Peggy Noonan

Barack Obama, six years into his presidency, does not have a foreign-policy legacy—or, rather, he does and it’s bad. He has a visceral and understandable reluctance to extend and overextend U.S. power, but where that power has been absent, violence and instability have filled the void. When he overcomes his reluctance to get involved, he picks the wrong place, such as Libya, where the tyrant we toppled was better than many of those attempting to take his place.

Syria, red lines, an exploding Mideast, a Russian president who took the American’s measure and made a move, upsetting a hard-built order that had maintained for a quarter-century since the fall of the Soviet Union—what a mess.

In late February, at a Washington meeting of foreign-policy intellectuals, Henry Kissinger summed up part of the past six years: “Ukraine has lost Crimea; Russia has lost Ukraine; the U.S. has lost Russia; the world has lost stability.”

What Barack Obama needs is a foreign-policy win, and not only for reasons of legacy. He considers himself a serious man, he wants to deal constructively with a pressing, high-stakes international question, and none fits that description better than Iran and nuclear weapons. And so the talks in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Here is the fact. The intention behind a deal—to stop Iran from developing, and in the end using, nuclear weapons—could not be more serious and crucial. The Arab world has entered a war phase that may go for decades. Its special threat is that the struggle is not only an essential one—Sunni vs. Shiite, in a fight to the end—but that it engenders and is marked by what British Prime Minister David Cameron has called “the death cult.” Many in the fight have no particular fear of summoning the end of the world.

Once Iran has what used to be called the bomb, there will be a race among nearby nations—Persian Gulf states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey—to get their own. As each state builds its arsenal, there will be an increased chance that freelancers, non-states and sub-states will get their hands on parts of it.

The two most boring words in history are “nuclear proliferation.” Jimmy Carter made them so on Oct. 28, 1980, when, in a presidential debate, he announced that his 12-year-old daughter, Amy, had told him that the great issue of the day was the control of nuclear arms. America laughed: So that’s where the hapless one gets his geopolitical insights.

Nuclear proliferation has been a problem for so long that we no longer talk or think about it. But in the current moment in the Mideast, we’re not talking “nuclear proliferation” in the abstract. It’s more like talking about the spread of nuclear weapons among the inmates of an institution for the criminally insane.

Here I digress, but only to get near the heart of the matter.

There are many reasons nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. One is that the U.S. was not evil and the Soviet Union was not crazy. It was also a triumph of diplomacy, of imperfect but ultimately sound strategic thinking, that kept the unthinkable from happening. (There was luck involved, too.)

Great credit is due also to a book. It is what made the future use of nuclear weapons unthinkable.

“Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun.” That is from the first pages of “Hiroshima,” by the journalist John Hersey, published in a full issue of the New Yorker magazine almost exactly a year after the Aug. 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb on that city. Soon after, the article was published as a book.

Both caused a sensation, painting for the first time, in plain, subdued style, the facts of what really happened when a nuclear weapon was used on a human population. He wrote of people vaporized, radiation sickness and poisoned water. “The fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.” A man reached for a woman and the skin came off her hand like a glove. In a city of 245,000 almost 100,000 were immediately killed, and another 100,000 left desperately sick and wounded.

“Hiroshima” did a huge and historic thing. It not only told the world what happened when a nuclear weapon was used, it single-handedly put a powerful moral taboo on its future use. After “Hiroshima,” which sold millions of copies, no one wanted it to happen again.

But now it is almost 70 years since that book. It isn’t required reading anymore. In that time nuclear weapons have only become more powerful. But the world hasn’t really thought about nuclear war since 1989, as if the threat ended when the Soviet Union did.

What do the wild, young, apocalyptic warriors of the Mideast know of the old taboo?

*   *   *

To Iran, and the negotiations:

What is needed is a deal that keeps Iran from developing nuclear weapons, period. A bad deal will be worse and more dangerous than no deal. A bad deal will—perhaps—slow the deadly project, not end it.

None of the reporting out of Lausanne has suggested that a helpful agreement would emerge. Tuesday’s deadline for production of a basic framework was missed; on Thursday, a framework, the contents of which were not revealed, was announced. But President Obama is not known as a good negotiator. He and his White House have given the impression that they want a deal too much—they need the win. It isn’t good when you let the people on the other side know how much you need it.

Meanwhile there were interesting journalistic reflections from left and right. The headline on Ari Shavit’s April 2 piece in Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, called the talks a “march of folly.” Past sanctions on Iran cratered their economy and forced them to the table, but now, from a position of weakness, he wrote, they are “overcoming the West” with “cunning” and “resolve.” Signs point to a bad deal in June and a bad deal will be dangerous.

K.T. McFarland, writing online for Fox News this week, opposed the talks from a different angle. The “neoconservatives who believe the only way to stop Iran’s bomb is to bomb Iran” are wrong, she said, as is President Obama when he says the choice is a deal or war. “Our policy . . . should not be Obama-style capitulation or Bush-style war,” but increasing political pressure through increased economic sanctions. More than 70% of Iranians are under age 30, Ms. McFarland noted. “How long will they tolerate being ruled by a handful of 80-year-old mullahs who have pushed their economy into free fall?”

Everything about the talks has had the look of a bad deal, one that will not stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions but will allow that nation, in Mr. Shavit’s words, to “cast a giant shadow on world peace.”

Mr. Obama should have walked when Tuesday’s deadline failed to hold. Absent an ultimate deal, something good can always happen down the road. With a bad final deal nothing good will happen, and bad things will surely follow.

In the end he should toughen the sanctions and wait out the mullahs. No one in America would be angry. Most would think “Wow, if he walked, it must have been a terrible deal—give him credit for trying!” Everyone else would be relieved.

That would enhance his foreign-policy legacy. That would be a win.

And so it begins. Ted Cruz announced Monday, the first major Republican to declare for the presidency. More will soon follow. I am happy because I suffer from a deep, bizarre and pretty American aberration: I love politics. Politics is serious, earnest, crucial, necessary—the venue in which we decide much of our country’s future. Beyond that I love the great game of it—the wins and losses, flubs and failures. The mess, the occasional glory. Even at its most disappointing high politics is the greatness game. Its necessities—caring, taking part, voting—remind us that, as Laurens van der Post once said, we are living not only our own lives but the life of our times.

Every four years political enthusiasts, especially younger ones, say earnestly that this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Many of us have lived through more than one of those. But I can say what this election will most assuredly be, at least on the Republican side: anything but boring. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton may wind up debating herself on an empty stage with good lighting. But Republicans will have Scott Walker,Jeb Bush,Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul,Mike Huckabee,Marco Rubio and probably John Kasich duking it out. Add Carly Fiorina, and some others. There are some great debaters in that group, serious talents with big accomplishments and very different views. If you want a preview, go to any breakfast, lunch or dinner with conservatives and Republicans in America and hear them argue the case for their guy—while they figure out who their guy is. Boring is not on the menu. “We don’t need another Bush!” “Walker’s the one with guts!” “Kasich will surprise everybody.”

What a heck of a fight this will be.

And now, as Ted Cruz often says, let’s get back to Ted Cruz. The latest conventional wisdom is that he is not to be discounted. The latest conventional wisdom is correct.

His announcement Monday at Liberty University was a wow, really brilliant. It’s giving future contenders announcement envy. They’re all going to have to up their game and produce an announcement that’s dynamic, rousing, and shows at least someone is excited about their entry.

It had all the elements. It was a surprise, it was the first of the year, it was beautifully produced—a big bowl of cheering students, some enthusiastically and some because if they had to be there at least they weren’t in class. Mr. Cruz prowled the stage like the showman he is, delivering a full speech without notes. He was like a Sunday morning preacher in a midsize megachurch on a local TV station.

His guiding insight is that only an undiluted conservative can rouse the base to get out the vote that failed to come out in 2008 and ’12. He says he can bring back the Reagan coalition. I don’t know how you reassemble a coalition from 30-plus years ago in a demographically and politically evolving nation, but we’ll see.

A person with intimate knowledge of Mr. Cruz’s thinking told me last week that the senator sees the GOP base in terms of bracketology. A sizable portion of the base is composed of moderates, another of conservative/tea party activists. Then there are evangelicals, then libertarians. Mr. Cruz’s plan is to nail down his own bracket, conservative/tea party. At the same time he is going for evangelicals, big time, which is why he announced at Jerry Falwell’s university and not in Texas. Mike Huckabee is strong with evangelicals, but Mr. Cruz figures that while he can take some of that bracket, Mr. Huckabee won’t be able to get any of the tea party because of his spending record as governor of Arkansas.

Mr. Cruz believes he’s the only candidate who can compete with Rand Paul in the libertarian bracket. He sees a sweet spot with those who are economically libertarian but have doubts about Mr. Paul’s foreign policy.

The moderate bracket is crowded. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, others—a fight in a phone booth.

Mr. Cruz knows either Mr. Rubio or Mr. Walker could fight him in his brackets. But he thinks they’ll mostly compete in the moderate bracket, where Mr. Bush will get roughed up. Mr. Cruz won’t win moderates, but that underscores his point: A moderate GOP nominee won’t win the general election because parts of the Republican base won’t come out.

Mr. Cruz knows his reputation as the angry, surly face of the dark side of conservatism. He’s the government-shutdown artist, the living answer to the question “What if Joe McCarthy went to Harvard Law?” He says it’s a caricature.

He once noted to me in conversation that when people on TV call him angry and snarling, they never show video to illustrate the point. He says there is no angry, snarling video because he isn’t angry and doesn’t snarl. He never throws mud, he says, and won’t. He sees himself as a happy warrior.

I don’t think the snarling image thing is his main problem. He has two others.

One is much remarked upon. He is 44 and a first-term senator. He entered the national stage less than three years ago, though it seems like longer because he made himself so famous so fast. He talks about Reagan, but Reagan in 1980 had been a union president, two-term governor of a huge state, candidate for the GOP nomination in 1976, and longtime leader of modern conservatism. He had been an executive; he had run things; his accomplishments could be measured.

Mr. Cruz here is not like Reagan. He’s like a first-term senator named Barack Obama, 45 when he announced.

This prompts a major 2016 question: Did Mr. Obama permanently lower the bar? Did his winning and holding the presidency with such limited experience, and his governing in many eyes so unsuccessfully, leave a whole generation of politicians thinking “I can do that!” and “Even I can do better than that!” Or, after Mr. Obama, will there be among Republicans voters a hunger for deeper biography? Is the country in the mood for more on-the-job presidential training?

Mr. Cruz’s second problem has to do with words like sincerity, earnestness, ingenuousness. His conservatism is serious—fully thought through, studied, internalized. But who is he? I think of the comment of one of his fellow conservative senators: “He’s a complete charlatan, you know.” He did the shutdown, said that senator, not because it might work or help but because it served his breakout plan: be the guy who convinces the base he’s the only one they can trust. The senator’s implication: It’s a game to this guy.

It is not hard to notice that every Cruz conversation, every interview, seems to be the rote performance of a speech. In public, and often in private, he moves his hands and face and modulates his voice like a TV pro. Politicians have to be actors, but the trick is to be an actor without being a phony.

Slickness is not a virtue in a politician, and obvious oiliness is a drawback. Mr. Cruz needs some awkward lessons. Maybe he can call Rick Perry.

The 2016 presidential campaign is here, pushed up prematurely by the Hillary Clinton email controversy. When a major candidate of a major party has major trouble, the election moves more sharply into focus.

Apart from Mrs. Clinton, small stories have begun to shoot up like flares.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker shied away from the accomplished and interesting Liz Mair, who had agreed to be digital strategist in his social media operation. She had tweeted some indiscreet, funny and provocative things about Iowans—the word “morons” was involved—and is also moderate or liberal on various social issues. She was not signing on as a domestic or foreign-policy adviser, but even campaign staffers now, in political oppo culture, are the target of full Internet body frisks.

There was something sad in the story. Now of all times you want to see candidates include a wide variety of voices, including irreverent and especially creative ones. A diverse party with everyone in on the fight, no loyalty oaths or litmus tests, is what is needed. But that kind of decision probably wouldn’t come from a candidate whose breakout plan begins with the word Iowa.

Mike Huckabee has, amazingly, been revealed by the New York Times as hawking, for money, an unorthodox diabetes cure in an Internet infomercial. I watched it. He comes across as a smooth, friendly huckster or a teddy-bearish snake-oil salesman, which is not how a presidential candidate would normally want to look. Once a young journalist, looking at a photo of Paul Ryan in gym shorts and sleeveless T-shirt with his cap on backward and lifting barbells, said, musingly, “That’s a real congressman move.” Hawking magical elixirs is a real Arkansas governor move.

The president has jumped into the strangeness fray by musing aloud that mandatory voting in the United States would be a good idea. “It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he told an audience in Cleveland. Yes, it would. It would mean a lot of people who aren’t interested in public policy and choose not to follow it would suddenly be deciding it.

The way it is now, if you aren’t interested—and you have the right not to be interested—you don’t have to vote. If you are interested, you pay attention, develop political views, and vote. Making those who don’t care about voting vote will only dilute the votes of those who are serious and have done their democratic homework.

Most of us are moved by the sight of citizens lined up at the polls on Election Day. We should urge everyone to care enough to stand in that line. But we should not harass or bother those who, with modesty and even generosity, say they are happy to leave the privilege of the ballot to those who are engaged. Mandatory voting is, so far, the worst and most mischievous political idea of the year, and deeply eccentric.

I detect more than the usual amount of uncertainty and angst among the leadership of both parties this year, and it is due to doubts about their putative front-runners.

Democratic establishment angst is composed of obvious and less obvious elements. Obvious: They worry Mrs. Clinton’s email-gate will linger, and they’re afraid of more scandals tumbling out of the Clinton Foundation closet. They fear the constant regurgitation of old scandals. They’re afraid they’ll have no sway when future embarrassments and controversies come. She’s Hillary, she does it her way, she keeps it close, it’s a tight circle.

Less obvious: She’s all they have.

By that I don’t mean there is no one else who can run. It’s a shallow bench, but a bench. I mean that for all her flaws Hillary Clinton is the only major Democrat who can keep the Democratic Party together in this cycle.

Without Hillary the party will probably lurch left. And if it lurches left it’ll probably lose the general election. Democrats will break up into left-progressives, way-left-progressives, populists of different stripe, older moderates and centrists. The left is no longer passionate about Mr. Obama because he is not left-wing enough. Hillary Clinton holds the party together with her Hillaryness—her popularity with the base, her connection to the Clinton years, her sex. The idea of the first female president in a party increasingly preoccupied with identity and gender politics is a powerful ideological glue.

Hillary, to the general public, comes across as centrist. In part this is because she is associated with her husband’s ultimate moderation, and in part because she has grown more moderate over the years, at least in the sense of playing ball with various entrenched powers. She is certainly hawkish. Her popularity and persona will keep her party seeming centrist, even if she inches to the left to appease sizable parts of the base, and to show her heart is still with them.

But I think an untold story of 2016 is that the Democratic establishment is desperate when Mrs. Clinton is in trouble because without her they see a fracturing of their party.

We focus on the GOP and its dramas with what is called the far right. We pay no heed to the Democrats and their dramas and challenges from what is never called their far left.

There’s a balancing angst among many Republicans. It is connected to the fact that Jeb Bush is broadly considered a front-runner, if not the front-runner. And at the end of the day Bushes always break the party.

George H.W. Bush didn’t mean to but he did, in 1990, when he gambled that the economy would rise and its rise would justify his rescinding of his no-new-taxes pledge. Instead he got a recession. Thus was born Pat Buchanan’s candidacy for the presidency and what in retrospect was the first iteration of the tea party. Mr. Bush lost the election.

George W. Bush broke his party after his 2004 re-election, in part with his immigration proposals and the way he advanced them, with aides insulting his GOP opponents—“nativist,” they said—and, in the end, by two unwon wars. Add the crash and the presidency was closed to the Republicans for at least eight years. Mr. Bush gambled that the wars would be victorious, that the party that loved him would march to the banner of an immigration agenda that did not take their legitimate anxieties into account. He left a party more broken, less a whole.

But what’s different about Jeb Bush is this: His father and brother surprised the base with their decisions after they had won the presidency. Jeb is declaring before he wins that he will take particular stands at odds with many in the base—for comprehensive immigration reform, for the Common Core.

He said the other day he’s doing it because he has “a backbone.” That’s a strut, not an argument. It will be interesting to hear the argument. He should meet—publicly—with anti-Common-Core parents, take every question, answer every criticism, and make his case with data and through the prism of experience.

Same with immigration. Take all comers.

That would show backbone. That will get others, not just him, saying he has it.

Maybe we’re not stuck in Scandal Land.

For a while I’ve assumed Hillary Clinton would run for her party’s nomination and be a formidable candidate in the general election. After Tuesday’s news conference I’m not so sure.

Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners, and when she did she couldn’t sustain it. She looked at the ceiling and down at notes, trying, it seemed, to stick to or remember scripted arguments. She was shaky. She couldn’t fake good cheer and confidence. It is seven years since she ran for office. You could see it.

Her claims—she stayed off the State Department email system for “convenience,” she thought “it would be easier to carry just one device,” her server “contains personal communications from my husband and me”—were so transparent, so quickly disprovable. Minutes later journalists were posting earlier statements in which she said she carries two devices, and The Wall Street Journal’s report saying Bill has sent only two emails in his life.

This wasn’t high-class spin. These were not respectable dodges. They didn’t make you grudgingly tip your hat at a gift for duplicity. I could almost feel an army of oppo people of both parties saying, “You can do better than that, Hillary!”

This wasn’t the work of a national, high-grade political response team, it was the thrown-together mess of someone who knew she was guilty of self-serving actions, who didn’t herself believe what she was saying, who didn’t think the press would swallow it, and who didn’t appear to care.

She didn’t look hungry for the battle, she looked tired of the battle.

Everyone knows what the scandal is. She didn’t want a paper trail of her decisions and actions as secretary of state. She didn’t want to be questioned about them, ever. So she didn’t join the government’s paper-trail system, in this case the State Department’s official email system, which retains and archives records. She built her own private system and got to keep complete control of everything she’d done or written. She no doubt assumed no one outside would ask and no one inside would insist—she’s Hillary, don’t mess with her.

She knew the story might blow but maybe it wouldn’t, worth the chance considering the payoff: secrecy. If what she did became public she’d deal with it then. When this week she was forced to, she stonewalled: “The server will remain private.”

Is it outrageous? Of course. Those are U.S. government documents she concealed and destroyed. The press is not covering for her and hard questions are being asked because everyone knows what the story is. It speaks of who she is and how she will govern. Everyone knows it.

She knows it too.

At the news conference she seemed like a 20th-century figure in a 21st-century world. Her critics complain it’s the 1990s returning but it isn’t, it’s only the dark side of the 90s without the era’s peace and prosperity.

Mrs. Clinton is said to be preparing to announce her candidacy for the presidency in three to four weeks. But did that look like the news conference of a candidate about to announce? It lacked any air of confidence or certitude. For a year the press has been writing about the burgeoning Clinton Shadow Campaign. Where’s the real one?

Defenses of Mrs. Clinton were ad hoc, improvised, flat-footed. It all looks disorderly, as if no one’s in charge, no one has drawn clear lines of responsibility or authority. We hear about loyalists, intimates, allies, pals, hangers-on, Friends of Hill. People buzz around her like bees on random paths to the queen.

In 2008 Barack Obama had impressive, disciplined people around him—David Axelrod,Robert Gibbs,David Plouffe. I remember thinking at the time that they were something unusual in politics: normal. Hillary has people like David Brock, a right-wing hit man who became a left-wing hit man. Who’s he supposed to do outreach to, the other weirdos?

Is this thing really happening? Is the much-vaunted campaign coming together?

After the news conference I thought what I never expected to think: Maybe she doesn’t really want this. Maybe that’s what this incompetence is meant to be signaling.

Here I will speculate, but imagine being Hillary Clinton right now:

Her mother, the rock of her life, died in 2011. In the past years she’s had health issues. She’s tired, having worked at the highest levels of American life the past 25 years. She’s in the middle of a scandal and, being Hillary, knows that others might pop along the way.

Add this: Maybe she thought her ideological hunger, which was real, would sustain her throughout her life, and it hasn’t.

Maybe what happened to her, in part, is the homes of her Manhattan mega-donors. She’s been in the grand townhouses and Park Avenue apartments since 1992. She’d go in and be met and she saw what they had. Beauty. Ease. Fine art of a particular, modern sort, the kind that is ugly, that reminds its owners that just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t understand that life is hard, painful, incoherent. It is protective, cautionary, abstract and costs $20 million a picture.

But what lives they have! Grace and comfort and they don’t have to worry about the press, they don’t have to feel on the run, they don’t have to press the flesh with nobodies.

She’d like those things! But she went into “public service” and had to live on some bum-squat-Egypt Southern governor’s salary.

She wanted what they have. They’re her friends, no more talented than she. But they went to Wall Street and are oozing in dough. She stayed in the lane she was in. And she figures she missed out on the prosperity her husband presided over.

She has her causes—women’s rights, income inequality. But she can advance them in other ways.

Maybe she isn’t really hungry enough for the presidency anymore. And maybe she doesn’t have illusions anymore. She’s funded by Wall Street. Her opponent will be funded by Wall Street.

Maybe she’s of two minds about what she wants. But it’s not really hunger that’s propelling her now, its Newton’s law of inertia: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Maybe she thinks about another line of work, a surprising fourth act. She likes to be served, be admired, be taken care of by staff. But you can get those things without being president. If you are wealthy, and she is now—and maybe that was the purpose of all those six-figure speeches—you can get those things easily.

Maybe she doesn’t, really, want to run. Maybe she’s not sure she can. Or maybe she’ll go for it: It’s what she’s been going toward all her life.

Maybe Democrats who saw that news conference will sense an opening and jump in. There’s the myth of the empty bench, but it won’t be empty if she leaves it. That’s another law of physics: Nature abhors a vacuum.

We all talk so much about the presidency and who’s got the best chance. Maybe it’s not Hillary. Maybe that’s over and no one knows, even her.

Doesn’t the latest Hillary Clinton scandal make you want to throw up your hands and say: Do we really have to do this again? Do we have to go back there? People assume she is our next president. We are defining political deviancy down.

The scandal this week is that we have belatedly found out, more than two years after she left the office of secretary of state, that throughout Mrs. Clinton’s four-year tenure she did not conduct official business through the State Department email system. She had her own private email addresses and her own private Internet domain, on her own private server at one of her own private homes, in Chappaqua, N.Y. Which means she had, and has, complete control of the emails. If a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking to see emails of the secretary of state, the State Department had nothing to show. If Congress asked to see them, State could say there was nothing to see. (Two months ago, on the request of State, Mrs. Clinton turned over a reported 55,000 pages of her emails. She and her private aides apparently got to pick which ones.)

Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat because she might have been doing a great deal of interesting work in those emails, not only with respect to immediate and unfolding international events but with respect to those who would like to make a positive impression on the American secretary of state by making contributions to the Clinton Foundation, which not only funds many noble causes but is the seat of operations of Clinton Inc. and its numerous offices, operatives, hangers-on and campaign-in-waiting?

What a low and embarrassing question. It is prompted by last week’s scandal—that the Clinton Foundation accepted foreign contributions during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. It is uncomfortable to ask such questions, but that’s the thing with the Clintons, they always make you go there.

The mainstream press is all over the story now that it has blown. It’s odd that it took so long. Everyone at State, the White House, and the rest of the government who received an email from the secretary of state would have seen where it was coming from—a nongovernmental address. You’d think someone would have noticed.

With the exception of the moment Wednesday when a hardy reporter from TMZ actually went to an airport and shouted a query at Mrs. Clinton—it was just like the old days of journalism, with a stakeout and shouted queries—Mrs. Clinton hasn’t been subjected to any questions from the press. She’ll slide, she’ll glide, she’ll skate. (With TMZ she just walked on, smiling.)

Why would she ignore regulations to opt out of the State email system? We probably see the answer in a video clip posted this week on Buzzfeed. Mrs. Clinton, chatting with a supporter at a fundraiser for her 2000 Senate campaign, said: “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I . . . ever want to do email?”

But when you’re secretary of state you have to. So she did it her way, with complete control. It will make it harder, if not impossible, for investigators.

The press is painting all this as a story about how Mrs. Clinton, in her love for secrecy and control, has given ammunition to her enemies. But that’s not the story. The story is that this is what she does, and always has. The rules apply to others, not her. She’s special, entitled, exempt from the rules—the rules under which, as the Federalist reports, the State Department in 2012 forced the resignation of a U.S. ambassador, “in part for setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail system.”

Why doesn’t the legacy press swarm her on this? Because she is political royalty. They are used to seeing her as a regal, queenly figure. They’ve been habituated to understand that Mrs. Clinton is not to be harried, not to be subjected to gotcha questions or impertinent grilling. She is a Democrat, a star, not some grubby Republican governor from nowhere. And they don’t want to be muscled by her spokesmen. The wildly belligerent Philippe Reines sends reporters insulting, demeaning emails if they get out of line. He did it again this week. It is effective in two ways. One is that it diverts attention from his boss, makes Mr. Reines the story, and in the process makes her look comparatively sane. The other is that reporters don’t want a hissing match with someone who implies he will damage them. They can’t afford to be frozen out. She’s probably the next president: Their careers depend on access.

But how will such smash-mouth tactics play the next four, five years?

Back to the questions at the top of the column.

Sixteen years ago, when she was first running for the Senate, I wrote a book called “The Case Against Hillary Clinton.” I waded through it all—cattle futures, Travelgate, the lost Rose law firm records, women slimed as bimbos, foreign campaign cash, the stealth and secrecy that marked the creation of the health-care plan, Monica, the vast right-wing conspiracy. As I researched I remembered why, four years into the Clinton administration, the New York Times columnist William Safire called Hillary “a congenital liar . . . compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.”

Do we have to go through all that again?

In 1992 the Clintons were new and golden. Now, so many years later, their reputation for rule breaking and corruption is so deep, so assumed, that it really has become old news. And old news isn’t news.

An aspect of the story goes beyond criticism of Mrs. Clinton and gets to criticism of us. A generation or two ago, a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.

What happened? Why is her party so in her thrall?

She’s famous? The run itself makes you famous. America didn’t know who Jack Kennedy was in 1959; in 1961 he was king of the world. The same for Obama in ’08.

Money? Sure she’s the superblitz shock-and-awe queen of fundraising, but pretty much any Democrat in a 50/50 country would be able to raise what needs to be raised.

She’s a woman? There are other women in the Democratic Party.

She’s inevitable? She was inevitable in 2008. Then, suddenly, she was evitable.

Her talent is for survival. This on its own terms is admirable and takes grit. But others have grit. As for leadership, she has a sharp tactical sense but no vision, no overall strategic sense of where we are and where we must go.

What is freezing the Democrats is her mystique. But mystique can be broken. A nobody called Obama broke hers in 2008.

Do we really have to return to Scandal Land? It’s what she brings wherever she goes. And it’s not going to stop.

Thoughts on the 2016 primaries:

No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it is weird and disturbing.

Republicans are the action, and will draw all the lightning. A read on where the base—huge, broad and varied, including but not limited to attendees of this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference—is:

Republicans this year are not looking for Reagan. They’re looking for Churchill. They’re looking for the guy who knows the war is already here, not the guy who knows the war can be averted if we defeat the guys who would wage it. What is “the war”? Everything from scarily sluggish economic growth to long-term liabilities and deficits; from the melting away of the post-World-War-II order to the Mideast to domestic terrorism. Every four years there is frustration and argument; this year there is urgency.

What the Republican Party needs in a presidential candidate is not a centrist who can make the sale to conservatives in the primaries; it is a conservative who can win over centrists in the general election. That means the Republican nominee should be a man or woman who can redefine conservative thinking for current circumstances and produce policies that centrists and independents will find worthy of consideration.

Jeb Bush is said by some and treated by many as the front-runner, the one to beat. I don’t see it. In fact I think he’s making a poor impression.

It’s a commonplace to say nobody’s watching this early. But some people are, especially activists in the base and the mainstream media, which is picking up impressions that will harden into widespread clichés. What are they seeing?

Mr. Bush is spending much of his time in The Rooms—offices and conference rooms—with millionaires and billionaires. Money in politics is very important, and Mr. Bush makes a great impression on the denizens of The Rooms. He speaks their language. They like his experience, the fluency with which he speaks of domestic policy. Here his family name helps him; they know he is politically vetted, a successful former governor, is respectful of the imperatives of business, and is bottom-line sane.

It is going so well that Patrick O’Connor of the Journal reported this week the Bush team is asking fundraisers who want to join the campaign’s top tier to collect $500,000 by the end of March. But veteran bundlers expect it will cost more “to reach the inner circle . . . because deep-pocketed donors have been so eager to write big checks.”

All this reflects a deliberate allocating of the candidate’s time. The Bush campaign will vacuum up money now and be interesting and compelling later. They’re trying to force rivals out of the race by picking up their potential donors and leaving nothing but crumbs.

Mr. Bush’s operation is also, according to the New York Times, muscling party strategists and policy specialists to advise only him and no one else. Again a message is sent: Be with us now or we’ll remember later. It sounds tough and Clintonian. Actually it looks less like a sales pitch than a hostile takeover.

There’s something tentative and joyless in Mr. Bush’s public presentations. He isn’t mixing it up with voters or wading into the crowd. So far he is not good at the podium. His recent foreign-policy speech was both bland and jangly, and its one memorable statement—“I am my own man”—was the kind of thing a candidate shouldn’t have to say.

What is most missing so far is a fierce sense of engagement, a passionate desire to lead America out of the morass, a fiery—or Churchillian—certainty that he is the man for the moment. In its place we see a softer, wanner I’m smart, accomplished, know policy, and it’s my turn.

I am not sure Mr. Bush likes the base. If he doesn’t, it would explain some of his discomfort. I am wondering if he sees the base as a challenge, not a home, something he has to manage, not something he is of. He was perhaps referring to this in December when he said you have “to lose the primary to win the general.” Actually you have to win it, but to really succeed you have to show you share the base’s heart, that you understand its beginning points and align with it on essentials. When you disagree with it you address those issues among friends, and with confidence. You can’t cover up differences in a passive-aggressive way—at their feet when you really want to be at their throat.

A certain resistance to the idea of Mr. Bush is bubbling up among some journalists and intellectuals. In an arresting piece in the Atlantic, David Frum asked if he is the Republican Obama —essentially bicultural, interested in transforming a nation he finds lacking. “Both Jeb Bush and Barack Obama are men who have openly and publicly struggled with their ambivalence about their family inheritance. Both responded by leaving the place of their youth to create new identities for themselves: Barack Obama, as an organizer in the poor African-American neighborhoods of Chicago; Jeb Bush in Mexico, Venezuela, and at last in Cuban-influenced Miami. Both are men who have talked a great deal about the feeling of being ‘between two worlds,’ ” Mr. Obama in his books and Mr. Bush in his speeches. “Both chose wives who would more deeply connect them to their new chosen identity. Both derived from their new identity a sharp critique of their nation as it is. Both have built their campaign for president upon a deep commitment to fundamental transformation of their nation into what they believe it should be.”

Jim Geraghty of National Review writes of “considerable evidence that there’s a lot of Jeb-skepticism out there among conservatives.” Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard says Mr. Bush may be “cornering the market” on professional Republicans but asks: “What is the case for a Bush restoration, beyond the fact that it would make the professional GOP comfortable once again? Why should average Republican primary voters—the insurance salesmen and truck drivers, not pollsters and policy advisers—choose Jeb over Scott Walker, Chris Christie , Ted Cruz, or the dozen other potential nominees?”

These are respected voices read by many conservatives.

Finally, this week’s polls—yes, it’s early—offer Mr. Bush little comfort. A Quinnipiac poll in Iowa has him coming in fifth, behind Mr. Walker, Rand Paul , Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee . Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post noted the really bad news for Mr. Bush is that he was well known among respondents “and not all that well liked”—41% favorable to 40% unfavorable. A national survey from Public Policy Polling shows Mr. Walker in the lead at 25%, with Mr. Carson at 18%, and Mr. Bush in third place with 17%.

The road is long. Maybe Jeb Bush will succeed. But no one should bow to his inevitability. He doesn’t have a better chance with Republican voters than some other possible candidates, and may have less.

Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.

“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)

Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far successful organization whose members mean business. Their mettle should not be doubted. ISIS controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and intends to restore, and expand, the caliphate. Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the banned London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized ISIS’ laws of war as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes, “because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”

ISIS has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are believed to have joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. . . . The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”

The scale of the savagery is difficult to comprehend and not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.

The West, Mr. Wood argues, has been misled “by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. . . . The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers,” drawn largely from the disaffected. “But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Its actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bring about the apocalypse.”

Mr. Wood acknowledges that ISIS reflects only one, minority strain within Islam. “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”

He quotes Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on ISIS’ theology. The group’s fighters, Mr. Haykel says, “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition,” and denials of its religious nature spring from embarrassment, political correctness and an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

The Islamic State is different from al Qaeda and almost all other jihadist movements, according to Mr. Wood, “in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character.” Its spokesman has vowed: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” They believe we are in the End of Days. They speak of how “the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria.” The battle will be Rome’s Waterloo. After that, a countdown to the apocalypse.

Who exactly is “Rome”? That’s unclear. Maybe Turkey, maybe any infidel army. Maybe America.

What should the West do to meet the challenge? Here Mr. Wood’s tone turns more tentative. We should help the Islamic State “self-immolate.”

Those urging America to commit tens of thousand of troops “should not be dismissed too quickly.” ISIS is, after all, an avowedly genocidal and expansionist organization, and its mystique can be damaged if it loses its grip on the territory it holds. Al Qaeda, from which ISIS is estranged and which it has eclipsed, can operate as an underground network. ISIS cannot, “because territorial authority is a requirement.”

But ISIS wants to draw America into the fight. A U.S. invasion and occupation, Mr. Wood argues, would be a propaganda victory for them, because they’ve long said the U.S. has always intended to embark on a modern-day crusade against Islam. And if a U.S. ground invasion launched and failed, it would be a disaster.

The best of bad options, Mr. Wood believes, is to “slowly bleed” ISIS through air strikes and proxy warfare. The Kurds and the Shiites cannot vanquish them, but they can “keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand.” That would make it look less like “the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammed. ” As time passed ISIS could “stagnate” and begin to sink. Word of its cruelties would spread; it could become another failed state.

But that death, as Mr. Wood notes, “is unlikely to be quick,” and any number of things could go wrong, including a dangerous rapprochement with al Qaeda.

Mr. Wood’s piece is bracing because it is fearless—he is apparently not afraid of being called a bigot or an Islamophobe. It is important because it gives people, especially political leaders, information they need to understand a phenomenon that may urgently shape U.S. foreign policy for the next 10 years.

In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama administration’s willful delusions and dodges. They reached their height this week when State Department spokesman Marie Harf talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists, such as “lack of opportunity for jobs.” She later went on CNN to explain: “Where there’s a lack of governance, you’ve had young men attracted to this terrorist cause where there aren’t other opportunities. . . . So how do you get at that root causes?” She admitted her view “might be too nuanced of an argument for some.”

Yes, it might.

It isn’t about getting a job. They have a job: waging jihad.

The president famously cannot even name the ISIS threat forthrightly, and that is a criticism not of semantics but of his thinking. ISIS isn’t the only terrorist group, he says, Christians have committed their own sins over history, what about the Crusades, don’t get on your high horse. It’s all so evasive. Each speech comes across as an attempt to make up for the previous speech’s mistakes in tone and substance. At the “violent extremism” summit this week he emphasized Islamic “legitimate grievances” and lectured America on the need for tolerance toward American Muslims.

Of extremists he said: “They say they are religious leaders—they are not religious leaders, they are terrorists.” But ISIS and its followers believe they are religious leaders, prophets who use terrorism to achieve aims they find in religious texts.

On the closing day of the summit the president said, “When people are oppressed and human rights are denied . . . when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism.” Yes, sure. But isn’t ISIS oppressing people, denying their human rights and silencing dissent?

“When peaceful democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only available answer.” Yes, sure. But the young men and women ISIS recruits from Western nations already live in peaceful democracies.

It’s not enough. They want something else. It is, ironically, disrespectful not to name what they are, and what they are about.

I was at dinner at the home of a friend, a journalist, when the phone rang. I heard her say, “Oh no, no,” and saw her face: Something terrible had happened, not to her personally but in the world. She got off and told us that Bob Simon, the CBS News correspondent, had died. I knew she was about to add, “in the Mideast,” or “shot down,” but she said “a car crash,” on New York’s West Side Highway. My first thought was: What an injustice. Bob Simon, who covered Vietnam, the Troubles in Ireland, the Gulf Wars, who was taken prisoner by Saddam Hussein —Bob should have left in the thick of it, in a war, dodging bullets. Nothing banal should have taken that soul away.

He was a bona fide and veteran foreign correspondent. I knew him at CBS, where I am now a contributor, a young man but already a person of stature, known for daring and judgment. He was different from the clichés of his job: He didn’t have movie-star looks or a polished baritone. But he had guts, flair, the mind of a reporter and a clear, clean writing style that, on inspection, was more than clear and clean.

All CBS, the next day, was in mourning. “Oh my God, this place just dissolved,” said his “60 Minutes” colleague Lesley Stahl. “Everybody here loved Bob Simon.” She had just come from a meeting of the show’s staff. “Everyone spoke, from the control room to reporters to editors to assistants, and everybody said basically the same thing, which is what he really wanted to be was a regular guy. . . . He didn’t want to be a big TV star, he didn’t want the trappings.” He wanted to walk the streets unrecognized.

“He was no-bull about people and things,” said John Reade, a former CBS News producer who worked with Simon for three decades. “His attitude toward news was ‘Get a load of this!’” It wasn’t indignation or “Are you kidding me?” It was, as Mr. Reade put it, “Get a load of this, it’s beautiful!”

He wasn’t dramatic or self-valorizing. “He didn’t take unnecessary chances, he took necessary ones,” said Mr. Reade. He protected his crew. “Television is a collaborative business. A finished piece, if it’s well-shot, well-cut, well-written, well-narrated, is a gem the whole crew can enjoy. They were proud to work with him.”

Both praised his writing. Ms. Stahl: “He was maybe the best writer for television news alive. He could get more feeling and thinking in a piece than anybody else. There was almost a moral quality to his work. A lot of his stories dealt with injustice, and there was a simplicity to his writing, a poetic succinctness.”

And he had range. “He covered a lot of war, a lot of violence—wherever there was any kind of explosion, there he went. But he also loved music and has a body of work about opera, orchestras, young musicians.”

Once a former president of CBS News suggested he get voice lessons, and everyone at “60 Minutes” groaned: “This is Bob—you can’t take Bob away from Bob,” Ms. Stahl remembered the thinking. “His writing and his voice were the same thing.”

Bob Simon was 73. He was the real thing.

*   *   *

And now the counterpoint. Some thoughts on Brian Williams.

I watched like everyone else the past 10 days, at first thinking one bad embarrassment does not sink a career, and then seeing the embarrassments pile up. An acquaintance, a journalist, quoted an old Japanese saying to the effect that people forget everything after 2½ months. I think we forget the specifics, the ins and outs of a scandal, but we retain the essential word that captures it, and the word here is lies. That isn’t a word that can be attached to the public face of a major news organization.

I think NBC essentially ended Mr. Williams’s career as anchor of the evening news, and did what they had to do.

He could not continue as a reporter of the news, or an interviewer who elicits news, because he could no longer report or grill when the story is lies. And in modern America the story is always lies. The 2016 presidential campaign has already begun. There will be famous gaffes, fibs, embarrassments, embellishments. How can an anchor or reporter ask questions when his own tendency to invent and embellish is well-established and a subject of national mirth?

Why did he invent tales of Bob Simon-like derring-do? He was already at the top and he was brave in the sense that everyone who goes to where the explosions are is showing physical courage. He was impressive without embellishments.

He probably doesn’t know himself. Watching the story unfold I thought of a line from the 1974 film “The Gambler”: “They’re all looking to lose.” Everyone who gambles isn’t only looking for the high, the score, the win but also for the other thing they need, the loss, the brush with death, the adrenal jolt of being ruined.

Mr. Williams’s fictions look very much like a form of gambling. They say he was warned, and he didn’t stop. He must have known each time he was telling an untruth that he was heightening the risk he’d be caught. He came up in the age of videotape and reigned in the age of the Internet. Someone was going to find something, and year by year they didn’t. He added to his stories the way a gambler on a streak increases his bets. “The rocket hit a helicopter” became ‘the rocket hit my helicopter,’ the crime in New Orleans became the gangs that overran his hotel.

Lessons? Anchors shouldn’t be allowed to become anchor-monsters. When management knows its anchor tells tall tales, it has to have the means to stop him. Things that are too big to fail, fail.

No one is safe anymore. Status is no longer a buffer. We know this in the abstract, but it’s still startling in the particular. Technology makes scandal faster and more completely devastating.

They can hurt you with tape but kill you with laughter. Many people, uncoordinated and unaffiliated, can bring down a target by doing a full frisk of past statements on the Internet, that incredible tool. But as powerful a weapon is anarchic wit. If you went to #BrianWilliamsMisremembers on Twitter , you laughed at the picture of him standing with Lincoln on the battlefield, or reporting live, apparently as St. Joseph, on the birth of Christ. American wit is in very good form, and it can be lethal. It wasn’t only investigative work that shaped the outcome of the Brian Williams story, it was the number of people laughing.

America is hungry for authenticity and honesty and fiercely resents its absence from places where it should be.

A longtime reader of this column, age 84, emailed recently to say the heartbreak of his life the past few years has been witnessing the daily corruption of all information—the rigging of numbers and claiming of facts, the scientific papers that manipulate data to advance a political agenda, the misleading government statistics. We’re drowning in lies, he said.

That is not an exaggeration.