Peggy Noonan

What’s the political word of the year? For months journalists couldn’t settle on how to describe the rollout of ObamaCare. “Failed,” disastrous,” “unsuccessful.” In the past few weeks they’ve settled on “botched.” References to the botched rollout have appeared in this paper, The Hill, NBC, Fox, NPR, the New Republic, the Washington Post and other media outlets.

When I was new in the Reagan administration, a colleague would worry aloud to me about the bad things he was hearing about the budget negotiations on the Hill. We’re giving away the store, the negotiators aren’t tough enough, they’re throwing in the towel. I tried to study up so I could be alarmed too. But it was hard because my background was Democratic—a Reagan Democrat before that term was popularized—and we just never thought about “the budget.” It wasn’t strictly economic issues that made us conservative; it was a constellation of issues, including taxes and spending.

I didn’t see the trajectory of life through “the budget,” and in that respect I was a normal American. That’s how we were, and are. We hire people to make budgets but we’re not accountants, that’s not the American DNA. Anyway my alarm remained insufficient and finally I admitted to my colleague that the way I see it history is long and textured, and specific and discrete legislative actions rarely make or break a great nation. A series of bad, bad budgets can harm a country. A series of good, good budgets can help it. End of story.

Two things have changed since those days. The first is that we used to worry the government would go bankrupt, and now we worry that it is bankrupt and no one’s admitting it. This has created an air of considerable crisis. The second happened in the past few years. It is that the government is now unable even to pass a budget, to perform this minimal duty. Instead Congress and the administration lurch from crisis to crisis, from shutdown to debt-ceiling battle. That gives a sense the process itself is broken, and this lends an air of instability, of Third World-ness, to the world’s oldest continuing democracy. We can’t even control our books. We don’t even try.

That’s my context for the Ryan-Murray budget deal.

Should it be passed? Yes, yes and yes. The good things about it are very good. The idea that Republicans and Democrats are capable of coming to a budget agreement is good. The idea that they can negotiate and make concessions and accept gains is good. The idea the U.S. government is able to produce anything but stasis and acrimony is good. That we can still function even in the age of Obama —good.

America looks like a great fool in the world when we have such division and dysfunction we can’t produce a budget. We were the guys who used to make it work! Now our friends are embarrassed for us and our adversaries gloat.

The agreement moves us an inch or two in the right direction. Let me tell you what that’s better than: It’s better than moving a few inches in the wrong direction! And it’s better than where we’ve been, in a state of agitated paralysis.

It is moderate progress. When the only progress you can win is moderate, take it.

The bill contains a little entitlement reform, a little federal worker and military pension reform. These are helpful and, as we say when wearing green eyeshades, the savings will compound in the out years. The reforms are achieved without tax increases—an achievement.

The deal breaks the caps for discretionary spending but fortunately leaves most of the sequester intact. Half the new spending will go to defense, which could use some relief, and half to pork. This is not ideal. But it’s real and it’s a budget and it goes in the right general direction, not the wrong one.

Some critics have said, bizarrely, that this takes the steam out of a future grand bargain. But where was that elusive bargain? Was anything happening there? It is equally arguable that Ryan-Murray will function as what diplomats call a confidence-building measure. If it passes both houses and garners support in the polls it could encourage both parties toward bigger agreements, such as tax reform. Which America desperately needs in order to grow.

The deal benefits both parties. It allows the Democrats to look serious. They haven’t in a while. It makes them look capable of something that is both modest and constructive—unlike ObamaCare, which is neither. They’re trying to get out from under the sullying of their brand. The policy implications are good for the country, so let ’em have what they need.

The Republican gain is substantial. The deal avoids upcoming fights over funding the government. The Democrats were going to win those, and in fact would have gotten a twofer. Republicans would be painted, again, as shut-down-the-government nihilists, and everyone’s eyes would have been taken off the ongoing disaster of ObamaCare. Avoiding another shutdown is a big fat Christmas gift for Republicans. They should thank themselves and accept it.

More important, the deal helps them look again the way Republicans used to look before they spent a dozen years squandering their reputation. It makes them look like a governing party. Look Ma, they can do something. They can put together an agreement that allows the government to run. They are not only the yelling, hog-stomping opposition, they can still build things that work.

You know, Republicans used to be known for that. It was their strong suit—sober at home and sober abroad. Then they got romantic and confused and decided big dramatic things were the way. But the American people, who enjoy drama in their actors, artists and even lately in popes, don’t require drama right now from their government. They are happy for some calm there. Republicans forgot they were the calm center.

The Democrats meanwhile spent the past five years on a toot, passing multi-thousand-page bills they didn’t read whose consequences they didn’t even bother to guess at. Now, to the consternation of the American people, they have blown up the American health-care system. That system was a road with a lot of potholes and not enough lanes. It needed repair and strengthening. Instead Democrats attacked it like the Bridge on the River Kwai and are now standing there scratching their heads like Alec Guinness, asking: “What have I done?”

That whole mess will have to be cleaned up. Maybe a budget deal will give Congress a little space—and confidence—in which to attempt it.

The deal’s foes can’t just say it isn’t good enough. Of course it’s not good enough! They’re never good enough. “The budget” is just a thing going in the wrong direction or the right direction. This one goes right. Have a good 2014 and it will go righter still.

Tea-party lawmakers and their supporters should recognize an opportunity when it appears. They suffer from a reputation of selfishness. They only have to look to their base, they only have to take care of themselves, and do. The Republican Party must operate nationally and make an impression on a big and various nation of 315 million. There are moments when the tea party has to tug the Republicans right. This is a moment when cooperating—backing a deal that is better than the absence of a deal—would be statesmanlike. The thing about statesmen is they’re taken seriously. And it isn’t only Democrats who would benefit from looking serious.

We’re not a year into his leadership, but it’s Christmastime and the pope has been much in the news. Let’s look at how he’s doing.

He continues to capture the imagination. When he says something, people look and listen. His approach is not to lecture on the finer points but to embrace, and through the embrace communicate the essentials. An image of the first nine months: Francis on the phone, calling strangers. “Hello, it’s the pope, I read your letter!” He famously eschews the special—the regalia, the car, the palace, the shoes. He wears a cross made not of gold but of common metal. That seems in line with his tastes and nature but carries a symbolic punch: The church should not use its dignity and greatness, its art and finery to separate itself, unconsciously, from the people.

In a world full of loneliness and poverty he says: We are all equal, and equally loved.

Somehow you get the impression that even though he is 76—everyone thinks he’s younger—he’s going to be around a long time. And his papacy is going to be big.

His apostolic exhortation released last week set out general guidelines for the church as it tries to bring people to it. I read the controversial economics section twice, and to me it sounded pretty much like how modern popes talk and think. The world is swept by “consumerism,” by the worship of things, which leaves our hearts “complacent yet covetous.” The desire to acquire blunts the conscience, crowds out God’s voice, and keeps us from hearing the only invitation that will make us happy.

His concerns in this section are classically Catholic and, in their emphasis, economically liberal: “Today we have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” That struck me as a rebuke not only of “Wall Street” but of the media, which report the latter but not the former. Francis continues: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest.” He scores “trickle-down” economic theories “which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” This view reflects “a naive trust” in the economically powerful.

He must have heard about the carried-interest tax break, and corporate welfare.

All this has been portrayed as an attack on free-market economic thinking, but it struck me more as an attack on mindless selfishness, greed and go-with-the-flow acceptance of the unrightness of the world. It made me think of Charles Dickens. The pope’s message in part is: Don’t be Scrooge. He cared only for money, had no respect for the poor—he thought they should die and decrease the surplus population—wasn’t the least bit interested in treating his employees justly or with compassion, and missed out on all the real joy of life, until he wised up.

But is Francis saying more than that? Is he hostile to capitalism, and do we see this hostility in the pointed use of phrases such as “trickle-down,” a term the left uses to disparage the idea that created wealth, when invested or spent, spreads and benefits others?

I don’t know, I don’t think so, and we’ll see. I don’t think he’s saying be a leftist but something more revolutionary and fundamental: Be a saint. Be better, kinder, more serious and loving, and help create systems that reflect good, kind, loving people.

The pope has a way of colorfully saying, through words and actions, that the church is on the side of the poor—the materially and spiritually poor—and always has been. I think he’s saying that here: that the Church has a bias for the poor and impatience toward those who would abuse them. And he is speaking not infallibly but as a matter of a worldview rightly shared.

The popes of the modern era have been more or less European social democrats, of the economic left. I’ve never heard a pope worry about the depressive effects of high tax rates, have you? Or the dangers of high spending? Popes are sometimes geniuses but not economists.

And priests are like soldiers. I’ve never met a member of the military who cared much about taxing and spending. Their general view is that taxes should be high enough to allow a great nation to support a first-rate military and keep you safe, end of story. Soldiers aren’t really paid commensurate with their responsibility and importance; it’s not as if they’re in the 60% bracket. Priests tend to be like that, too. They’re not paid much, they’re housed and fed by their order or parish. Taxes are more or less abstract to them. How high should taxes be? High enough for a first-rate country to help its citizens get the good things they need, end of story.

Priests know what’s important in life, and it isn’t money. You have to factor that in when you talk economic policy with them, just as you have to factor in that soldiers would give their lives for you.

Back to Francis, previous popes and economic policy. Our experience forms us. It shapes our thoughts and assumptions. John Paul II and Benedict XVI came from a particular 20th-century European experience. In their youth it was the rise of Nazism, and through their adult lives it was the constant threat of Soviet communism, which was both expansionist—it took John Paul’s Poland and half of Benedict’s Germany—and atheistic. They saw communism as a limiter of freedom and a distorter of the human heart.

The great foe of Soviet communism? America and the West, which had the wherewithal and spiritual strength to resist it. The West brought with it—was rich because of—free-market capitalism. John Paul and Benedict, whatever their private thoughts on how nations should arrange themselves economically, came to have a natural appreciation and respect for what made the West wealthy. They understood its positive utility.

Francis may turn out to be different in this regard. It is possible his appreciation for the wider apparatus of economic freedom does not run so deep. He is from Argentina, not a frontline state in the Cold War, and not necessarily a place—Peronism, corporatism, the military’s influence, the intertwining of money and government—that would give you a dreamy sense of free-market potential. Trickle-down didn’t always work so well there.

We’ll see the implications, if any, of all that.

For now, Francis really has a way of breaking through the media clutter, doesn’t he? At a dinner the other night a smart young priest referred to how Francis’s comments can often be taken a number of different ways. He said, “Maybe he’s just unclear. But he’s a Jesuit, so I assume it’s deliberate.” You mean strategic ambiguity, I said. We laughed because that’s what we both thought. Francis wants to get us thinking about what we should be thinking about. He wants to invite thought.

And he’s succeeding, isn’t he?

I had a lot of jobs in a somewhat knockabout youth—waitress, clerk, temporary secretary, counter girl in a bakery (nice—no one’s ever sad in a bakery) and in a flower shop (hard—for hours I removed the thorns from the tough, gnarly roses we sold, which left my hands nicked and bloodied). All the jobs of my teens and early 20s were wonderful in the sense that I was lucky to have a job. Unskilled baby boomers were crowding into an ailing economy; they took what they could and did their best from there. I could earn a salary to buy what I needed—clothes, food, money to go to college at night, then during the day. But the jobs were most wonderful in that they contributed to the experience hoard we all keep in our heads.

The best was waitressing. That’s hard work too, eight or 10 hours on your feet, but you get to know the customers. People will tell you their life stories over coffee. There’s something personal, even intimate, in serving people food, and regulars would come in at 6 or 7 a.m. and in time you’d find you were appointments in each other’s lives. At the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey, long-haul truckers on their way to New York would stop for breakfast. They hadn’t talked to anyone in hours. I’d pour coffee and they would start to talk about anything—the boss, the family, politics.

I learned from them what a TSA agent told me many years later: “Everyone’s carrying the same things.” I had asked the agent what she’d learned about people from years of opening people’s bags and seeing what was inside. She meant her answer literally: Everybody’s carrying the same change of clothes, the same toiletries. But at the moment she said it we both understood that she was speaking metaphorically too: Everyone’s carrying the same burdens, the same woes one way or another. We have more in common than we know.

Once when I was 18 my friends and I ran away. We pooled our cash, bought a broken-down car for $200 and aimlessly drove south. We wound up in Miami Beach, in what was then a fallen-down, beat-up area and is now probably a millionaire’s row. I worked at a restaurant whose name I remember as the Lincoln Lanes. Jackie Gleason did his TV show nearby, and the June Taylor dancers used to come in for lunch. They were so great—young and beautiful and full of tales about the show and about Jackie, who once drove by in his car. I thought of him when I first saw Chris Christie, years later. Mr. Christie on YouTube confronting an aggrieved constituent was sheer Gleason: “To the moon, Alice!”

The hardest job I had was working the floor at a women’s clothing store on Park Avenue in Rutherford, N.J. It was part of a chain. It was boring when traffic was light—clocks go slow in retail when no one’s there. There’s no stool to sit on during your shift: You’re working the floor so that’s where they want you, walking around, folding sweaters, rearranging hangers. You don’t have the same conversations with a harried woman trying on a skirt that you do with a tired trucker on his way to the city who decides to give you his philosophy of life.

One thing all these jobs had in common was something so common, so expected, that it was unremarked upon. You got holidays off. You were nonessential personnel. You worked at a place that didn’t have to be open, so it wasn’t. You got this gift, a day off, sometimes paid and sometimes not, but a break, an easement of responsibility.

I suppose the shops I worked at were unthinkingly following tradition. Thanksgiving, Christmas—these are days to be with friends and family and have a feast. Maybe if you pressed them they’d say something like: “This is what we do. We’re Americans. Thanksgiving is a holiday. We’re supposed to give thanks, together.” They’d never trespass on a national day of commonality, solidarity and respect.

You know where we’re going, because you’ve seen the news stories about the big retailers that decided to open on Thanksgiving evening, to cram a few extra hours in before the so-called Black Friday sales. About a million Wal-Mart workers had to be in by 5 p.m. for a 6 p.m. opening, so I guess they had to eat quickly with family, then bolt. Kmart opened on Thanksgiving too, along with Target, Sears, Best Buy and Macy’s, among others.

The conversation has tended to revolve around the question of whether it’s good for Americans to leave their gatherings to go buy things on Thanksgiving. In a societal sense, no—honor the day best you can and shop tomorrow. But that’s not even the question. At least shoppers were being given a choice. They could decide whether or not they wanted to leave and go somewhere else. But the workers who had to haul in to work the floor didn’t have a choice. They had been scheduled. They had jobs they want to keep.

It’s not right. The idea that Thanksgiving doesn’t demand special honor marks another erosion of tradition, of ceremony, of a national sense. And this country doesn’t really need more erosion in those areas, does it?

The rationale for the opening is that this year there are fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and since big retailers make a lot of their profits during that time something must be done. I suppose something should. But blowing up Thanksgiving isn’t it.

There has been a nice backlash on the Internet, with petitions and Facebook posts. Some great retailers refused to be part of what this newspaper called Thanksgiving Madness. Nordstrom did not open on Thanksgiving, nor did T.J. Maxx, Costco or Dillard’s. P.C. Richard & Son took out full-page ads protesting. The CEO was quoted last week saying Thanksgiving is “a truly American holiday” and “asking people to be running out to shop, we feel is disrespectful.” Ace Hardware said, simply: “Some things are more important than money.”

That is the sound of excellent Americans.

People deserve a day off if what they do is nonessential. Selling a toy, a jacket, even a rose is nonessential.

Black Friday—that creepy sales bacchanal in which the lost, the lonely, the stupid and the compulsive line up before midnight Friday to crash through the doors, trampling children and frightening clerks along the way—is bad enough, enough of a blight on the holiday.

But Thanksgiving itself? It is the day the Pilgrims invented to thank God to live in such a place as this, the day Abe Lincoln formally put aside as a national time of gratitude for the sheer fact of our continuance. It’s more important than anyone’s bottom line. That’s a hopelessly corny thing to say, isn’t it? Too bad. It’s true.

Oh, I hope people didn’t go. I hope when the numbers come in it was a big flop.

I hope America stayed home.

And happy Thanksgiving to our beloved country, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

Congress right now has a historic chance—really, it could wind up in the history books next to the stopping of FDR’s court-packing scheme in 1937—to hold back ObamaCare. Congress can delay it, or pass a law mandating or allowing insurance companies to continue insuring everyone they just threw off coverage. Heck, they could try to vote now, under new conditions and with the American people behind them, to repeal the whole thing.