Peggy Noonan

Watching Season 2 of “House of Cards.” Not to be a scold or humorless, but do Washington politicians understand how they make themselves look when they embrace the show and become part of its promotion by spouting its famous lines? Congressmen only work three days a week. Each shot must have taken two hours or so—the setup, the crew, the rehearsal, the learning the line. How do they have time for that? Why do they think it’s good for them?

All the Northeast is covered in snow, and the sound and clamor of Washington is muffled. The federal government took a day off; the news is full of weather. Not a bad time to ponder why people do what they do—more specifically, why witnesses to history often take notes on what they see and hear, and in time leave their papers to universities and libraries. Obviously we’re keying off this week’s story of Diane Blair, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, who died in 2000 and whose papers were given by her husband to the University of Arkansas. There they were kept sealed until 2010. An enterprising reporter for the Washington Free Beacon, Alana Goodman, took a look and found a small trove of journal entries and memos that add texture to our understanding of the Clinton era. Which, it occurs to me, may some day be referred to as the first Clinton era, but that’s another column.

Some were surprised Blair’s papers existed and were given to a public institution. She was smart and loyal, an intimate, and some of what she wrote casts her friend in a poor light. But some of it casts her in a good light. Blair’s note-taking doesn’t seem to me disloyal to a friend, but loyal to history. You owe your friends loyalty, but you owe history something too, if you are privileged to travel within it for a time. And history gets little help from discretion.Regarding the note-taking, you might ask, “Isn’t it enough just to live it? Why write it down?” The answers there are human:

To keep it: to capture your time in history as it happened. To remind yourself it’s real.

To understand it: to order it as you write and try to make sense of it.

To reflect on it. To suggest through what you include what mistakes in attitude or action were made, what challenges met.

And again, to tell history what happened. To cast light, provide context, give a deeper feel.

A separate question is why people leave their papers behind. They don’t have to. They could keep and then burn them; they could leave them to a family member and have that person or his descendants decide how to dispose of them. Or they could give them to an institution that wants them, that will ensure their physical safety and make them available to scholars and journalists down the road.Again, history has its claims, but things get human here, too. When you leave an institution your archive you’re saying, “I was alive—this is proof,” and, “I was successful—here is the evidence.” Stephen Enniss is director of the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, which houses extensive collections of manuscripts, individual archives and historical material. I asked him why people leave their papers. “It’s a plea for posthumous life,” he said. We want to believe our efforts had meaning. “The notion that our papers might be kept suggests the institution has granted a kind of status to the work—it will be studied in future years. By implication your life has been of significance.”

When Mr. Enniss worked at Emory University, there was an Irish poet whose papers were going to the school. The poet kept a box by his desk and threw in whatever he’d just written or read. “Every time a box got full, he’d seal it and send it in,” Mr. Enniss recalls. “I’d open it. I’d find a jacket mixed in in one, a pair of eyeglasses in another. After a few years I realized it was as if I was creating a surrogate figure of the poet himself.”What do we learn of Mrs. Clinton from the Blair papers? Not much that close observers don’t already know. A small mystery is what was left in the papers by accident or happenstance, and what by design. Was what appears to be a romantic note from Bill Clinton something of value with which Blair could not part, or a clue left for history’s Sherlocks ?

*   *   *

Blair was not an operative or a tough guy, but a trusted friend. She wasn’t Dave Powers or Bebe Rebozo, uncritically and unquestioningly serving a superior. Blair was an equal. She comes across as a person Hillary Clinton talked to in order to more clearly hear and define who Hillary Clinton was—that is, in order to see and understand herself.

From Mrs. Clinton there’s an always-startling pugnacity and aggression. Sen. Sam Nunn, she says within Blair’s hearing, “should be unmasked as a fraud.” “HC urging hard ball.” “HC still in despair that nobody in WH tough enough and mean enough.” People “trying to destroy them.”

The Clintons are always “getting killed.” “HC on treadmill, how furious she is.” “HC furious at speechwriters.” “Is trying to work through her anger.”

Mrs. Clinton often boasts about her toughness. After her husband’s impeachment, Blair has Hillary observing it “drives their adversaries totally nuts, that [the Clintons] don’t bend, do not appear to be suffering.” On Beltway pundits: “We’ve rendered them irrelevant.” People often “need to get the message bigtime.” “They should have their noses rubbed into it.”

They were a rough bunch, or at least a colorful and sometimes histrionic one. When Bill Clinton is considering a Supreme Court choice, a supporter warns him that if one prospect even thinks “about messing with Roe, what Lorena Bobbitt did to John would look like nothing.”

Four observations.

First, the Blair papers remind us the Clintons in their early days in the White House were much like the Obamas. They didn’t know Washington and were taken aback by its meanness and mayhem. They thought it was something personally directed against them. Their reaction in turn was outsize. They thought, essentially, that any means necessary were justified in fighting the opposition’s wickedness. They didn’t understand wickedness was par for the course. In both cases their simple lack of sophistication in this area warped the politics of their era.

Second, the Clintons were of the Democratic generation that disdained Chicago’s first Mayor Richard Daley, whose administration they literally fought in the streets. He was rough, tough, the machine. The Clintons rose and went on to become . . . rough, tough, a machine. In politics as in life you can become what you hate.

Third, the Blair papers remind us that in the past quarter-century the office of the presidency has become everyone’s psychotherapy. There is an emphasis on the personality, nature, character and charisma of the president. He gets into dramas. He survives them. He is working out his issues. He is avenging childhood feelings of powerlessness. He is working through his ambivalence at certain power dynamics. He will show dad.

History becomes the therapist The taxpayer winds up paying the therapist’s bill.

This wouldn’t be so bad—it would actually be entertaining!—if the presidency were not such a consequential role. People can lose lives when presidents work through their issues. This Endless Drama of the Charismatic President is getting old. And dangerous.

Finally, the Blair papers are interesting, but don’t expect much more. Word in Clintonland will have gone out: Ditch the papers. Have a bonfire. Or see that they’re sealed until 2066.

Welcome to my obsession. It is electricity. It makes everything run—the phone, the web, the TV, the radio, all the ways we talk to each other and receive information. The tools and lights in the operating room—electricity. All our computers in a nation run by them, all our defense structures, installations and communications. The pumps at the gas station, the factories in the food-supply chain, the ATM, the device on which you stream your music—all electricity. The premature infant’s ventilator and the sound system at the rock concert—all our essentials and most of our diversions are dependent in some way on this: You plug the device into the wall and it gets electrical power and this makes your life, and the nation’s life, work. Without it, darkness descends.

Because this is so obvious, we don’t think about it unless there’s a blackout somewhere, and then we think about it for a minute and move on. We assume it will just be there, like the sun.

But this societal and structural dependence is something new in the long history of man.

No one who wishes America ill has to blow up a bomb. That might cause severe damage and rattle us. But if you’re clever and you really wanted to half-kill America—to knock it out for a few months or longer and force every one of our material and cultural weaknesses to a crisis stage—you’d take out its electrical grid. The grid is far-flung, interconnected, interdependent, vulnerable. So you’d zap it with an electromagnetic pulse, which would scramble and fry power lines. Or you’d hack the system in a broad, sustained attack, breaking into various parts, taking them down, and watching them take other parts down.

Or you’d do what the people at the center of a riveting front-page story in this newspaper appear to have done. You’d attack it physically, with guns, in a coordinated attack.

The heretofore unknown story happened last April 16. There was an armed assault on a power station in California. Just after midnight some person or persons slipped into an underground vault near Highway 101 just outside San Jose. He or they cut telephone cables—apparently professionally, in a way that would be hard to repair. About a half hour later, surveillance cameras at Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s nearby Metcalf substation picked up a streak of light, apparently a signal from a flashlight. Snipers then opened fire. The shooters appear to have been aiming at the transformer’s cooling systems, which were filled with oil. If that was their target, they hit it. The system leaked 52,000 gallons; the transformer overheated and began to crash. Then there was another flash of light, and the shooting, which had gone on almost 20 minutes, stopped.

The assault knocked out 17 giant transformers that feed electrical power to Silicon Valley. A minute before the police arrived, “the shooters disappeared into the night,” in the words of reporter Rebecca Smith, who put the story together through interviews, PG&E filings, documents and a police video.

No suspect in the case has been identified.

Jon Wellinghoff, who at the time was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told Ms. Smith the attack “was the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.” If the attack were replicated around the country, it could take down the entire electrical grid.

There was no big blackout after the attack—officials rerouted power, and power plants in Silicon Valley were asked to increase their output—but it took 27 days to get the substation fully working again.

Mr. Wellinghoff said he briefed Congress, the White House and federal agencies. But 10 months have passed since the attack, and he fears another, larger one could be in the planning stage.

Ms. Smith quotes an FBI spokesman in San Francisco saying the bureau doesn’t think a terrorist organization launched the attack. Investigators, he said, “are continuing to sort through the evidence.” PG&E, in a news release, called it the work of vandals.

If so, they were extremely sophisticated and well-armed. More than 100 shell casings were later found at the site. They were of the kind ejected by AK-47s. They were free of fingerprints.

Mr. Wellinghoff later toured the area with professionals from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains the SEALs. He said the military experts told him it looked like a professional job. They noted small piles of rocks that they said could have been left by an advance scout to alert the attackers as to where to get the best shots.

Some in the industry see it the way Mr. Wellinghoff does, including a former official of PG&E, who told an industry security conference he feared the incident could be a dress rehearsal: “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”

Rich Lordan, an executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, said: “The depth and breadth of the attack was unprecedented” in the United States. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”

It’s hard to look at the facts and see the Metcalf incident as anything but a deliberate attack by a coordinated, professional group with something deeper and more dangerous on their minds than the joys of vandalism.

So, questions. Who is looking for the shooters, and how hard? On whose list of daily action items is it the top priority?

Those who worry about the grid mostly worry about hackers, and understandably: The grid is under regular hack attack. But the more immediate and larger threat may be physical attacks. In any case, as Ms. Smith suggests, the Metcalf incident appears to lift the discussion beyond the hypothetical.

Protection of the grid on all levels and from all threats should be given much more urgent priority by the federal government. If it ever goes down nationally, it will take time to get it back up and operational, and in the time it could take—months, weeks—many of our country’s problems would present themselves in new and grimmer ways. There would likely be broad unrest, much of it inevitable and some of it opportunistic. What would happen in an environment like that, with people without light, means of communication, and perhaps in time food? What would happen to public safety? To civil liberties? Those questions sound farfetched. They are not.

I end with an anecdote. In 2006 I met with some congressional aides and staffers to talk, informally, about what questions should be in the country’s hierarchy of worries. They were surprised when I told them a primary concern of mine was electricity, how dependent we are on it, how vulnerable the whole system is. I asked if there was any work being done to strengthen the grid. Blank faces, crickets. Then a bright young woman said she thought there was something about electricity in the appropriations bill a while back.

You always want to think your government is on it. You want to think they see what you see. But really, they’re never on it. They always have to be pushed.

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year’s innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid’s school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

So the president’s State of the Union address is Tuesday night, and it’s always such a promising moment, a chance to wake everyone up and say “This I believe” and “Here we stand.” The networks are focused and alert, waiting to be filled with a president’s excellence and depth. It’s a chance for the American president to say whatever the storm, however high the seas, the union stands “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible.” That’s how Stephen Vincent Benet had Daniel Webster put it, in a play.

In a State of the Union a president tries to put his stamp on things. Here we are, here’s where we’re going, all roads lead forward. We can face whatever test, meet whatever challenge, united in the desire that we be the greatest nation in the history of man . . .

What great moments this tradition has given us. JFK’s father thought his son’s first State of the Union was better than his Inaugural Address. It had a warmth. “Mr. Speaker . . . it is a pleasure to return from whence I came. You are among my oldest friends in Washington—and this House is my oldest home.” Friends, home—another era. LBJ taking the reins in 1964: “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined.” And you know, that’s what it became. Nixon enjoyed dilating on history, and was interesting when he did.

Reagan dazzled, though he told his diary he never got used to it: “I’ve made a mil. speeches in every kind of place to every kind of audience. Somehow there’s a thing about entering that chamber—goose bumps & a quiver.” There was his speech after he’d recovered from being shot—brio and gallantry. And of course Lenny Skutnik. Just before Reagan’s 1982 speech Mr. Skutnik, a government worker, saw Air Florida Flight 90 go into the Potomac. As others watched from the banks of the frozen river, Mr. Skutnik threw off his coat, dived in and swam like a golden retriever to save passengers. The night of the speech he was up there in the gallery next to the first lady, and when Reagan pointed him out the chamber exploded. This nice, quiet man who’d gone uncelebrated all his professional life, and then one day circumstances came together and he showed that beneath the bureaucrat’s clothing was the beating heart of a hero.

***

Well. History still beckons, waiting to be made. The great unstated question of today: Can America come back, reclaim her old spirit, confidence and joy, can we make things again, build them, grow, create, push out into the new?

And here I think: Oh dear.

Because when I imagine Barack Obama’s State of the Union, I see a handsome, dignified man standing at the podium and behind him Joe Biden, sleeping. And next to him John Boehner, snoring. And arrayed before the president the members, napping.

No one’s really listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop windup talk machine. Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently, nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such important men engaged.

But nothing interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously, with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that is helpful, insightful or believable. “I’m not a particularly ideological person.” “It’s hard to anticipate events over the next three years.” “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now.” “I am comfortable with complexity.” “Our capacity to do some good . . . is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.”

Nobody is!

He gave a speech on the National Security Agency, that bitterly contested issue, the other day. Pew Research found half of those polled didn’t notice. National Journal’s Dustin Volz wrote that Americans greeted the speech with “collective indifference and broad skepticism.” Of the 1 in 10 who’d followed it, more than 70% doubted his proposals would help protect privacy.

The bigger problem is that the president stands up there Tuesday night with ObamaCare not a hazy promise but a fact. People now know it was badly thought, badly written and disastrously executed. It was supposed to make life better by expanding coverage. It has made it worse, by throwing people off coverage. And—as we all know now but did not last year—the program was passed only with the aid of a giant lie. Now everyone knows if you liked your plan, your doctor, your deductible, you can’t keep them.

When the central domestic fact of your presidency was a fraud, people won’t listen to you anymore.

The poor speechwriters. They are always just a little more in touch with public sentiment than a president can be—they get to move around in the world, they know what people are saying. They have to imitate the optimism of the speeches of yore, they have to rouse. They are the ones who know what a heavy freaking lift it is, what an impossible chore. And they have to do it with idiots in the staffing process scrawling on the margins of the draft: “More applause lines!” The speechwriters know the answer is fewer applause lines, more thought, more humility and candor. Americans aren’t impressed anymore by congressmen taking to their feet and cheering. They look as if they have electric buzzers on their butts that shoot them into the air when the applause line comes. “Now I have to get up and enact enthusiasm” is what they look like they’re thinking. While the other party thinks “Now we have to get up too, because what he said was anodyne and patriotic and we can’t not stand up for that.” And they applaud, diffidently, because they don’t want the folks back home—the few who are watching—to say they looked a little too enthusiastic about the guy who just cost them their insurance.

They are all enacting. They are all replicating. They’re all imitating the past.

You know when we will know America is starting to come back? When some day the sergeant at arms bellows: “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States” and the camera shows a bubble of suits and one person emerges from the pack and walks into the chamber and you’re watching at home and you find yourself—against everything you know, against all the accumulated knowledge of the past—interested. It’ll take you aback when you realize you’re interested in what he’ll say! And the members won’t just be enacting, they’ll be leaning forward to hear.

And the president will speak, and what he says will be pertinent to the problems of the United States of America. And thoughtful. And he’ll offer ideas, and you’ll think: “Hey, that sounds right.”

That is when you’ll know America just might come back.

Until then, as John Dickerson just put it: Barack Obama, Inaction Figure.

Zzzzzzz.

ometimes the most obvious thing is the most unnoticed. I find myself thinking this week about the destructive force of selfishness in our political life. This common failing is the source of such woe! Politicians call themselves public servants, so they should be expected to be less selfish than the average Joe ; their views and actions should be assumed to be more keenly directed toward the broad public good. But no one expects that of politicians anymore, and they know it and use the knowledge to justify being even worse than they’d normally be. “If I have the name, I might as well have the game.”

They are the locus of selfishness in the modern world.

Chris Christie’s problem isn’t that he’s a bully, it’s that he’s selfish. Barack Obama isn’t stupid and therefore the maker of mayhem, he’s selfish.

There isn’t a staffer on the Hill who won’t tell you 90% of members are driven by their own needs, wants and interests, not America’s. The former defense secretary, Bob Gates, has written a whole book about it, and the passages in which he speaks most plainly read like a cry from the heart. The chaplain of the Senate, Barry Black, made news a few months ago because he’d taken to praying that the character of our representatives be improved. “Save us from the madness,” he prayed one morning last October. “We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness.” The single most memorable thing I ever heard from a Wall Streeter was from one of its great men, who blandly explained to me one day why certain wealthy individuals were taking an action that was both greedy and personally inconvenient to them. “Everyone wants more,” he said, not in a castigating way but as one explains certain essentials to a child.

People in public life have become more grasping, and less embarrassed by it. But the odd thing, the destabilizing thing as you think about it, is that we’re in a crisis. We’ve been in it since at least 2008 and the crash, and the wars. We are in unprecedented trouble. Citizens know this. It’s why they buy guns. They see unfixable America around them, they think it’s all going to fall apart. In Washington (and New York) they huff and puff their disapproval: Those Americans with their guns, they’re causing a lot of trouble. But Americans think they’re in trouble because their leaders are too selfish to face challenges that will do us in.

What’s most striking is that in a crisis, you don’t expect business as usual. You expect something better from leaders, you expect them to try to meet the moment.

*   *   *

Mr. Christie is a great talent, a political figure of real and natural gifts. What has jeopardized his position is not that he’s gruff, in-your-face, insistent—a bully. It’s that he’s been selfish. In 2012 he was given a star role, keynote speaker at the GOP national convention. His speech was strong, funny and ran about 2,340 words. But it took around 2,000 of them before he got to a guy named Romney. Everything else was “The greatest lesson that mom ever taught me . . . When I came into office . . . I have an answer.” The GOP nominee needed a boost from blue-state man, but there wasn’t much in it for blue-state man. He’d only get Republican cooties on him. So he played it like a vanity production and made a speech about himself.

That wasn’t a major sin—it’s only politics, not policy. But it fit in with his effusive embrace of Mr. Obama in the days before the 2012 election. Any governor would show strategic warmth for a president in charge of ladling out federal money after disaster. But Jersey was about to re-elect president Obama by nearly 18 points, and Mr. Christie wanted to win over Democrats when he ran the next year.

He was already going to win big. But he had to win bigger, had to have more.

Again, not much of a sin. But when Bridgegate came, it seemed to fit the pattern—he’ll ding you when he doesn’t have to, even if it makes local citizens cry, to gain an advantage, to get more. Whoever made the call, selfishness is at the heart of the scandal.

*   *   *

There’s an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think the voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.

Which gets us, inevitably, to the King of I, who unselfconsciously claims ownership of . . . everything. “My military,” “my White House,” “my cabinet,” “my secretary.” The president does first person singular more than Mr. Christie does. But his actions are so much more consequential, because they’re national and because they play out in the area of policy.

The president’s health-insurance reform had to be breathtaking, mind-bending, historic. It had to be a Democratic Party initiative only. It required a few major lies to gain passage, but what the heck.

It was political selfishness that blew up the American health-care system. And it’s the public, in this and other messes, that’s left holding the bag. But as government gets bigger the bag gets bigger, and people will get tired of carrying it. They’re already tired.

I close with the selfishness story of the week, the stunning New York Post expose on Public School 106 in Far Rockaway, a neighborhood in the borough of Queens. The grade school is a poster child for the indifference of those who are supposed to be helping the country. There are no gym or art classes, the Post’s Susan Edelman reported. The library is a junk room; the nurse’s office lacks essentials; there are no math or reading books for the Common Core curriculum. Kids are left to watch movies. Kindergartners are shunted off to dilapidated trailers. The principal, Marcella Sills, often doesn’t show up for work, or swans in near the end of the day. School staff were afraid to speak up because they feared retribution from Ms. Sills or the teachers union.

When the Post broke the story, the city’s Department of Education sent an inspector. The principal actually showed up early that day. The school took delivery of some books. Everyone was in high spin mode.

The union will look to the union’s interests, Ms. Sills will no doubt see to hers, the new city administration will try to limit embarrassment, handle the fallout and change the subject. But you couldn’t read the stories without thinking: Who’s looking out for the kids? And what’s happening to us?

Someday history will write of our era, and to history the biggest scandal will be the thing we all accepted in our leaders, chronic and endemic selfishness. History will be hard on us for that.

Gov. Chris Christie acquitted himself well in his “Bridgegate” news conference, and emerged undead. He said he had “no knowledge or involvement” in the apparent scheme by his political operatives to take revenge on a New Jersey mayor who refused to back him in the 2013 election. He had “no involvement,” in the four-day-long traffic jams they arranged on the George Washington Bridge. Learning of it left him feeling “blindsided,” “embarrassed,” “humiliated” and “stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here.” He claimed personal responsibility, announced the firing of a top staffer, apologized to the state, and said he’d go to Fort Lee to apologize to the town and its mayor. Instead of leaving the podium at the end of his statement he stayed for a barrage of questions. The appearance went almost two hours. You can make mistakes, lose your focus and poise, when you let the press exhaust itself asking questions of you; it took guts and brains to pull it off.

Cities sometimes make swerves. That’s what New York did in November when it elected a left-wing Democrat, Bill de Blasio, as mayor. The city was saying, “Enough with the past, let’s try something new.” There’s no doubt they will get it.

Mayors Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and Mike Bloomberg (2002-13) led a renaissance of the city, which had half-killed itself in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with bankruptcy, labor unrest and high crime rates. The city was thought to be unworkable, finished. For Mayor Giuliani the job was to stabilize, get the criminals off the street, let people feel safe again. Once that was done New York’s natural hunger and high spirits would reassert themselves, businesses would thrive and hire. He left behind a safer, more prosperous city. And there was the parting gift of his last days as mayor, during 9/11 and its aftermath, when—love him or hate him—he showed what a leader looked like.

Mike Bloomberg, sworn in weeks later, had to lead the city as it righted itself, got over the trauma and refound its confidence. His job was to shake off the ashes and dust, expand and diversify the economy, help create jobs, lower crime rates even further, move forward. He succeeded. The other night at his last dinner as mayor, one of his daughters’ eyes filled with tears as she thanked him, in a toast, for leaving behind a city that her son could be proud of, love, and live in forever.

These imperfect men with their imperfect administrations and their big mistakes—they made a masterpiece. In the past 20 years, other American cities were going down—Detroit most famously—while New York not only became again what it was, the greatest city on the face of the Earth, but it looked like it, and felt like it.

*   *   *

Why did New York swerve from that path instead of continuing on it? A lot of reasons. You have to have some years on you to remember New York when it didn’t work—to even know that it’s not magically ordained that it will. You have to be older than 30 or so to remember when it wasn’t safe.

In 1991, there were 2,245 murders in New York. In 2013, there were 333. If you’re a 20-year-old voter, or a 40-year-old voter who came to the city from elsewhere, you don’t remember 1991, and how it felt. You don’t remember garbage strikes and grime. Your vision of the city is as it was in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era, a city ever rising.

And New York is a Democratic town. Sooner or later it was going to swerve. Though the largely untold story is that voter turnout in November was historically low. Only about a million of 4.3 million registered voters showed up at the polls. Bill de Blasio won in landslide, but it was a landslide from a severely reduced pile of voters.

*   *   *

No one knows exactly what’s coming, but Mr. de Blasio’s inaugural address on Wednesday was not promising. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, you can choose, as a leader, to be a uniter or a divider. Mr. de Blasio seems very much the latter. He is on the side of the poor and the marginalized, which is good, but he took every opportunity to jab at those who are not poor and don’t live on the margins. “Big dreams are not a luxury of the privileged few,” he said. Whoever said they were? He is a political descendant of those “who took on the elite.” New York “is not the exclusive domain of the One Percent.” Who said it was? His campaign promises—more spending, higher taxes—are not, he said, just “rhetoric.” There was a repeated refrain: “We won’t wait. We’ll do it now.”

This mayor will “reform” the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department. Exactly how, he didn’t say. But stop, question and frisk has been part of the kind of policing that helped New York reduce crime.

“We will ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day, universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student.” The wealthy should not complain. “Those earning between $500,000 and one million dollars a year, for instance, would see their taxes increase by an average of $973 a year. That’s less than three bucks a day—about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks.”

Ah, those latte-swilling debutantes and malefactors of great wealth.

There was no mention of the most famous impediment to educational improvement and reform: the teachers unions.

Mr. de Blasio acknowledges that his “progressive vision” is not supported by everyone. “Some on the far right continue to preach the virtue of trickle-down economics. They believe that the way to move forward is to give more to the most fortunate, and that somehow the benefits will work their way down to everyone else. They sell their approach as the path of ‘rugged individualism.’ ” But don’t worry, he doesn’t want to “punish success,” he wants to “create more success stories.”

It isn’t hard to unpack this. Those who oppose Mr. de Blasio are greedy and uncaring. They don’t offer a point of view, they “preach,” and what they preach is that the poor should be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. They “sell” this argument—my goodness, they’re trying to make money even while discussing politics—but the flawed product they peddle is “rugged individualism,” a phrase that hasn’t been used in this city in a century. But even rugged individualists, he quotes former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as saying, can’t survive in the midst of “collective starvation.” And you thought Mike Bloomberg left New York in pretty good shape.

*   *   *

An inaugural address is a big thing. It declares an agenda but also sets a tone. An attitude. The tone Mr. de Blasio set was that of a divider.

A uniter’s approach would have been one that was both more morally generous and more honest. It wouldn’t set one group against the other, it would have asserted that all New Yorkers are in this together. Something along this approach: “To those who earn half a million dollars or more a year, we know and understand that your weekly paycheck is already subject to federal, state and city taxes. Which means we know you already contribute a great deal, and not only through taxes. So many of our citizens are deeply civic-minded. They give their time and effort to helping their local churches and synagogues; to building civic organizations; to raising funds for the poor and the hungry; to volunteering for literacy programs; and donating their wealth to keep the arts and the museums going. In our town, much has always been asked of those to whom much has been given—and they have come through. They have helped build a ladder. And now we are going to make that ladder sturdier, stronger, higher and wider so more of our young can use it.”

What was absent in Mr. de Blasio’s remarks was a kind of civic courtesy, or grace. The kind that seeks to unite and build from shared strength, the kind that doesn’t demonize. Instead, from our new mayor we got the snotty sound of us vs. them, of zero-sum politics.

It was not a promising beginning. Or rather what it promises is unfortunate. I already miss Mike.