Peggy Noonan

At the end of the first Gulf War I saw something that startled me and gave me pause. More than 20 years later I can still see the image in my mind, so vivid was the impression it made.

It was June 8, 1991. America had just won a dazzling victory. We’d won a war in a hundred hours. Saddam Hussein had folded like a cheap suit and slunk out of Kuwait. The troops were coming home and the airwaves were full of joyous reunions. It was good.

Then the startling thing: There was a huge, full-scale military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington—two miles of troops, tanks, helicopters, even missiles. They marched from the Capitol past the White House, where there was a reviewing stand full of dignitaries. An F-117 stealth fighter streamed overhead.

I watched it on the news, from New York. When I saw the tanks, those big heavy bruisers, rolling down the avenue, it looked to me for all the world like a May Day parade in the Brezhnev era—militarist, nationalist, creepy. The journalist Michael Kelly captured some of the feel of it in the afterword of his book, “Martyr’s Day.” The parade was “a splendid evocation of military might and military discipline,” yet he found it “oddly disquieting.”

Disquieting was exactly the word. It was all such a rolling brag for a brief engagement we’d won with brains, guts and superior technology. More important, the size and nature of the parade seemed to suggest we were forgetting something: that war is a tragedy. People die in wars, the brave are sacrificed. War is sometimes necessary but always a mark of failure, the last bloody stop after breakdowns of diplomacy and judgment on all sides. War isn’t something you throw a fizzy party for while showing off your shining hardware.

We had discovered how to brag. We had discovered how to beat our breasts with triumphalism and rub the world’s nose in our superior strength. We’d gotten through World Wars I and II barely saying a word. The parade struck me not as a thanksgiving (it’s over, there were limited casualties, we triumphed, thank God) but an assertion: “We’re No. 1.” But—more disquiet—if you’re really No. 1, and know it, you don’t have to say it like this, do you?

The world in the 20th century liked the America that could do the job and the Americans who modestly did it. It wouldn’t feel so warmly about an America that made such a show of its prowess and power.

Since 9/11 and the wars that followed, we have grown confused about power and its proper uses. America is not eager for huge new military-strategic adventures; America knows it itself has a lot of repair to do, especially of its economy. America has not grown isolationist and in fact has never been more global in its daily life—in its commerce and culture, in its very neighborhoods. But it has grown more modest and sober-minded about what it can and should do.

At the same time, America has to stand, always, for what is right and decent in the world, or it will no longer be America. It needs to be able to do things only it can do at the moment, and do them bravely, successfully—and modestly.

Which gets me to my dream for the schoolgirls.

John McCain has it exactly right. (I don’t think I’ve ever written that sentence.) He told CNN that as soon as the U.S. learned that hundreds of children had been kidnapped and stolen away by a rabid band of terrorists in Nigeria, we should have used “every asset that we have—satellite, drones, any capabilities that we had to go after them.” He told the Daily Beast: “I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country.” He added, as only Sen. McCain would: “I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan. ” That’s Nigeria’s hapless president.

Mr. McCain said that if he were president he would have moved already, and that is not to be doubted.

There is nothing wrong with taking action—when possible—that is contained, discrete, swift, targeted, humanitarian and, not least, can be carried through successfully. And then shutting up about it. That might remind the world—and ourselves—who we are. And it might have very helpful effects down the road. “If we do that, the Americans may come.” Leave the monsters guessing.

So, my dream: We go in, rescue the kids, get out, go home, and say nothing. Our troops would be happy with that: They like their jobs and like doing good, but the showbiz aspects that sometimes follow their actions only lead to distraction and discord. The White House would have to dummy up too, which would be hard for them. Staffers always want to make a president look good, and Obama staffers seem to think their primary purpose is to aggrandize the president. But there would be no network special with a breathless Brian Williams giving us the tick-tock on how it all went down and how the president kept his cool when all about him others were losing theirs.

What happened would, of course, get around. The world would know in time. But we would say nothing, like dignified people who use their might not for praise or power, but to achieve a measure of decency in the world.

You can’t do this kind of thing every time there is a need. But—if it’s not too late, if it hasn’t been made impossible by the passage of time—you could do it this time.

In the past few weeks, as the story of the kidnapped girls unfolded, the Obama White House reacted as what it is: reflexively political but not really good at reading anything but the feelings of its base. Which, in a narrow way, has proved enough to get them through so far. They probably assume that the American people in general, on hearing of any rescue mission, would say, “Oh no, American involvement in another war—stop, don’t do it!”

But that’s not what the American people would think. They’d just think of the little girls. “Is it possible to go in there with a few hundred troops and save the girls and get out? Then do it!” And when word reached them that America had done it, they’d feel proud—we saved some children from the beasts who’d taken them.

Americans would feel happy about what we’d done, and good about not bragging about it. Actually we would really be proud but not sickly proud, just morally satisfied. Like we used to when our heads were screwed on right.

I really like the part about doing it as swiftly and silently as possible. I like thinking of the world saying: “Who did this? Who saved the little girls?”

And the answer: “It was the Americans. They had no right! But at least they quickly left. And the children were saved. At the end of the day they are a great people.”

The Benghazi investigation should go forward but with knowledge that it will face heavy partisan and media pushback.

Democrats will argue—they already are—that with the country in crisis the attention of Congress should be turned to addressing the issue that weighs most on the public mind: a bad economy with the very top flourishing while the middle is stuck, stressed and sinking.

That will not be a wholly effective line for Democrats. Their and the president’s inability to work legislatively with Republicans the past 5½ years has left the American people understanding that nothing’s going to get done in the immediate future anyway. Benghazi isn’t distracting Congress because they’re not doing anything.

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.

The more effective pushback will come from Big Media. Network leaders, producers and newspaper editors did not go after the story when the first serious questions began to bubble up. Afterward they dismissed the questions as old news. Now they are defensive and resentful. They are not going to help Republican investigators do the job they themselves should have done. (If they’d done it there might be no need for another investigation, because people might feel satisfied they know the essential facts.) Any proof of a Democratic coverup will have the appearance of indicting the media, too.

There is a threat, too, from the Republicans themselves. They’re happy to hold hearings, as parties out of power are, but members frequently don’t prepare, dig into the material, know what to look for. Sometimes they’re leaden: When Hillary Clinton famously asked what difference does it make, none of them had a reply. Sometimes they just compete with each other for Most Fiery Moment, which might get them a six minute pop on “Hannity.” If they act unseriously and cynically, the American people, to the extent they’re watching, will turn off. In the end that would produce a GOP humiliation. More importantly, what happened at Benghazi wouldn’t be found out.

We are about to find out if Republican congressmen can be mature.

The reasons Benghazi is important do not have to be rehearsed here. An American outpost, virtually undefended, was attacked by armed and organized al Qaeda-associated militants on the anniversary of 9/11 and four were left dead, including the U.S. ambassador. It happened eight weeks before the 2012 presidential election. From day one White House management and leadership focused on spin and an apparent fiction. Did they deliberately mislead and misdirect? Why was there no military response? Who is responsible?

A Democratic former senator noted to me a few months ago that veterans and their families feel a simmering sense of betrayal. They deserve to know what happened and why.

Beyond that, history needs to be told, by which I mean future White Houses need to be told, what really happened. People in politics, of whatever party or persuasion, will need to understand that the words, “Don’t—that’s Benghazi” mean “Don’t lie and mislead, it will hurt us.” The Common Core people say our young are falling behind in math and science, and they are, but we’re not exactly raising generations of moral and ethical deep thinkers, either. Those who are being trained up with a sense of right and wrong aren’t likely to lead lives whose main purpose is to get a good table at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. People need to be told what happened because lessons need to be heard and internalized.

Since the scandal began, media movers, in an attempt to diminish it as a story and exculpate themselves for not covering it, have begun to say, “Benghazi is no Iran-Contra!”

They are right, but in ways they do not understand.

Iran-Contra was a real scandal and an embarrassment to the U.S. government. In the early 1980s the Reagan White House was worried about the fate of a handful of American hostages being held by Hezbollah, which had snatched each off the streets of Beirut. The president was especially worried about CIA station chief William Buckley, who was being tortured.

Suddenly in 1985 word reached the administration of a possible opening, a group of so-called Iranian moderates who might be willing to pressure Hezbollah for the hostages’ release. Meetings were authorized. It turned out the Iranian group wanted something in return: the U.S. to permit Israel to sell them antitank missiles to use against Iraq. The U.S. would replenish the Israeli stock.

Reagan unwisely agreed. His secretary of state, George Shultz, heard about the scheme, opposed it, and told Reagan that while it might not technically amount to an arms-for-hostages deal, it would look like one and open the president to charges he broke the law.

Reagan should have pulled the plug, but some hostages were slowly released, and he allowed the scheme to continue.

The story broke in a Mideast newspaper. The administration denied it—all of it. Reporters began to dig.

It was a big enough scandal on its own, but then came word that profits from the arms sales had been illegally funneled to the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the communist Sandinista government.

The attorney general, Ed Meese, launched a review of the affair. It was a real investigation, and he went public with his findings. The national security adviser who oversaw the operation had left, but his replacement resigned and his deputy was fired.

The president delivered a national address. Two congressional committees launched investigations. Networks covered the hearings live. Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post said it was the most fun he’d had since Watergate.

Reagan waived executive privilege so his aides would testify. He announced a special commission to investigate everything. There was a full housecleaning. Colin Powell was brought in to run the National Security Council, and Mr. Shultz given full authority for all dealings with Iran. Ultimately Reagan dumped his chief of staff.

The Iran-Contra affair did not spring from low motives. There was no hope of partisan gain, it wasn’t a political play.

All involved were trying—sometimes stupidly, almost childishly—to save lives, and perhaps establish a new opening with Iran. They had good reasons, but the actions were bad, and everyone involved paid a price.

Compare that with how the Obama White House has handled Benghazi. It’s all been spin, close ranks, point fingers, obfuscate, withhold documents, accuse your accusers of base motives. Nobody in the administration has paid a price.

The reporter Bob Timberg, who along with the late Michael Kelly toughly covered Iran-Contra for the Baltimore Sun, suggests the press had its own biases. “At a certain point, though, I realized that the comparison to Watergate . . . didn’t hold up when looked at in light of the motives,” he writes in his new memoir, “Blue-Eyed Boy.”

No, Benghazi was no Iran-Contra, in terms of the nature of the crime or the handling of it.

Dude, that was, like, almost 30 years ago. You can look it up.

Dude, that’s how patriots, not punks, deal with scandals.

George Will made an incisive and spirited case against the Common Core on Tuesday’s “Special Report With Bret Baier. Earlier in the broadcast Michelle Rhee, whose efforts in education have earned her deserved admiration, was invited on to make the case for Common Core. She reverted to the gobbledygook language that educators too often use, and failed to make a persuasive case that the Core is good for public-school students, and will help them, and our country, in the long run.

My conversations with several Core proponents over the past few weeks leave me with the sense they fell in love with an abstraction and gave barely a thought to implementation. But implementation—how a thing is done day by day in the real world—is everything. There is a problem, for instance, with a thing called “ObamaCare.” That law exists because the people who pushed for it fell in love with an abstract notion and gave not a thought to what the law would actually do and how it would work.

The educationalists wanted to impose (they don’t like that word; they prefer “offer” or “suggest”) more rigorous and realistic standards, and establish higher expectations as to what children can be expected to have learned by the time they leave the public schools. They seem to have thought they could wave a magic wand and make that happen. But life isn’t lived in some abstract universe; it’s lived on the ground, in this case with harried parents trying, to the degree they can or are willing, to help the kids with homework and study for tests. The test questions that have come out are nonsensical and impenetrable, promise to get worse, and for those reasons are demoralizing. Louis CK was right “Late Show With David Letterman,” when he spoofed the math problems offered on his daughters’ tests: “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?”

There sure is a lot of money floating around. Who is watching how those who’ve contracted to do Common Core-related work are doing their jobs?

George Will focused on the higher, substantive meaning and implications of the Core, but the effort has also been psychologically and politically inept. Proponents are now talking about problems with the rollout. Well, yes, and where have we heard that before? One gets the impression they didn’t think this through, that they held symposia and declared the need, with charts and bullet points, for something to be done—and something must be done, because American public education is falling behind the world—and then left it to somebody, or 10,000 somebodies, to make it all work.

The people who developed and created Common Core need to look now at themselves. Who is responsible for the nonsensical test questions? Who oversees the test makers? Do the questions themselves reflect the guidance given to teachers—i.e., was the teaching itself nonsensical? How was implementation of the overall scheme supposed to work? Who decided the way to take on critics was to denigrate parents, who supposedly don’t want their little darlings to be revealed as non-geniuses, and children, who supposedly don’t want to learn anything? Who among these serious people chose sarcasm as a strategy? Who decided the high-class pushback against the pushback should be defensive and dismissive? Did anyone bother to get actual parents in on the planning and development? Were women there, and mothers? Maybe parents with kids in the public school system? Who even picked the ugly name—Common Core sounds common, except to the extent to which it sounds Soviet. Maybe it was the people who dreamed up the phrase “homeland security.”

The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me. Since patronizing people you disagree with is all the rage, I’ll have a go. The Common Core establishment appears to be largely led by people who are well-educated, well-meaning, accomplished and affluent, and who earnestly desire to help those in less fortunate circumstances, but who simply don’t know enough about normal people—how they live, how they think—to have made a success of it. Also they don’t seem to know that intelligent Americans, exactly the kind who quickly become aware of and respond to new federal schemes—sorry, I meant national ones—have become very, very wary of Washington, and the dreams of its eggheads. How they could have missed that is also beyond me.

Rome

Friends and I kept seeing groups of Poles who’d taken planes or 20-hour bus rides to be here for the canonization of John Paul II. They did not look wealthy. A lot of them wouldn’t have had tickets to the big mass because the Vatican kept saying there were no tickets. (In fact there were, and they were thoughtfully color-coded.) A lot of them knew they’d spend a rainy night on the floor of a church or, some of them, wrapped in plastic parkas as they slept on the street on yoga mats they carried on their backpacks. Many would watch the proceedings on a Jumbotron in a piazza far from St. Peter’s. They didn’t care. They came anyway because they loved him. He was enmeshed in their lives, and whether they’d known him or not they felt enmeshed in his. Lech Walesa, at an American reception, seemed to speak for them when I asked how he felt to see his old friend elevated. “I feel I will have a friend in Heaven to greet me if I get there,” he said.

In the days before and after the canonization, I couldn’t help reflect on what a leader is, and how it is that great leaders engender gratitude, loyalty and love.

You have to stand for something. You have to suffer for it. (John Paul was shot and almost killed, and he spent the last third of his pontificate in constant physical distress. He kept showing up anyway.) You have to be brave. (He wasn’t afraid of any earthly power, not even the Soviet Union.) You have to stand by your beliefs as long as you know they are right; you have to speak and write the truth. Explaining what you believe involves trusting people to hear and consider; it assumes they will respond fairly and even with their highest selves. In this way you develop a relationship with people, an ongoing conversation between your articulations and their private thoughts. You are talking to them. When eventually they respond, they are talking to you.

Great leaders are clear, honest, suffer for their stands and are brave. They conduct a constant dialogue. At the end, when they are gone, the crowd declares what they heard. When John Paul died, they issued their judgment: He was a saint.

Popes aren’t presidents, and presidents aren’t saints. Both operate within wildly different realities and have wholly different obligations, so to compare the two isn’t quite just. And yet I couldn’t help think the past week of President Obama, whom I started to think of as poor Obama—whose failings as a leader are now so apparent, and seem so irremediable, partly because they spring from not only his nature and personality but his misunderstanding of what leaders do.

Does he stand for something? I suppose he stands for many things, but you can’t quite narrow it down and sum it up. A problem with his leadership is that there’s always the sense that he’s not quite telling you his core and motivating beliefs. There are a lot of rounded banalities. There are sentiments and impulses. But he isn’t stark, doesn’t vividly cut through. There’s a sense he’s telling people as much as he feels he can within the parameters of political safety, and no more.

As for speaking truthfully, well, he speaks, in many venues and sometimes at great length. But rather than persuade the other side, he knocks down a lot of straw men and deploys no affection or regard for those who disagree with him. He says the great signature program of his presidency will do one thing and it turns out to do another. He is evasive about Benghazi and the other scandals. He winds up with polls showing Americans do not see him as a truth teller. That’s treacherous for a leader. People give politicians a lot of leeway because they think so little of them. But they don’t like it when they’re being played.

Is he brave? Well, he can take a punch. He’s not afraid to be foolhardy, either in statements about red lines or in the U.S. role in Libya. But he seems increasingly passive. He is not passive when it comes to his political fortunes—he goes out and speaks and tries to rally the base—but even there, and certainly when it comes to governing, he seems bored, as if operating at a remove. Valerie Jarrett was once quoted saying he’s so exceptionally gifted that he’s been bored most of his life. It seems to me more likely an exceptionally gifted person would be exceptionally interested in and alive to the wonder and drama of things. I think her meaning was that only the most demanding and important of jobs would consistently arouse his engagement and focus. But he seems pretty bored as president.

He’s not a dynamist. He doesn’t seem excited about all the possibilities for America.

To be in Europe is to realize, again and at first hand, that America has experienced a status shift. Europeans know we are powerful—we have the most drones and bombs and magic robot soldiers—but they don’t think we are strong. They’ve seen our culture; we exported it. The Internet destroyed our ability to keep under wraps, at least for a while, our embarrassments. People everywhere read of our daily crimes and governmental scandals. The people of old Europe thought we were great not only because we were wealthy but because we were good. We don’t seem so good now. And they know we’re not as wealthy as we were.

In these circumstances it would be quite wonderful to have a leader who is a deeply believing enthusiast who could tell the world—and us—that we can, and will, turn it all around.

Pollsters always say a politician has to project optimism. I think what they have to project is belief, and when people see it they appreciate it and become more optimistic. Does Mr. Obama project belief? Or does he project something more like doubt, or inertia? How wonderful it would be to see an American president appreciate all the possibilities of becoming a great energy-producing nation—all the new technologies and jobs, all the rebound they’d bring. To have a leader who feels and conveys a palpable joy in the transformative nature of this new world. Instead what we see is a ticket-checking approval, coupled with a wary, base-pandering, foot-dragging series of decisions such as the latest delay of the Keystone pipeline. It looks like a kind of historical lethargy, or listlessness.

The aspect of the presidency he seems to enjoy most is the perks—the splashy vacations, the planes, the hoops, the golf. When his presidency is over there will be the perks of the post-presidency—foundations, libraries, million-dollar speeches, staff, protection. A literary agent estimated he’ll get up to $20 million for his memoirs, Michelle Obama perhaps $12 million.

So no, you don’t get the impression he’ll have to suffer for where he stands, or who he is.

On Russia and Ukraine we are experiencing things incrementally and coming to terms with the fact that we have entered a new era. Vladimir Putin has ended the post-Cold War settlement and is redrawing borders. It is childish and obtuse to see his moves and understand them as anything but what they are, the beginning of a time that will sorely try the United States. We have to get busy figuring out how to deal with it, both day to day and in the long term.

In rough connection to that, two books. One reminds us that Moscow was making diplomats’ heads explode long before the Cold War. The second is from a futurist who notes history not only is surprising, it can move at quite a clip once it takes one of its turns.

“All the Great Prizes” is John Taliaferro’s insightful, smartly observed biography of John Hay, whose fabled career took him from 22-year-old private secretary to Abraham Lincoln to secretary of state, 40 years later, in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. In between Hay was a diplomat, poet, newspaper editor, fiery editorial writer, presidential biographer and ambassador. He had a warm mind and a cool heart. Hay was graceful, pleasing, broad-gauged, calm, and he counseled the occasionally hotheaded Roosevelt in how to maneuver and deflect. He had a generous and realistic sense of the imperatives of nations.

So it’s interesting the Russians drove him wild.

In 1901 Moscow was moving to dominate Manchuria, which gave the willies to everyone in Asia and to the U.S., which had commercial interests. An American consul in the region warned Hay that unless Russia was checked, it would annex Manchuria outright. All the secretary got when he protested to Russia was denials and hurt looks. He complained that he was “dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science.” He wrote to Roosevelt: “I take it for granted that Russia knows as well as we do that we will not fight over Manchuria, for the simple reason that we cannot.”

In the end, in 1904, the Japanese moved against Russia in a sneak attack on Port Arthur, almost taking out the Russian fleet. A brutal war commenced. Russia was defeated in a series of battles and experienced widespread unrest at home. Czar Nicholas II had thought the war would contribute to patriotic feeling; instead it sparked demonstrations and riots that were the first violent sign of the revolution that would come a dozen years later.

Peace was pushed and negotiated by Teddy Roosevelt, who became the first American president to win a Nobel Peace Prize—and he deserved it.

By that time Hay had written to him with uncharacteristic anger: “Four years of conflict with [the Russians] have shown me that you cannot let up a moment on them without danger to your midriff. The bear that talks like a man is more to be watched than Adam Zad”—a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Adam-zad, “the Bear that walks like a Man!”

*   *   *

For a possible look into the future, the second book, “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century” by George Friedman, founder of the private intelligence and forecasting firm Stratfor. The book was published four years ago, in January 2010. In one chapter he predicts Russia’s future.

“In geopolitics, major conflicts repeat themselves,” he writes. “Russia is the eastern portion of Europe and has clashed with the rest of Europe on multiple occasions.”

Europeans who have invaded Russia lived to regret it—if they were lucky. Russia in turn has sometimes pushed westward. “At other times, passive and ignored, Russia is taken advantage of. But, in due course, others pay for underestimating it.”

The Cold War didn’t settle the Russian question, which is: “Where will its frontiers lie and what will be the relationship between Russia and its neighbors?” In the years since 1989 American actions were “insufficient and unfocused.” They alerted the Russians to “potential danger from the United States and ensured they would respond to it.”

To Russia, “The farther west into Europe its borders extend, the farther conquerors have to travel to reach Moscow. Therefore Russia is always pressing westward,” just as Europe presses eastward.

“Russia had its guts carved out after the collapse of communism. St. Petersburg, its jewel, was about a thousand miles away from NATO troops in 1989. Now it is less than one hundred miles away. In 1989, Moscow was twelve hundred miles from the limits of Russian power. Now it is about two hundred miles.” Russia does not feel it has to “conquer the world,” but that it must “regain and hold its buffers—essentially the boundaries of the old Soviet Union.”

Sweeping demographic changes—a slowly growing or declining population, especially among ethnic Russians—would suggest the mid-2010s were the right time to move. Later might be too late.

Europe now, too, is hungry for energy, and Russia supplies it with natural gas. International energy markets may shift in the future, but for now Europe is dependent on Russia, so that Moscow can use its resources to bend neighbors to its will.

Russia, Mr. Friedman predicted, will take actions that will appear to be aggressive but in fact are defensive. It will focus on recovering influence and control in the former Soviet Union, re-creating the system of buffers it once hand. It will then attempt to create a series of buffers beyond the boundaries of the old Soviet Union. It will also try to prevent anti-Russian coalitions from forming.

“It is only a matter of time before Russian influence will overwhelm Kiev,” Mr. Friedman wrote. The Russians “must dominate Belarus and Ukraine for their basic national security. . . . Ukraine and Belarus are everything to the Russians. If they are to fall into the enemy’s hands—for example, join NATO—Russia would be in mortal danger.” Reabsorbing Belarus and Ukraine “into the Russian sphere of influence is a given in the next five years.”

The flashpoint after that will be the Baltics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—all former parts of the old Soviet Union, all members of NATO. Russia will attempt to neutralize them.

All of this will be not a sudden confrontation but an extended one. The tools the Russians will use will be covert (financing and energizing local Russian minorities), economic (cutting or threatening to cut the flow of natural gas) and military pressure (stationing troops near borders).

At first, Mr. Friedman wrote, the U.S. will underestimate Russia. Then it will be obsessed with Russia.

It will end, he says, with the collapse of Russia.

The extended confrontation will severely strain Russian military and economic power. Internal pressures, poor infrastructure, demographic shifts, and a government consumed by military considerations and distracted from potential domestic advances will have an impact. (Mr. Friedman does not go into this but since we’re speculating, one internal factor could be a grinding discord due to resistance to Putinism among educated Russians grown used to free speech.)

The new era, he says, will end as the old Soviet Union did. “Russia broke in 1917, and again in 1991. And the country’s military will collapse once more shortly after 2020.”

Rome

Everyone keeps talking about the Francis Effect. The pope has captured the world’s imagination with his warmth, apparent merriness and palpable affection for those who are poor and imprisoned, in whatever way—jail, loneliness, illness, disability. An American cardinal smiles and shakes his head when he tells me that nowadays his seminaries are full. A hotel clerk shares with brimming joy that he has a picture of his daughters with Francis, “and we are not like him—we are Buddhist.” Everyone still has a favorite Francis moment—the time he stopped to kiss the man whose head was covered with growths and tumors, or the telephone calls to strangers. He continues to wade into crowds like a man with a very human need for other humans. His security guards must be beside themselves. In fact there is a new subtext in the Francis conversation: People worry about him now. The assumption: A man this good, if he tries to do what he’d like to do, will be in danger.

After Francis, the conversation of the pilgrims in Rome—three million are expected for this weekend’s canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, and already at night the streets of Parione are like Mardi Gras—turns to something else, to two words. Everyone says them sooner or later, remembering the electric moment in April 2005 when John Paul died and four million people engulfed Rome.

“Santo Subito!” they chanted at his funeral. Make him a saint—immediately.

What a moment. Cynical old men in the Vatican were amazed, then irritated. No one had invited the millions, who had shown up spontaneously, clogging the streets and sleeping on sidewalks. No one had asked them to say anything—they were nobodies, they weren’t giving the eulogy. No one expected them to give the church an order.

But they did.

The old pope had been dying for a long time, of a cluster of illnesses including Parkinson’s disease. At the end he could barely lift his head, and everyone saw it, witnessed his suffering over seven long years. Still they felt an allegiance, an appreciation, and something more.

What did they see that the clever missed?

The public saw what the genius Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw. “This pope is a gift of God,” he told the BBC soon after John Paul’s reign began, in 1978. Here, in fiercely abbreviated form, some of what he did:
Enlarge Image

Pope John Paul II releases a dove during ceremonies in Guasmo, a poor suburb of Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1985. Reuters/CORBIS

He was a crucial actor in defeating the Soviet Union, an expansionist, atheistic, totalitarian state that for 70 years bedeviled mankind. After he was shot and almost killed in 1981, he made a point to go to the would-be assassin’s prison cell to assure him that he was personally forgiven, and that God loved him. He wrote and spoke in a new way of the true nature and meaning of the Catholic faith from its beginnings to its missions to its meaning in the world. As Francis would, he stood for the powerless, from the unborn to the unwell to the aged. Like Francis, he was uninterested in fanciness and formality: The last time I saw him, in a public audience in July 2003, his cassock, which was six inches too short, revealed white athletic tube socks and beat-up brown loafers. He stood—and fought—for human rights, for the existence of truth and the right of every human being to be exposed to it. He hated war and called it “always a defeat for humanity.” Like John XXIII he was committed to closer relations with Judaism; he called the Jewish people “our elder brothers,” and when he died he named only two people in his will, his personal secretary and his friend the former chief rabbi of Rome.

As Bernard Lecomte wrote in an eloquent essay in L’Osservatore Romano, John Paul “passionately defended his convictions in matters of family and sexuality” and was the first pope “to celebrate the beauty of the sexual act as an absolute gift of a man to a woman (and vice versa).” At the same time he condemned “all that would change the absolute character of this gift.” He condemned the death penalty, stood for workers, frowned on rapacious capitalism, and decried a “culture of death” that did not grant “the right to be born and to die a natural death.”

He stood where he stood with intellectual rigor and at some cost. In his time as pope he faced the de-Christianization of Europe and the West—his papacy could be understood, in part, as a constant attempt to remind them what they were saying goodbye to and why, for its survival, they must not.

He faced the questions of his time with brio and courage, showing he took to heart his exhortation to the world in the first days of his papacy: “Do not be afraid.”

In the end, during his long goodbye, the people of the world saw and understood that he was acting out in public the deepest meaning of his papacy: Every life has value, even the old and the sick. No one is expendable.

Those now engulfing Rome are more than aware of what else happened during his reign—the Great Shame, the sexual abuse of children that continued and deepened. The church has paid grievously for it, and rightly so. I have written on the shame over the years and seen cardinals try to shame me for it, so believe my sincerity in these assertions:

First, it would have been almost impossible for John Paul to understand the depth and breadth of the scandal because of his history. He had come of age under Nazism and Communism. They hated the church. Priests who fought them—John Paul was one—were heroic. Nazis and communists constantly attempted to undermine the church by falsely accusing its priests of mis- and malfeasance, including sexual impropriety. That was his context when John Paul was told of recent charges of child abuse. The idea they were true would have seemed impossible to him.

Second, if John Paul had been fully and explicitly told by sincere and forthcoming bishops what was happening, the size and scope of it, you would have to be a fool or quite wicked to think his answer would have been, “Oh that’s all right, kids don’t matter.” Children—undefended human beings at risk in the world—were everything to him.

There is a misunderstanding regarding sainthood itself, and it is that saints are perfect. Saints aren’t perfect, they’re human. A saint is recognized for heroic virtue in the service of Christ, but saints have flaws, failings and eccentricities. It is because they are not perfect that they are inspiring. They remind you what you could become.

The millions who came for John Paul’s funeral made their famous demand—”Santo Subito!”—because of what they saw in John Paul. They saw his suffering, his radiant goodness, his triumphs, and at the end his brokenness.

They knew what he’d done.

They knew who he was.

Now some are here again, engulfing Rome to show their appreciation and love.

I bet that crowd will have something to say. Maybe it will be another chant.

“San Giovanni Paolo. Grazie!”

Early in the 2012 presidential cycle, a friend and former staffer of Jeb Bush observed to me, bitterly, that this smart, capable man wasn’t included in the names of potential GOP nominees for only one reason: His name was Bush. I said that’s true, but it’s also true that he got his chance in politics because his name was Bush. He inherited the fame, the money lines and support, and made a career of them. There’s a rough justice in life, you have to roll with it.

But public attitudes toward the Bush name have been changing. George H.W. Bush is increasingly acknowledged as a great diplomat, a patriot, a steady and sophisticated president, an exemplar of the greatest generation. When I say he should have won a Nobel Prize for his work in the days after the Soviet Union, and during the reunification of Germany, people are no longer startled and usually nod in agreement. George W. Bush, for his part, is the object of increased public affection, and it’s not just the paintings. Those who disagreed with him and opposed his decisions now readily concede his humor and warmth, his fortitude and the fact that you could count on him to stand on his word.

As for the dynasty question, it would obviously be muted if Hillary Clinton gets in the race and is the Democratic nominee. We can still be depressed about that—dynasties are not like us—but the Democrats won’t be able to use it.

The Republican establishment, such as it is, has the right to back Jeb if they think he can win. The grass-roots has the right to oppose him. Let it be a fight if he chooses it.

What is jelling into a cliché is true: Jeb Bush’s problem is not immigration per se. That issue is still dynamic; people are arguing and thinking it through. Jeb has an argument to make. When he told an interviewer last weekend that some illegal immigration can be seen as “an act of love,” I read of it and assumed it was an act of phony eloquence—insufficient, tin-eared, a sign that he’d grown rusty. But then I saw the interview. It was clear he was simply expressing a sincere respect for, and a kind of bond with, immigrants who have crossed the border to get the job that will feed the family. I thought of how I would experience his comments if I were here illegally or had a family member who was. I’d appreciate it, a lot. I’d hear what he said as a signal of empathy and understanding. I’d think he was saying “have a heart,” which is what Rick Perry said in 2012. And that’s not the worst thing a Republican could say right now, is it?

Jeb Bush’s real problem, and not just with members of the tea party, is his early and declared support for the Common Core national school curriculum. He decided to back federal standards for what should be taught in the public schools at the exact moment the base of the Republican Party had had it up to here with federal anything.
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Jeb Bush at charter school KIPP Academy in Oklahoma City on April 8. Associated Press

A year ago I attended a meeting in which Jeb spoke of his support for the core to conservative education policy intellectuals. When told the subject of the meeting, I was confused: He’s for Common Core or against it? For it? Really? In what abstract universe are conservative intellectuals operating? Federal standards for what should be taught in the classroom would immediately be received with skepticism by parents who, year after year now, have seen their children turned into test-taking monkeys. They are taught to the test, and the tests seem to exist so that school systems can claim achievement. What used to be called the joy of learning gets crowded out. Moreover, some parents, maybe a lot, would assume any new education scheme would be administered by the education establishment, meaning a lot of Lois Lerners—apparatchiks, ideologues, politicos. Federal programs like Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind always mean well, but maybe the answer to our education woes won’t come from the federal level.

Parenthetically I note that conversations with public-school teachers the past few years have reminded me how lucky I was, in high school in the 1960s, not to be surrounded by people who insisted I excel. They let us choose our own speed. I don’t remember being hounded by tests, which was lucky because I didn’t do my homework or test well. But I felt free to spend all my time reading good books and pondering things. I didn’t always attend school, but I did experience the joy of learning. The indifference of the educational establishment was a great gift to me. It allowed me to get an education.

At any rate, there is surely a growing sense that if you want standards, you should establish them locally, with local groups fighting out whether more attention should be given to Thomas Jefferson than Samuel Gompers. No state wants stupid students. No parents want dumb kids. It will work itself out—awkwardly and imperfectly, like life.

*   *   *

But back to Jeb Bush. I have no idea if he’s running, and neither perhaps does he. It would probably be a hard psychological question. He has seen the presidency up close and seen all the muck a family has to deal with on the way to the glory. That muck has only grown deeper since his father and brother ran. It would be surprising if he were not ambivalent about the enterprise. All his adult life his family has been in the spotlight: He knows the sting of undeserved criticism and the embarrassment of unearned praise. He knows what it is to see people you love attacked and not be able to answer because answering isn’t classy.

Beyond that there is the father-brother thing, which is the foreign-policy question. His father is now seen as a foreign-policy realist. He was prudent after the end of the Soviet Union, he was tactful, and when he felt he had to go to war in Kuwait he built a world-wide coalition, did the job he said he would do, and stopped when that job was done. Jeb’s brother is associated with neoconservatism: Be daring, break the tectonic plates, force the realities to reconstitute themselves in new and better ways, invade, spread democracy.

Where does Jeb stand? What philosophical assumptions guide his decisions? Whichever policy view he declares will seem like an implicit rebuke of someone he loves.

Democrats are never forced to answer these questions because they are not expected to have a philosophy, only political exigencies. But Republicans are forced to answer, in debates run by a mainstream media looking for sport. And the question is more than a question about policy intellectuals and their preferences, it’s also a choice between the party’s suburban wing and its Born Fightin’ wing.

It will all be complicated. But if you really want the presidency, you accept the complications. You can’t run ambivalently. Mr. Bush knows this, of course, which is why he talks about only running if he feels the joy of it.

Put aside the numbers for a moment, and the daily argument.

“Seven point one million people have signed up!”

“But six million people lost their coverage and were forced onto the exchanges! That’s no triumph, it’s a manipulation. And how many of the 7.1 million have paid?”

“We can’t say, but 7.1 million is a big number and redeems the program.”

“Is it a real number?”

“Your lack of trust betrays a dark and conspiratorial right-wing mindset.”

As I say, put aside the argument, step back and view the thing at a distance. Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.

Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi’s statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn’t understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she’d done. This is how we make laws now.

Her comments alarmed congressional Republicans but inspired Democrats, who for the next three years would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they’d read the bill and understood its implications. They were later taken aback by complaints from their constituents. The White House, on the other hand, seems to have understood what the bill would do, and lied in a way so specific it showed they knew exactly what to spin and how. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan, period.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period.” That of course was the president, misrepresenting the facts of his signature legislative effort. That was historic, too. If you liked your doctor, your plan, your network, your coverage, your deductible you could not keep it. Your existing policy had to pass muster with the administration, which would fight to the death to ensure that 60-year-old women have pediatric dental coverage.

The leaders of our government have not felt, throughout the process, that they had any responsibility to be honest and forthcoming about the major aspects of the program, from its exact nature to its exact cost. We are not being told the cost of anything—all those ads, all the consultants and computer work, even the cost of the essential program itself.

What the bill declared it would do—insure tens of millions of uninsured Americans—it has not done. There are still tens of millions uninsured Americans. On the other hand, it has terrorized millions who did have insurance and lost it, or who still have insurance and may lose it.

The program is unique in that it touches on an intimate and very human part of life, the health of one’s body, and yet normal people have been almost wholly excluded from the debate. This surely was not a bug but a feature. Given a program whose complexity is so utter and defeating that it defies any normal human attempt at comprehension, two things will happen. Those inclined to like the spirit of the thing will support it on the assumption the government knows what it’s doing. And the opposition will find it difficult to effectively oppose—or repeal the thing—because of the program’s bureaucratic density and complexity. It’s like wrestling a manic, many-armed squid in ink-darkened water.

Social Security was simple. You’d pay into the system quite honestly and up front, and you’d receive from the system once you were of retirement age. If you supported or opposed the program you knew exactly what you were supporting or opposing. The hidden, secretive nature of bamaCare is a major reason for the opposition it has engendered.

The program is unique in that the bill that was signed four years ago, on March 23, 2010, is not the law, or rather program, that now exists. Parts of it have been changed or delayed 30 times. It is telling that the president rebuffed Congress when it asked to work with him on alterations, but had no qualms about doing them by executive fiat. The program today, which affects a sixth of the U.S. economy, is not what was passed by the U.S. Congress. On Wednesday Robert Gibbs, who helped elect the president in 2008 and served as his first press secretary, predicted more changes to come. He told a business group in Colorado that the employer mandate would likely be scrapped entirely. He added that the program needed an “additional layer” or “cheaper” coverage and admitted he wasn’t sure the individual mandate had been the right way to go.

Finally, the program’s supporters have gone on quite a rhetorical journey, from “This is an excellent bill, and opponents hate the needy” to “People will love it once they have it” to “We may need some changes” to “I’ve co-sponsored a bill to make needed alternations” to “This will be seen by posterity as an advance in human freedom.”

That was the president’s approach on Tuesday, when he announced the purported 7.1 million enrollees. “The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. . . . In the end, history is not kind to those who would deny Americans their basic economic security. Nobody remembers well those who stand in the way of America’s progress or our people. And that’s what the Affordable Care Act represents. As messy as it’s been sometimes, as contentious as it’s been sometimes, it is progress.”

Someone said it lacked everything but a “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was political showbiz of a particular sort, asking whether the picture given of a thing will counter the experience of the thing.

There’s a brute test of a policy: If you knew then what you know now, would you do it? I will never forget a conversation in 2006 or thereabouts with a passionate and eloquent supporter of the decision to go into Iraq. We had been having this conversation for years, he a stalwart who would highlight every optimistic sign, every good glimmering. He argued always for the rightness of the administration’s decision. I would share my disquiet, my doubts, finally my skepticism. One night over dinner I asked him, in passing, “If we had it to do over again, should we have gone in? would you support it?”

And he said, “Of course not!”

Which told me everything.

There are very, very few Democrats who would do ObamaCare over again. Some would do something different, but they wouldn’t do this. The cost of the blunder has been too high in terms of policy and politics.

They, and the president, are trying to put a good face on it.

Republicans of all people should not go for the happy face. They cannot run only on ObamaCare this year and later, because it’s not the only problem in America. But it’s a problem, a big one, and needs to be hard and shrewdly fought.