manager, he hasn’t gotten beyond the idea ‘I alone can fix it.’”

It would be good to know people in the administration are regularly thinking about all this.

They need to repair the breach with the intelligence community. They need to see to it that a serious NSC process is produced, and all positions filled, preferably with experienced professionals for whom the next crisis is not their first one.

It might be good to have regular situation-room meetings on what-ifs, and how to handle what-ifs, and to have deep contingency planning with intelligence, military and civilian leaders discussing scenarios. “Put yourself in a position,” says Mr. Haass, “where you’re less unread when a crisis does occur.”

All the senior people in an administration always know whether and how they’ll get to the bunker. But by the time we’re talking bunkers, the story is almost over. It’s not a plan. Think about the plan.

Margaret MacMillan again: People not only get used to peace and think it’s “the normal state of affairs,” they get used to the idea that any crisis can be weathered, because they have been in the past. But that’s no guarantee of anything, is it?

NPR voice: This week in Advice for People Who Didn’t Ask, we focus on two men of significant ambition who are making perplexing decisions.

President Trump just took a drubbing on immigration, undone by the deadly competence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is now generally regarded as the answer to the question: “What if a Prada bag with a gun in it became a person?” That is from former Obama speechwriter and leftist provocateur Jon Lovett, and it’s a good line because it is true.

Republicans on the Hill are negotiating for a new deal, but their team just lost and Democrats are heady. (There is always, however, the deadly competence of Mitch McConnell.)

If no deal is struck, the president can risk another shutdown or attempt to secure wall funding by declaring a national emergency. The more-serious Republicans do not want that historic precedent set, and in any case it would get bogged down in the courts.
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What should the president do? Survey the field after battle and notice that some of the landscape has changed. For a solid month Americans again focused on illegal immigration. In a country that’s never thinking about only one thing, that was a bit of a feat. Also, Mr. Trump in his statements and meetings with the press came across, for perhaps the first time, as sincere and informed. Previously he’d looked like a guy who’d intuited a powerful issue and turned it into a line.

Congressional Democrats did not seem sincere, and a lot of them found it necessary to say they very much want the border secure. They made a point of speaking of their fidelity to the idea. They were telling the people back home: I acknowledge there’s a problem and want to help.

At their best, Democrats oppose the wall as a matter of political aesthetics. A big, fat, glowering slab of concrete on the edges of America is . . . brutalist, unlovely, aggressive. That’s not who we are!

The word “wall” has become as symbolic to them as it is to the president. When they add, “But I’m not for the wall,” they are telling their immigrant constituents, “I don’t fear you, I’m for you.”

The Democrats must defeat the president on that one word.

The president should let them, while pretending it pains him.

The vast majority of the American people want order and the rule of law returned to the border. How it is done is up to the experts. They just want it done. The word “wall” has been symbolic to many of them too—it means taking the issue seriously.

But the president himself has given up on the idea of a wall specifically. He spoke often during the shutdown of barriers, structures, smart tech, dedicated personnel. He knows one big wall won’t cut it. He’s taken to talking about tunnels. Walls don’t stop tunnels.

But he can’t admit he’s backed off on the wall, and he loves his showbiz, so now and then he says, “Wall, wall,” and whoever’s around him will say, “Yeah, wall.” He should stop.

Mr. President, tear down that word.

While Republicans on the Hill are negotiating, he should go to the country in a new way, making an earnest case about the benefits of ordered legal immigration and the threat of illegal chaos. He should go not to his usual big rallies but to the old Republicans, the people who voted for Bushes and Romneys—an audience that doesn’t love him no matter what. He needs not the solid one-third who support him but the not-solid third who might go this way or that. And they should be seated, not standing there waiting to cheer. He should be so brave he doesn’t have to be exciting.

He should push and push and then accept a solid deal that doesn’t mention a wall but includes everything else. Then he should act defeated. He should run around looking slump-shouldered and lost in his big blue overcoat. It won’t be hard!

He should ask the media please, in the coming year and now that a deal has been passed, to cover the border, talk to people who work there, find out if what we’ve done has controlled illegal immigration.

Within a year the answer should be apparent. If the border is secure Mr. Trump will look good: He’s the first president in a quarter-century to get the job done. It was five-dimensional chess after all! If it doesn’t work he’s got a big fat 2020 issue: “I bowed to reality, I made a deal, and look what they did.”

Now to the second man of significant ambition—Howard Schultz, who may run for president. What a great story he has. A city kid from New York, from the real working class and with the truest, most reliable working-class trope: family pain. Nobody gave him his first million. He builds a company, spreads his product through the country and the world, creating 238,000 jobs as of 2017. And jobs build families. This is a public good.

But he’s a neophyte who’s not a natural, a novice without magnetism. I don’t see his constituency. And his theory of the case is wrong. He’s fiscally to the right and on social issues to the left. There’s some market for that, but is it really where America is going?

No, it is not.

America is headed left economically. Two thousand eight changed everything, deeply undermining faith in free-market capitalism. One of the great sins of that time—and all the years after—was that the capitalists themselves, in their vast carelessness, couldn’t even rouse themselves to defend the reputation of the system that made them rich and their country great. In any case, the most significant sound in 2016 was Trump audiences cheering his vows not to cut entitlements. They would have cheered if he’d promised increases, too.

As for what are called the social issues, moderation is the future, maybe even a new conservatism, not leftism. The left has demanded too much the past few years, been maximalist in its approach, got in America’s face and space. Its social activism is a daily harassment in ways that don’t show up in the polls. The new abortion regime in the states, bake my cake, the farther edges of #MeToo, demands for changes to our very language. Liberation becomes propaganda and filters up through the media and down to the schools. America once had a lot of “live and let live” in it. Not anymore, and its giving way is causing barely articulable grief, and more broadly than the left imagines.

Wise Democrats are developing reservations. Young conservatives are perhaps about to come alive.

I think Mr. Schultz has it backward.

But his immediate problem is the Democratic Party, which has grown newly strategic and is about to pummel him. Democrats will never forget—and it is understandable that they will never forget—what Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy in 2000 did to Al Gore. Mr. Nader’s 97,488 votes in Florida kept Mr. Gore from becoming president, and elected George W. Bush. They feel they are this close to taking out Mr. Trump. They are not going to let another independent get in their way.

Mr. Schultz had better know what’s coming. As the Twitter meme goes, would they kill baby Nader? They would.

Donald Trump’s signature, which he enjoys displaying after signing bills and executive orders, is unusually big, sharp and jagged. It’s like the lines a seismograph makes during an earthquake, or what a polygraph shows when you’re telling a whopper. Lately it’s looking bigger and sharper.

He’s in a crisis he summoned. His numbers are down. He’s dug himself in a hole. His foes, delighted at his struggle, refuse to help him get out—even as they claim concern that employees are going without pay and air-traffic controllers are calling in sick, even when the longer the shutdown, the likelier something really bad will happen.

The State of the Union address has been sacrificed. It is fair that the president not give the address—and that the House speaker not leave Washington, even to visit troops—during a shutdown in which others, not they, suffer. But it would have been much better if both sides had met and issued a statement: “We acknowledge that a shutdown is always the result of failure, and while it continues the president and the Congress will forgo benefits of office. We will continue to talk and attempt to end the impasse. As soon as we do, this important address will take place.”

They can’t say that because they’re not talking. Which is amazing in itself, and a scandal.

Nancy Pelosi’s original excuse for disinviting Mr. Trump, security concerns, was lame and disingenuous, and being obviously those things it was also aggressive.

And all because she didn’t want to sit behind him and stare at his hair. She didn’t want to sit through an hour of listening to him while looking at the back of his head, which is what speakers do. If the speech had taken place as usual, Mr. Trump, being Mr. Trump, likely would have used the moment to put her on the spot—making some plea for agreement, having his Republicans jump to their feet in applause, turning around, pausing, daring her not to nod to his good-faith idea.

That would have been rude. He is rude. And now he has been punished. No speech! I’m not sure we fully appreciate that for a speaker of the House to tell a president of the United States that he is not welcome to make a State of the Union address is a shocking violation of norms. And it will lead to nothing good. A new precedent will have been set: You can disinvite a president if you hate him. And the future won’t be short of hate.

I’m hearing a lot of “good riddance” about the speech, but that’s shortsighted and historically ignorant. Yes, the event has devolved into kabuki in which stupid applause lines prompt rote cheering. Yes, it’s too often a laundry list. The language has become phony as it attempts to be elevated: “Let us follow those better angels.” My urging to speech-givers has been to hold the let-us. Plain, straight and honest is the way to go, and if you have a little wit that won’t hurt either.

What’s being overlooked is that the speech has a high policy purpose. It’s not a celebration of the imperial presidency. In fact, it puts the president on the spot. The Founders were not stupid and knew what they were doing when, in the Constitution, they instructed the chief executive to report to Congress on the condition the country is in.

The speech is a public acknowledgment that America is both a democracy and a republic. Somehow we’re never reminded. But that’s the chief executive going down the street to Congress’s house, asking to enter, and trying his best to persuade that coequal branch as the judiciary looks on.

The fact of the speech forces a White House to concentrate on what it thinks. Suddenly it must determine and put into words its priorities for the coming year. Suddenly it has a deadline. Suddenly it has to take its own sentiments seriously. The speech forces the president to decide, to focus, and not to take shelter in the day-to-day and whatever crisis just came over the transom.

The president is forced to take stock. He must state with at least some measure of credibility that “the State of the Union is . . .” Is what?

Harry Truman in 1949 was plain, unadorned: The state of the union is “good.” Gerald Ford in 1975 was blunt to the point of downcast: “The State of the Union is not good”—too many people out of work, inflation too high. Ronald Reagan in 1985 congratulated the American people for producing “a nation renewed, stronger, freer, and more secure than before.” George H.W. Bush in 1992 didn’t characterize the historical era but an event: “I am not sure we’ve absorbed the full impact, the full import of what happened. But communism died this year. . . . By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” Woodrow Wilson in December 1913: “The country, I am thankful to say, is at peace with all the world.” For Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1945, the subject was the war: “Everything we are and have is at stake. Everything we are, and have, will be given.”

It matters what they say! Not only to the moment but to history.

As to its other purposes, the speech is a moment of enacted majesty. Not real majesty—real majesty would be Jackie Kennedy walking behind the caisson and behind her a street full of kings. But it’s a night when our democracy struts its stuff. The president, Congress, the Supreme Court, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, the military, the press in the gallery, all arrayed. The heroes in the balcony, reminding us not of our politics but of our humanity, of the fact that almost against the odds America keeps producing spectacular individuals. All are there acting out comity, dignity, stature. I don’t really care if they feel these things. No one cares. We just want them to show it because children are watching, or at least taking a look as they pass a screen, and learning how adults in public act.

My friend Jeremy Shane, who worked in the George H.W. Bush administration, speaks of the thrill of the door’s opening. “It was hard not to get goose bumps when the sergeant-at-arms bangs on the floor and announces, ‘Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!’ ” And modest Landon Parvin, one of the great speechwriters of our era, remembers watching the speech as a child. “When I was growing up, State of the Unions were special occasions, like the queen opening Parliament and giving her speech. They were, in effect, occasions of state.”

All this has value. A fracturing nation cannot afford to so blithely cast aside another of its traditions.

Everyone involved should have shown forbearance and courtesy, a greater seriousness about a worthy tradition as it was delayed but not canceled, knowing you maintain form because you know democracies are in some part held together by it.

The speaker has shamed herself by not negotiating to end the problem that caused the postponement.

The president wouldn’t take a deal; now they won’t make a deal. We live through the chaos that is, always, his signature move.

We are American politicians. We are running for president. We are dancing and drinking beer. We are on a road trip, dilating on our mind-loops, hoping to make new friends. We are singing “One Nation Under a Groove.” We are announcing we’re exploring a run on Colbert as we giggle and hold his hand, as if we were announcing stardom in a new sitcom. And maybe we are. We have absorbed the lesson of the Trump era: You can do anything. And before this is over, you will. Beto O’Rourke live-streamed a dental visit as he queried his hygienist about life in her border town. His teeth are large, white and gleaming. This is not a kid who was ever told there’s no milk in the house. He is a candidate of hope. My hope is he’s too young to need regular colonoscopies.

Why do they do this? Because they know a candidate now is a mood. Not a thought, a stand or a statement, but a mood.

They do this because they want to seem unpretentious, relatable. “I’m just like you.”

But here is our secret: We would like someone better than us.

As they demystify themselves they further demystify the office they seek. If they win it they will have made their life harder by lowering their own stature. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Americans who’ve experienced some history, and have a sense of the trouble America is in, are jarred by this casual puerility.

How I wish they’d stop. I wish the next candidate to announce would be like . . . Margaret Chase Smith. Or Adlai Stevenson. Modest, adult, not exhibitionistic. He or she would make a sober, serious speech about the problems of our time. There would be no faint, unconscious air of “I know you’re stupid and shallow and I will now make believe I am your friend.”

But that is not my subject, which is the women running for president. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard and Kirsten Gillibrand have made it clear they’re in, and more will likely come.

Do they face double or different standards because they are women? Will they be subject to special and unique pressures?

Yes they do, and yes they will.

It is harder to be a public woman in America than a public man, and harder to be a female candidate. The challenges they face are practical, emotional, even existential. Practical: No one gets a lot of sleep on the trail, but a woman has to get up an hour earlier for makeup, hair, to choose what to wear and get it together. If she doesn’t, they’ll say she looks bad. Emotional: We are a crueler country every year, thanks in part to the internet, where women are the objects not of more hate but of sicker hate—brute, sexual, anonymous. Existential: people often experience what a woman says and what a man says differently. They just do.

Female candidates are also battered by professional consultants who claim to understand voters, and who tell them to be strong but approachable, warm but steely, mom but dad, young and bouncy but wise and grave. These operatives are the swarming locusts of politics, eating all in their path. They never say, “Let’s just settle down and be mature, as the moment seems to demand it.” Male candidates face this too, but for women it is more so—more nervous and defensive.

What do you do about such challenges? You don’t claim victimhood. You don’t demand special treatment. You overcome them.

There are some new dynamics this year. For 30 years Hillary Clinton sucked up all the oxygen. She was The Woman, the next in line, and in the end she was The Official Victim of Sexism, or so she said. But this year there are a lot of women running, with different backgrounds, histories and styles. They don’t have her baggage.

Democratic women are now out from under not a male shadow or a cultural shadow but Hillary’s shadow. The double standard of old may be less relevant this cycle. In fact, reporters may be too timid, holding back their punches in fear of Twitter mobs.

Hillary put the issue of “likability” and “relatability” forward as a subject of national debate. But likability is not a sexist slight. “It’s a standard for all candidates, like ‘charisma’ or ‘gravitas,’ ” says my friend Alessandra Stanley. For years pundits have asked, when only men were running, which candidate you’d want to have a beer with.

There are a lot of male candidates with likability problems. Some, such as Andrew Cuomo, a three-term governor of a large state, are so unlikable they aren’t even mentioned as contenders.

As for appearance, Ms. Stanley says, “It’s true that women draw comment for what they wear far more than men do, but men have their own problems. Women get attacked if they look too frumpy, and men get attacked if they look too vain. Let’s not forget John Edwards and his haircut and videographer.” If Joe Biden runs we’ll hear about tanning beds and teeth whiteners. If Sen. Sherrod Brown runs we’ll joke about his hair.

As for makeup, it is a decision, not a burden. We’re lucky we can be made to look better than men, poor dears. Female candidates should play it as they please.

Ms. Warren doesn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to such things and looks fine. Ms. Harris, who does, and seems to enjoy her beauty, also looks fine. Angela Merkel has no apparent physical vanity, which seems to have been OK with Germany. Golda Meir gave not a thought to how she looked, which was fine with Israel. Theresa May seems eager to be appropriate, no more. Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, worked it. She got that extra hour in the morning by having only coffee and vitamins for breakfast. She thought a leader should be well turned out and took enjoyment in being handsomely put together—full makeup, hair done, nice suit or dress, heels. “She thought and said that women had to be twice as good as men—and I believe that looking good was part of that ‘twice,’ ” her adviser and speechwriter John O’Sullivan tells me.

And there was something else, an element of past repression. Mr. O’Sullivan says Thatcher grew up near a Catholic church and, as a Methodist child, used to see the girls her age making their first Holy Communion in white dresses and bright ribbons. “If you wore a ribboned dress,” Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, “an older chapel-goer would shake his head and warn against the ‘first step to Rome.’ ” She longed for pretty things and as an adult wore them.

That’s sweet, isn’t it? She wore perfume too. She enjoyed being a girl.

I close with a note from a friend, a great liberal of many years. “The more masculine qualities that a woman has who’s running for president, the better off she is. Margaret Thatcher had all the forceful qualities that one associates with male politicians, and therefore was considered not so different from a man. She was held to the same standards as male politicians and was not found wanting.”

That may still be the ticket: Honestly feminine, however that looks, and as forceful as—and more serious than—the boys.

After 20 years of argument we all kind of know everything about illegal immigration, don’t we? And in a funny way most of us agree on the essentials.

America is for legal immigration, always has been. It is against illegal immigration.

Whether you see what’s happening on the border as a genuine crisis or merely a manufactured one, we agree there’s a problem. Hundreds of thousands of people a year are trying to enter America illegally. We need to make the situation more secure and orderly, less cruel.

Both sides agree the problem has a humanitarian dimension. Democrats speak quickly of women and children being divided and abused once they make it to the border. This is a real problem. Republicans speak of women and children being abused on the way to it. That’s a problem too. There’s a lot of suffering going on.

Both sides agree at least formally that a sovereign nation has a right to have borders, even a responsibility to have them. Borders say here’s where our land stops and yours begins. They say this is where your laws pertain, this is where ours do.

We are nothing without the rule of law. It is what allows America to operate each day.

Almost everyone would agree we have a right to determine the rules by which legal entry is attained. Most Americans would agree it is desirable to set those rules according to the nation’s needs. America is beginning to experience a shortage of registered nurses. Have you noticed? You will. Wouldn’t it be good to address the shortfall through immigration policy, inviting nurses from other countries to become legal residents and citizens? My people, from Ireland, were welcomed because the dynamic America of 1900 needed laborers and domestic workers. That, luckily, is what my people were. Two generations later I worked for an American president. What a miracle this place is. Let’s keep that up, the miracle part.

Those of us who are not politicians agree that neither party has really wanted to solve the problem. Both played it for their own gain, cynically, as if they weren’t even invested in this place. They should be ashamed.

It was not in the interests of the Republican Party to address the border problem because that might leave them open to charges they were driven by questions of race and color. Also their major donors didn’t mind illegal immigration, which was good for business. It’s always convenient when you see things the donors’ way! The affluent and powerful in America enjoy feeling liberal and are uninterested in how poor Americans view chaos (as a threat—America is all they have; they don’t have two passports and a share on a plane) and jobs lost to cheaper labor.

Democrats never intended to control the border because they think doing nothing marks them as the nonracist party, the compassionate, generous party that Hispanics will see as home. They would reap the electoral rewards in a demographically changing country. They will own the future! Their big donors too opposed border strictness. They don’t think about security a lot, even after 9/11. I think it was Murray Kempton who said Republicans are always hearing the creak of the door at night. It’s true. Democrats are less anxious about security. It’s fair to point out they tend to be more affluent and have the protections money can buy. Their fearlessness is not bravery but obliviousness. They off-load anxiety onto Republicans, who are always mysteriously eager to take it up.

I’ll throw in something else I think we agree on. Governing by shutdown is ignorant, cowardly and destructive. It is unjust to the innocent, who are forced to deal with reduced services, closed agencies and missed paychecks. It’s dangerous: Something bad will happen with air security, food inspection—something. It’s demoralizing: It makes America look incompetent in the world, unstable, like an empty adversary and incapable friend. It harms the democratic spirit because it so vividly tells Americans—rubs their faces in it—that they’re pawns in a game as both parties pursue their selfish ends.

And here is the part we won’t all agree on:

The president at the center of this drama is an unserious man. He is only episodically sincere and has no observable tropism toward truthfulness. He didn’t get a wall in two years with a Republican Congress and is now in a fix. He is handling himself as he does, with bluster and aggression, without subtlety or winning ways. He likes disorder.

But the game didn’t start with Donald Trump. Two decades of cynical, game-playing failure produced him.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have been just as unserious. Brinkmanship and insults—“malice and misinformation,” “soap opera,” “tinkle contest,” “as if manhood could ever be associated with him.” They are playing to their new, rising base and smirking slyly as the bear ties himself in knots. They demanded time to rebut the president immediately after his Oval Office speech. By tradition the networks offer response time after the State of the Union, not after every presidential address. This is because of a certain deference to the office. You allow a president—even if you hate him—to speak in the clear. He’s trying to lead; you let what he says settle in. Then the next day you formally hand him his head. If every presidential address is followed now by swift and furious rebuttal, we’ll never achieve any rough unity again.

In the end Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Pelosi’s speech was no more a success than the president’s: it broke no new ground, didn’t even try to persuade. Trevor Noah caught the mood: They looked as if the hostess at IHOP just told them there’s no senior discount.

Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Pelosi should stop. They should end the drama.

Who cares if it’s a wall, a fence, a bulwark, a barrier, smart tech, increased personnel? Get it done. Climb down. Make a deal.

Who cares how both sides spin the outcome, claim bragging rights, issue the cleverest taunt?

Just solve it. It’s been 20 years.

They should trade better border security for a deal that protects the Dreamers, who were brought here illegally as children. This would actually be good for the country. Not to be irrelevant, just thought I’d note it.

All of Mr. Trump’s foes think they do what they do because of him. Extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary measures. They become like him to fight him.

But some day Donald Trump will be gone. What will we have then? His tormentors think we’ll go back to normal. We won’t, in part because of how they acted in opposition. They think everyone will revert to courtesies, but they will have killed the old ways.

Mr. Trump never had the power to lower everything. He had the power to lower himself. Everything could be lowered only if he and his supporters plus his opponents decided “everyone into the pool.”

Stop this. It’s embarrassing. And it’s wrong. Make a deal.

My greatest hope for 2019 is cultural. It is that the left will rise and do what only it can do—strike a blow against political correctness in the arts and entertainment. All artists are meant to be free and daring. Their job, whether in drama, comedy or music, is to approach the truth—to apprehend it, get their hands on it and hold it up for a moment for everyone to see. That’s a big job, a great one, and you can do it only if you’re brave. Pope John Paul II, in his 1999 Letter to Artists, noted something I have witnessed: The artist faces a constant sense of defeat. You’re working, you’re trying, but it’s never as good as you wanted, as you dreamed. Even your most successful work only comes close. Artists are looking for “the hidden meaning of things.” Their “intuitions” spring from their souls. There is an “unbridgeable gap” between what they produce and “the dazzling perfection” of what they glimpsed in the creative moment. They forge on anyway.

From the divine to the slightly ridiculous, in one area, music:

At happy gatherings the past two weeks, talk turned to the controversy over Frank Loesser’s 1944 holiday classic, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” You know the argument. The song should be pulled from playlists and effectively banned because its lyrics, on close inspection, are somewhat rapey. It’s a song about sexual assault; there’s a clear power imbalance. This argument comes from young writers and activists of the #MeToo movement. Actually, the man in the song hopes to seduce, not rape; the song is flirty and humorous, a spoof of the endless drama between men and women.

From every conversation I witnessed liberal opinion is very much against banning the song, as is conservative opinion.

But companies hate controversy. Radio stations don’t want petitions at Christmastime, no one wants trouble. We’ll be hearing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” less as the years go by. It only takes a few highly focused idiots to kill a song.

But I want to mention a masterpiece, Randy Newman’s album “Good Old Boys,” released to critical acclaim in 1974. I listened to it over the holidays. There’s so much in it I love, such as “Marie,” one of the greatest love songs of the latter half of the 20th century. A working-class man who works in a factory comes home drunk and tries to tell his wife, in plain words, that he loves her. “You looked like a princess the night we met / With your hair piled up high / I will never forget.” He’s not eloquent or clever, but he reaches. “You’re the song / That the trees sing when the wind blows / You’re a flower, you’re a river, you’re a rainbow.” He tells her the simple truth: “Sometimes I’m crazy / But I guess you know / I’m weak and I’m lazy / And I’ve hurt you so / And I don’t listen to a word you say / When you’re in trouble I turn away / But I love you, I loved you, the first time I saw you / And I always will love you Marie.” The orchestration is rich and cinematic, and when you realize it’s a slow waltz, and imagine that, tears fill your eyes.

But it’s also a highly political album, and sharply pointed. It is an attempt to capture the cultural divide that existed even then in America—an album about the deplorables before the term was invented. In “Rednecks” the lyrics are rough. The factory worker had just watched Georgia’s segregationist governor being baited on a talk show. “Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show / With some smart-ass New York Jew / And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox / And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too / Well he may be a fool but he’s our fool / If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong.” The factory worker acknowledges every stereotype of white Southerners—people like him—while employing the ugliest racial epithet. He accuses the North of hypocrisy: It claims to be liberal but its special brand of real estate racism—putting black men “in a cage”—is worse.

It is rough art, it is bitter, it sees splits that are with us still.

And I realized as I listened: This album could never be made now. Mr. Newman would be attacked on social media, his label boycotted. He’d be accused of cultural appropriation, ethnic condescension, racial insensitivity. They would ban this.

And yet it is a masterpiece. And 45 years ago, in a less enlightened age, we could tolerate it, withstand it, even praise it.

What a loss if it didn’t exist.

Political correctness is the enemy of art. Self-censorship is a killer of art. Censorship applied from outside, through organized pressure, is an assassination of art.

We have seen the political correctness of the social-justice warriors sweep the universities, hounding out those who would speak from an incorrect perspective, decreeing new rules of language and living. They do not understand that when you tell people, especially Americans, what they can and cannot say, can and cannot think, they don’t stop saying and thinking. They go underground, sometimes to the depths. And it is dark down there.

Conservatives have long decried political correctness. The past 30 years they’ve provided the intellectual muscle against censorship.

But an end to political correctness in the arts and entertainment cannot come from the right. It can come only from the left. All the organs of entertainment and art in America, from Broadway to Hollywood, through Netflix , the museums and onward, are entities of the cultural left. They are run and populated by the cultural left.

They have the pertinent power. When conservatives write or speak against limits on free speech, what they say is heard by the left as mere reaction, a cover for intolerance, and so dismissed.

The left will listen only to entities of the left who say: Enough. Art needs air, and that air is freedom.

The turnaround might begin—just one idea—when some powerful cultural entity produces a documentary featuring great figures of entertainment and the arts saying how they feel about limits to artistic expression. What their personal experience with political correctness is, how it has limited what they do, what the implications are. It would require significant cultural figures who are not identified with the right to speak their peace.

And here is the great thing. Most of them do hate it. The producers and network chiefs, the comics, writers and directors—so many of them hate the air of inhibition under which they operate. They hate it with a lovely bitterness, and it is lovely because it is earned. They’ve all been stopped from at least one artistic act by the forces of censorship, in the same way that there is hardly an American the past quarter-century who hasn’t been shamed for saying, doing or thinking the wrong thing.

What I hope for this year is a break in the ice.

Artists of America, be brave. It is in your nature. Save our art and entertainment, past and present.

My most central hopes for 2019 involve, as yours likely do, peace at home and abroad. But I also hope very particularly for personal testimony from those who know whereof they speak. I want those who have worked with President Trump to tell us what it is like in this White House. And I want them to put their name on it.

How does he really operate each day? What do you see as you witness him doing his job?

The press reports he watches television for hours, is inattentive to briefings, doesn’t read, rants, rages, nurses petty resentments, doesn’t listen to those with expertise, doesn’t understand the constitutional limits on his office, is increasingly alone and paranoid. Are these things true?

What else is true? Would you trust him to handle a situation in which sound and immediate decisions had to be made in a clock-ticking crisis? Would you trust him to lead honestly and credibly through a crisis?

Two years is enough time to know. It is enough time to have observed and come to conclusions. It’s enough time to describe with confidence how things really are.

Candor couldn’t be more important than now and in the coming year, which will be politically fraught.

Next week Democrats take control of the House. They will certainly launch new investigations, and impeachment will become more prominent in the national discussion. Special counsel Robert Mueller will at some point report his findings to the Justice Department. Whatever his report contains it will not be compliments, and may include offenses Democrats and others judge impeachable. Tensions will be high and nonstop.

And that’s just one area of life, the president and Congress. Add a deeply unpredictable world and surprise events. Things aren’t going to get calmer, more stable, more placid and predictable in the coming year. Nor will the president.

Why do those who have worked with Mr. Trump so rarely if ever speak in any depth, in public, of their experience? Courtesy—it is traditional to serve quietly and leave discreetly. Fear—once you speak critically of a president, you’re a target. And maybe some aren’t sure what to think. A lot of people in the White House have never worked in one before. It takes time to figure out the difference between the weird and disturbing and the merely idiosyncratic. But again, two years—by now you should know.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said a great deal in his resignation letter, but between the lines. He strongly believes “our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” We need to treat our allies with “respect.” We must be “clear-eyed” about strategic competitors such as China and Russia. Mr. Mattis’s own views are “informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” “Because you have the right to have a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

He was saying the president does not treat allies and alliances with respect, is inexperienced, is not clear-eyed regarding some strategic threats. There was not a word of praise for the president, nor an expression of personal gratitude. Instead, “I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.”

For this oblique criticism, marked more by what was unsaid than what was said, Mr. Mattis was told to clean out his desk and leave before he had planned.

It was a good letter. But one letter isn’t enough.

The Trump supporters I know are motivated by patriotism, not spleen, bigotry or bitterness. They are so loyal to their man in part because they see all the forces arrayed against him, especially in the media. They believe, legitimately, that he gets only grudging credit for his accomplishments. And they have told themselves a story about the brave if unlikely outsider who sacrificed his own comfort to upend a corrupt system and protect the interests of the common man.

They will never believe the mainstream media when they say this presidency is unstable, dangerous, a threat.

Journalists are sometimes puzzled by this. After all, their books and articles are full of unsparing facts and observations about the president—and those quotes came from White House staffers and other administration officials. But those officials speak not for attribution. They are not named. Trump supporters will not believe anyone who won’t put his name on it, and whose motives are unclear.

But they will believe the generals. They will believe those who’ve worked in the administration in substantial positions and who can define what isn’t working and what the chaos means—with examples. They will believe serious people who gave an inexperienced president a chance, who joined his administration when others were reluctant, who put their careers on the line and tried to help the country.

They will believe those whose motives are clear and constructive.

They won’t believe someone like Omarosa, who wrote a book when she left the White House calling the president a cynic, a “racist, misogynist, and bigot.” They’d see her as a scatty show-business creature who got fired and is hitting back.

They won’t believe the words of “Anonymous,” author of the September New York Times op-ed that became a sensation. “The president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic,” that person wrote. “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality.” The president’s impulses are “generally . . . anti-democratic.” Meetings with him “veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions.” His behavior is “erratic” and is regularly thwarted by “unsung heroes” of the internal resistance.

This electrified the media and reinforced the views of Trump foes, but to my observation left Trump supporters coolly unimpressed. Unsung heroes? Who brokered this, a book agent? Anyone can protect his post-White House reputation with an anonymous hit piece, anyone can rationalize staying in a cushy job. Anyone can shore up his ideological bona fides so he’s not shunned later on by the people who matter to him. The piece seemed written not to expose a problem but to cover the tracks of a self-valorizing staffer who wants both to enjoy the White House and not be tainted by it. It was a career move, not a patriotic one.

Trump supporters will not believe the testimony of unnamed people with unknown motives. They will believe only the testimony of serious people who are obviously patriots.

Turnover has been high in this administration. Many have been fired or resigned. They should tell us what they know.

Those who did that would certainly become a target of the president’s operatives. They might for a time become figures of obloquy. They’d be called rats.

But if you do see this president as ultimately dangerous, you have a responsibility to say it.

We need some noble rats.

May they come forward, speak softly, and make their motives clear.

I didn’t intend to write on Andrew Roberts’s biography of Winston Churchill, because so many smart people have written on it so well. Also, I don’t belong to the Churchill cult. He was a great man, arguably the greatest of the 20th century, and right on the central question of his age, the meaning of Hitler. He had both political and literary genius, the first Western political figure of whom that could be said since Lincoln. He was brave and he was a visionary; he understood and wrote about the implications of splitting the atom long before it was split. He was also a person of titanic self-regard driven by a sense of destiny that occasionally verged on the half-mad. He made blunders for which others suffered and forgave himself too quickly and too much. And he was bloody-minded. “I love this war,” he confided to a friend at the height of World War I, when he was first lord of the admiralty. “I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.”

He did. War was opportunity. He didn’t think the lights were going out all over Europe, he thought the lights were about to shine brightly on his name.

And yet. What a warm and splendid book Mr. Roberts’s biography is. It is intelligent and fluid; he doesn’t lard things up to show you the depth of his research, but tells you what is important, with verve and sympathy. As you read you trust his judgment.

It reminds me what a moving life Churchill’s was, and what a struggle. His father, who treated him as an afterthought, did not live long enough to admire him; his mother became fully invested in him only once she understood he was a winner and would reflect well on her. His response to their neglect was a love that looks very much like gallantry.

Mr. Roberts gives fresh attention to the meaning and origin of Churchill’s domestic policies, which were central to his political life and usually get short shrift.

This feels pertinent now. Some readers will have found themselves the past few years, even before Donald Trump, certainly since the wars and the crash of 2008, revisiting and questioning political stances and assumptions they’d previously held with confidence. That questioning has been playing out in this space since 2005. For some Republicans, the question has been whether to change the party or leave it. For some Democrats, it’s “Am I completely comfortable in a party that appears to be charging, culturally and economically, to the hard left?”

Churchill, elected to Parliament as a Tory and from an ancestral Tory family, crossed the aisle early in his career and joined the Liberals. He later rejoined the Conservatives. Mostly this was due to his sense of what was required at that moment in terms of policy. He had a shrewd sense of the lay of the land; for all his intellectual flights he believed in realism. Like a true aristocrat, Mr. Roberts notes, he was not a snob; he had a filial respect for and sense of responsibility toward “the masses.”

The proximate reason for his bolting the Tories was high tariffs; he was a free trader. But more was at play. His early political career was marked by a gradual coming to terms with the England he was seeing all around him and its ossified politics and parties. He had believed, in Mr. Roberts’s words, “that social reform was not the exclusive preserve of the Liberals but could be appropriated by what he called ‘the Tory democracy.’ ”

But they weren’t good at appropriating. Churchill came out for the progressive income tax, with total exemptions for the poor. He backed the “minimum standards of life and labour,” policies that came to be the basis of the modern welfare state.

But free markets and competition mattered to him. Social spending was desirable—“spread a net over the abyss”—but it depended on “the existing competitive organization of society.” We need private enterprises, he said, “and do not grudge them their profits.” He opposed socialism. Were the early Christians socialist in spirit and practice? “The Socialism of the Christian era was based on the idea of ‘All mine is yours,’ ” he said. The socialism of the Labour Party “is based on the idea that ‘All yours is mine.’ ”

When he turned on the Tories it was wonderful work. They and the “protectionist manufacturers” say they support tariffs “because they love the working man,” he said in a speech in Manchester. “They love the working man, and they love to see him work.”

He was vivid, not vague, about his changes of mind. He told voters, “I admit I have changed my party. I don’t deny it. I am proud of it.” He didn’t think the Tories were an especially moral lot, and he didn’t think they saw the nation or its needs clearly. “I am delighted that circumstances have enabled me to break with them while I am still young and still have the first energies of my life to give to the popular cause.” He told his constituents he had plenty of loyalty—not to a party, but to them.

Years later, when he popped back to the Tories—he had a way of joining each party just before it began its ascent—he acknowledged what people were saying behind his back, and defused it with laughter. “Anyone can rat,” he said, “but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.”

He was candid in other ways. He rudely opposed women’s suffrage and said only “undesirable classes” of women wanted the vote. Suffragettes were rude right back, hounding him at his rallies and ringing bells to drown out his voice. He admitted he found it difficult to change his mind. “I was steadily moving forward to the position of whole-hearted supporter” of women’s rights, but he had been “much put off” by their efforts to curtail his speech and didn’t want to be seen “giving way” to such tactics.

It is good when politicians are frank about their opponents’ methods, and reasonable to admit you don’t want to appear to be bowing to them. Nobody likes to be bullied.

Something especially pertinent to this moment: Churchill was a warrior who threw insults like lightning bolts. He fought hard for his side. But he said political division “does not in my mind prejudice personal relations.” He was broad in his friendships, which encompassed figures of left, right and center. Mr. Roberts notes he was “privately affable” with friends and foes. He dined with the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb. He separated politics from personal friendship, in part, Mr. Roberts implies, because he understood we are not only political beings. His openness was misunderstood by people “who assumed he was being insincere either in the friendship or in the politics. In fact he was being neither.” If he liked you or valued your mind, you were in.

This old style should be made new again.

And Merry Christmas. May you reconsider whether someone is really a foe, and if he is, dine with him anyway.

Fox News’ year-end poll is interesting. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they would vote today to re-elect President Trump, with 30% saying they definitely would. Thirty-nine percent say they expect him to be re-elected; 52% do not. At the same time, the president has a 46% job-approval rating, while 52% disapprove.

So the president’s approval numbers have been more or less steady, but not all those who approve of him are ready to vote for him again.

Possible reasons why are suggested deeper in the poll. The proportion who think the economy will be better a year from now has fallen 11 points since two years ago, to 45%—the most pessimistic outlook in Fox’s poll since January 2001. Fifty-one percent say the economy is either fair or poor; 47% see it as excellent or good.

Equally interesting, respondents approve of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation by 56% to 37%—a 19-point margin. Forty-eight percent say they believe the Trump campaign coordinated with the government of Russia in 2016, while 37% see no coordination. Four in 10 expect Mueller will find evidence of crimes, while just over half of those polled do not think they will be impeachable offenses.

In a way the president’s position is solid—his support is not melting down after the midterms and his party’s loss of the House—and in a way not solid at all. He’s not expanding his base. Voters who approve of his leadership give themselves plenty of wiggle room in terms of support, showing skepticism about the economy and open-mindedness on the Mueller probe.

The poll suggests that if the president fires Mr. Mueller, he will pay a hellacious price in public opinion, with even his core experiencing some bleed.

The poll left me thinking of what a high-ranking Republican who himself was once considered a possible president said last week in conversation in Washington. He knows the president and the White House, and he certainly knows politics. He speculated aloud on a hunch he’s had that Mr. Trump might not run for re-election. Think of it, he said. Unrelenting bad news is likely coming—final findings from Mr. Mueller, a new and hungry Democratic House, more investigations, little bipartisanship, economic uncertainty. It’s not going to be fun; the outlook for re-election will dim.

So, the politician said, imagine this: The president wakes up one morning and announces that, actually and amazingly, he’s accomplished everything he set out to do when he ran in 2016—cut taxes, appointed judges, faced off with China, made better trade deals, controlled immigration, improved the outlook for financial markets. “I accomplished in four years what other guys couldn’t do in eight!” the president says: “My work is done!”

And he’s gone. The politician thought this just might happen.

Since we’ve already begun to look toward 2020, a thought on what we’ve been doing the past few cycles.

Here is my concern: Politics is part theater, part showbiz, it’s always been emotional, but we’ve gotten too emotional, both parties. It’s too much about feelings and how moved you are. The balance is off. We have been electing magic ponies in our presidential contests, and we have done this while slighting qualities like experience, hard and concrete political accomplishment, even personal maturity. Barack Obama, whatever else he was, was a magic pony. Donald Trump too. Beto O’Rourke, who is so electrifying Democrats, also appears to be a magic pony.

Messrs. Obama and Trump represented a mood. They didn’t ask for or elicit rigorous judgment, they excited voters. Mr. Trump’s election was driven by a feeling of indignation and pushback: You elites treat me like a nobody in my own country, I’m about to show you who’s boss. His supporters didn’t consider it disqualifying that he’d never held office. They saw it as proof he wasn’t in the club and could turn things around. His ignorance was taken as authenticity. In this he was like Sarah Palin, another magic pony.

After two wars and an economic crisis, Mr. Obama gleamed with hope and differentness. This shining 47-year-old intellectual—surely he’ll turn things around. He’d been an obscure and indifferent state legislator who was only two years in the U.S. Senate when the move to make him president began. It was all—a feeling. He was The One. Mr. O’Rourke, who’s shooting up in the polls as a possible Democratic contender, is sunny, friendly, even-keeled. He reminds some Democrats of Bobby Kennedy—soulful, able to see and summon the things you like best in yourself. He even looks like a son of Bobby Kennedy. He is 46, has served only six years in the House, and before that was on the City Council of El Paso, Texas.

Our public political culture has given in too much to emotionalism. Last week at the George H.W. Bush funeral, which functioned as a two-hour portal into the old America, something was unsatisfying. Bush’s political life spanned 30 years. He had a way of seeing the world, thoughts and assumptions about it, a point of view, and these things had an impact on history. But most everyone speaking, and most in the pews, spoke not of the meaning of these things but of his personal qualities. That has its place, but we are talking history here, and the thoughts that produce it. The same was true at John McCain’s funeral.

We are highlighting emotions in our public life at the expense of meaning. And again, emotions are part of life and part of us, but only part, not the whole.

An exultant Chris Christie, cruising to re-election as governor of New Jersey in 2013, told me in an interview what writers don’t understand about modern politics. He said, “They misunderstand what people want from someone in political life right now.” Voters “want someone who’s going to solve their problems. And who’s gonna be practical. . . . And who has a philosophy that they can live with.” Pundits are always trying to check off issues on a list, “and I don’t think that’s what politics is. Politics is a feeling. It’s a visceral reaction to someone. Especially when you’re voting for an executive.”

I didn’t say so at the time, but I personally disapproved: Politics isn’t only a feeling, it’s about thought and judgment, it’s about matters of the head and the heart. But I remember after I quoted him the number of smart people who did not see it differently, who said that guy is pretty smart.

But sober judgment, serious accomplishment, deep knowledge and personal maturity are most important in our political leaders, because of the complexity of the problems we face. History will be confounded that at such a crucial time, trying to come up with a plan to address such issues as artificial intelligence and robotics and the future of work and a rising China and the stresses of the nuclear world, we kept choosing magic ponies and hoping for the best.