Who Will Time Pick?

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

You have to hand it to Time magazine for managing to drum up interest in their Person of the Year choice. There was a time, I suppose up to about 15 years ago, when people really cared who Time put on the cover as Man of the Year. It meant something. But the media landscape changed, and those who care about the news can turn to a million instant outlets and portals. Time once had that marvelous voice-of-God quality of the great journalistic institutions; now it’s more obviously another voice in the choir, and a politically uniform and institutionally left-liberal choir it is.

But that’s another story. This one is about how they’ve done a good job building interest in the Person of the Year by offering a list of possible choices that contains so many losers that people couldn’t help reacting to it. Cable and broadcast news shows devoted stories and segments to it.

It was clever but also kind of nice and old-fashioned—traditional media carrying on its traditions, legacy media carrying on its legacy.

Time announces its choice tomorrow. Here a quick review of those it won’t be, and why, and who it will be.

• Bashar Assad, president of Syria. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody likes him. There’s no way to balance the pros with the cons, no way to suggest he represents the future and not the past. It looks like he’s defeated his foes, but what does that signal long0term? He won’t do as a cover: His head looks like it was squeezed from a tube.

• Sen. Ted Cruz. Of course not. He is a living encapsulation of everything Time hates. Once they did an encapsulation of everything they hated when they put Newt Gingrich on the cover, 19 years ago. They had an awful, glowering portrait. He looked pale and creviced as the moon, and the copy as I remember it suggested he was small, cold and spooky to look at on stormy nights. But Time had to choose him: He was the biggest political story of the year, having led the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, and on his way to the speakership. They can avoid Cruz, so they will. His name was put on the list only to agitate the left, and get them popping on cable.

• Jeff Bezos. He had a big year in that he promised drone deliveries and bought the Washington Post—an investment that heartened fogies by suggesting old media has a place in the new world. If the drones happen and the Post begins to rise again toward its ancestral levels of journalistic indispensability, Bezos will be person of the year in a few years.

• Miley Cyrus. Oh dear. Why? I guess for looking like one of Satan’s pigtailed imps. Her choice would cause some controversy but too little to sell magazines. She offends only the sensitive, and they’re a diminishing demographic. To put her on the cover Time would have to laud her specific genius, which she doesn’t have, or deplore her as a signifier of unfortunate trends, which Time wouldn’t do because they don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of that argument.

• Barack Obama. Why? Because his face on the cover will depress sales? Because it will look just like last week’s cover? Because he’s hopelessly overexposed? Because he’s had his worst year? Because his poll numbers are down? Because he’s becoming boring even to his supporters? Because the Democratic Party is 12 months away from beginning to cut ties with him in order not to be dragged down? Because his signature achievement is revealed every day as a disingenuous flop? He is on the list because presidents are always on the list.

• Hassan Rouhani, president of Iran. Nah. What would that even mean? What he is as a leader remains to be seen. What is happening in the political life of his country remains to be seen. Maybe he represents an opening, maybe not. Maybe the nuclear deal is good, maybe not. Even the cover would be problematic. If Time used a photo of his normally expressionless and arguably rather smug face, no one would buy the magazine. If they commission a warm, friendly or interesting portrait it will open them to charges of being useful idiots for an evil regime. Anyway, this is America: no one knows what he looks like or who he is.

• Kathleen Sebelius. More boob bait for cable. Why would they pick her? Because she is one of the public faces of the biggest domestic-policy disaster in 100 years? Because she’s gormless, formless and deliberately obscure in all her public remarks? Because she stands for something people don’t like? Because she proved herself historically incompetent? Because not only is it true that no one knows anything about her but no one wants to know anything about her? She is a functionary, an administrator. She is a cabinet secretary.

• Edith Windsor. She would be a sentimental choice—her personal story is touching, she can arguably be called a harbinger of things to come, and Time is in line with her essential agenda. But no one beyond news sophisticates knows who she is. She’s a runner-up.

• Edward Snowden. This would be interesting. What he did this year was not only important but arguably world-changing. He has managed, like him or not, support him or not, to put front and center the issue America and the West had for a decade successfully ignored, and that is the depth, breadth and implications of government surveillance of the citizenry. That issue has now caused and will continue to cause huge discomfort and debate, and will one way or another bring legislative responses. A fresh look at Snowden’s motives and actions would require deep and original reporting, as would the question of what, exactly, he has given America’s foes and potential foes. Is he a traitor, a patriot, a whistleblower, a scoundrel? Did he put everything on the line for his beliefs, or for something smaller than belief, such as ego? What he has done will have real implications for our future. But he won’t sell magazines. Or rather he won’t sell the Person of the Year issue. People already think they have a position on him. They won’t want to get another headache, not during the holidays.

• Finally, Pope Francis. Who is the person I say will be chosen. Reasons, not in order of importance:

Because he has captured the imagination of the world. Because the Person of the Year issue comes out at Christmastime, and the choice of the pope will have seasonal synergy. Because he is coming up on one year on the throne of Peter; he is ripe for but has not yet received a major mainstream journalistic summing-up. Time will enjoy getting the jump. Because it’s clear his papacy is going to be an important one. Because Francis is different from his recent predecessors in ways Time’s editors and reporters would find congenial. Because pretty much everybody likes him. Because while many on the left and right feel they understand his economic populism, the exact form it will take—its precise nature, and what he’ll do and say down the road—is not fully clear, which gives the story a little mystery. Because the pope is a Jesuit, and Jesuits interest journalists because journalists think they’re smart. Because as a personality he is irresistable. Because he is a good man, not a bad one, and therefore makes the heart feel hopeful and not more anxious. And because he is, to a degree greater than any other leader you can name, exactly right for his time.

It will be Francis.

Be a Saint, Not a Scrooge

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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.

Pope Francis blessing a man with neurofibromatosis
Pope Francis blessing a man with neurofibromatosis in Saint Peter’s Square, Nov. 6, 2013.

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?

Low-Information Leadership

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated.

That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.

*   *   *

People have seen their prices go up, their choices narrow. They have lost coverage. They have lost the comfort of keeping the doctor who knows them and knows they tend to downplay problems and not complain of pain, and so doing more tests might be in order, or tend to be hypochondriacal and probably don’t need an echocardiogram, or at least not a third one this year.

At the very least people have been inconvenienced; at the most they’ve been made more anxious in an already anxious world. In a month, at the worst they may be on a gurney in an ER not knowing the answer to the question “Do you have insurance?” and hoping they can get into an exam room before somebody runs the number on the little green plastic card they keep in the back of their wallet.

Everyone understands in their own rough way that ObamaCare is a big mess. And that it’s not the website, it’s the law itself. They have seen systems crash. In the past 20 years they’ve seen their own computers crash. They know systems and computers get fixed.

But they understand a conceptual botch when they see one. They understand this new program was so big and complex and had so many moving parts and was built on so many assumptions that may or may not hold true, and that deals with so many people with so many policies—and they know they themselves have not read their own policies, for who would when the policies, like the law that now controls the policies, are written in a way that is deliberately obscure so as to give maximum flexibility to administrators in offices far away. And that’s just your policy. What about 200 million other policies? The government can’t handle that. The government can barely put up road signs.

The new law seems like just another part of the ongoing shakedown operation that is the relationship of the individual and the federal government, circa 2013.

But back to the president, and his problem with being known as intelligent—Columbia, Harvard Law, lecturer on constitutional issues at the University of Chicago Law School.

The program he created in 2009-10, ran on in 2012, and whose implantation he delayed until one year after that election—in retrospect, that delay seems meaningful, doesn’t it?—has turned out to be wildly misleading as to its basic facts.

Millions are finding you can’t keep your plan, your premium, your deductible, your doctor. And millions more will discover this when the business mandate kicks in.

All of this—the fraudulent nature of the program—came as a rolling shock to people the past two months.

It’s a shock for most people that it’s a shambles. A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work? Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?” I couldn’t think of one, and it’s the same question I’d been asking myself. The questioner had been the manager of a great institution, a high stakes 24/7 operation with a lot of moving parts. He knew Murphy’s law—if it can go wrong, it will. Managers—presidents—have to obsess, have to put the fear of God, as Mr. Obama says, into those below them in the line of authority. They don’t have to get down in the weeds every day but they have to know there are weeds, and that things get caught in them.

It’s a leader’s job to be skeptical of grand schemes. Sorry, that’s a conservative leader’s job. It is a liberal leader’s job to be skeptical that grand schemes will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful.

And this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time.

People say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll, never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance! And you know, his policies were probably gold-plated—at the law firm, through his wife’s considerable hospital job, in the Illinois Legislature, in the U.S. Senate. Those guys know how to take care of themselves! Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe that’s to his credit, knowing he was lucky. Too bad he didn’t know what he didn’t know, like how every part has to work for a complicated machine to work.

Here I will say something harsh, and it’s connected to the thing about words but also images.

From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They’ve only seen the movie—the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said “Not another war” and Bobby said “Pearl Harbor in reverse” and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar…

Next Year Stay Home, America

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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!”

Black ThursdayThe 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.

Final Thoughts on JFK

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

I’m off this week but wanted to join in on some last JFK thoughts. I write just a few minutes before the 50th anniversary of that moment the shots rang out.

The television coverage has been excessive, and some have found it grating. Fair enough, but we’ll never do it like this again. There won’t be any such attention paid to the 60th and 70th; those who were there will be gone, as will be many of those who were not there but remember.

People keep doing “Where I was when I heard.” It is obnoxious, but it’s an understandably human impulse to want to locate yourself in time and space and tell someone where you were when you heard big news. Our parents did it with Dec. 7, 1941. “I was at a football game and the announcer came on and asked all military personnel to return to their bases . . .”

I was in seventh grade at John P. McKenna junior high school in Massapequa Park, Long Island. We were in the halls on our way to seventh period. My friend Karen Strazzeri walked up to me wide-eyed. “Did you hear? The president was shot.” That was too strange to be true. I told her it was probably a rumor but if it was true we’d find out soon. A few minutes later, in what I remember as social studies class, the teacher said the president had been shot. Then the principal came on the public address system and said the president was dead. We were all very quiet. Thn one boy, out of nervousness or idiocy, laughed. The teacher yelled at him, harshly: How could you so insensitive? That poor boy is probably still in therapy.

I remember that night or the next sitting on the lawn and looking up and thinking, “Isn’t it funny JFK is dead and the moon is still there and everything looks the same?”

I watched it all on TV, like everyone else. Later I worked in the CBS Newsroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and wound up working with the men and women who’d covered the assassination 15 years before. One of them, Marion Glick, told me what it was like. They all worked double shifts. The writers and producers and technicians, the secretaries and on-air talent, all of them felt they were performing a public service. They had a heightened sense of responsibility, like soldiers. Others felt this too. The second day, local restaurants and diners started sending over full dinners and lunches for the CBS staff, all on the house.

*   *   *

People debate whether JFK was a liberal or a conservative. He was a politician operating within a party that was starting to go left. He wasn’t that interested in ideology. He was propelled by a belief that of all the available leaders around, he’d be as good as any and better than most. He wanted to win, triumph and rise, and these are not bad things, and he thought that he, along with the best and the brightest he brought into the White House, could handle, with practicality and pragmatism, what came over the transom.

He was curiously passive about his legislative agenda. You always get a sense when you read the histories that he thought he’d always have trouble with those old Neanderthals in the Senate. It took Lyndon Johnson, the least appreciated president of modern times, who had the bad luck to follow Jack Kennedy’s act, to bully JFK’s agenda through. He knew those senators, knew what they needed, as opposed to desired and liked to pose about. He made deals, bent them to his will. Thus came the civil rights laws and Medicare. It is amazing that he gets so little public credit for these things. But he didn’t have dash and he wasn’t a glamorous or romantic figure.

You can’t ignore the sheer glamour in the Kennedy story. Yes it was the first fully televised White House, and yes his friends in the press splashed pictures of the family all over their magazines, but people wanted to look at them—there was a market for them—because they were beautiful and young and sun-splashed. They were like movie stars. The Nixons were not, Hubert Humphrey was not. They were at a disadvantage.

Anyway it’s foolish not to remember that glamour was part of the story.

*   *   *

Two small points. It is interesting that JFK was celebrated as the first modern president, the first truly hip president, and yet the parts of him we celebrate most are actually the old virtues. He lied to get into the military, not to get out of it. He was sick, claimed to be well, and served as a naval officer in the war. In the postwar years he was in fairly constant physical pain, but he got up every day and did his demanding jobs. He played hurt. He was from a big, seemingly close family and seemed very much the family man himself. What we liked most about him wasn’t hip.

And he was contained. He operated within his own physical space and was not florid or mawkish or creepily domineering in his physical aspect.

For generations after him politicians imitated him—his mannerisms, his look, his hair. Before JFK hair was not a political virtue. After him it was. I remember a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York who was the first candidate to blow-dry his hair. He had a big swoop of it. That guy ran on his hair. It was his platform. I remember a local New York City political figure who wore a kind of JFK wig, a big strange shock of hair that looked twice as big as his head. And he went pretty far.

If they had to imitate anything I wish it was how distanced, ironic and modest JFK was in the physical sphere. He didn’t hug the other pols on the platform, he didn’t give a big man-hug to the others on the dais, he didn’t kiss everyone and point at the audience and give them a thumbs-up. He didn’t act, he just was. Like a grownup. Like a person with dignity. Like a person with public boundaries who is an actor but not a phony.

Why We Still Talk About JFK

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

I am on my way from Los Angeles to Dallas, where tomorrow I will appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which will come live out of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I can’t believe I’ll be inside that place, from which, 50 years ago next week, at a corner window on the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed John F. Kennedy.

One of the questions we’ll discuss: Why do we still talk about JFK?

From my show notes:

1. We talk still about JFK and his death because the biggest generation in all U.S. history, that part of the population known as the baby boomers, watched it all, live, on that new thing called TV, and it entered our heads and never left. It was the first central historical fact of our lives, so we still read about it, think about it, and watch anything having to do with it.

2. Our parents experienced it as a different kind of trauma. They had lost one of their own. He had fought in World War II, like them. He was still young, like them, and now he was brutally cut down. What a lot of them felt was captured in the famous conversation of the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory and her friend Pat Moynihan. McGrory said: Oh Pat, can you believe we’re at Jack Kennedy’s funeral? “I feel like we’ll never laugh again.” He replied: “We’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

3. We talk about JFK’s death because for the 18 years leading up to that point—between the end of the war, as we used to say, and 1963—America knew placidity. Many problems were growing and quietly brewing, but on the surface America was placid, growing more affluent, and politically calm. And then this rupture, this shock, this violence, this new sense that anything can happen, history can be ripped from its rails, that security once won cannot necessarily be maintained. That our luck won’t necessarily hold.

4. And what followed—growing political unrest, cultural spasms, riots at political conventions, more assassinations and assassination attempts—was so different from the years preceding that we couldn’t help look back at JFK’s murder as the breakpoint, the rupture. After that, things turned difficult.

5. Why, after all the historians’ revelations and the stories of the past 30 years—the women, the drug use, the Kennedy White House’s own farfetched efforts to do away with Fidel Castro, the fantastical nature of the Bay of Pigs, the failure of JFK to anticipate and answer the crude communist clichés of Kruschev at Vienna, etc., etc.—why do we continue to hold this special place for JFK? Because in the months and years after his death we fell in love with him as he was presented to us by those who knew and cared about him. Youth, beauty, charm, high intentions, wit, a certain fatalism and, deep down, a certain modesty. “Camelot.” But Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.

6. We live in now. We live in this world. Right now I can hardly believe it that I am in seat 6B of American Airlines flight 2442, LAX to Dallas-Fort Worth, a few hundred miles west of Los Angeles, mountains and desert stretching below—and I am typing on an iPad, and will press a button, and my editor in New York in just a few seconds will read this and post it on The Wall Street Journal website and you will read it. It still takes my breath away. This is “the age of miracles and wonders.” Some child born now will look back on these days as Camelot.

ObamaCare Disaster Recovery

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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.

And who knows, they just might.A great deal is possible because the people are coming around to the Republican point of view on the program: They do not like it, do not trust it, do not believe it will make things better. The president got caught—and it’s amazing he did it, because he must have known he’d be caught when the program debuted—dissembling, for three years, as he sold and attempted to popularize his program. In fact if your insurance isn’t provided by an employer or the government, chances are pretty good you will soon lose your policy, your doctor, your premium price.

The White House is getting timorous. They’re losing their usual braggadocio, their burly confidence that they can weather any storm. By now they’ve seen a lot of Titanic cartoons. By now they’re wondering if that music they’re hearing isn’t “Nearer My God to Thee.” The polls show less faith in the president, less trust.

What a fall, and how richly deserved. The administration didn’t care enough to make sure the people of their country were protected. In the middle of a second Age of Anxiety they decided to make Americans more anxious. The next few weeks and months they’ll continue to see the people’s mighty wrath.

The mainstream press is already beginning to peel off. Bill Clinton gave them permission for that. Big Dawg was right: The president has to honor his own word and protect those who trusted him and have been thrown off their plans. The press, and congressional Democrats, are no longer disloyal if they say the same thing.

President ObamaDemocrats in the House seem near to snapping, and you never know what the House will do. They’re elected every two years. They’re always in an election cycle, and are thus more reactive to and sensitive to shifts in public thinking.

It would make history if congressional Democrats proved to be serious, equal to the moment, if they pushed back against the White House and came through for the American people by moving, in a real move, not a cosmetic gesture—too late for that, that’s what they should have been doing a month ago!—against ObamaCare.

And you get the impression they just might.

It would be practical. People back home don’t like ObamaCare now, and soon—as the Nov. 30 website deadline is blown, as public clamor spreads about canceled policies, higher costs, doctors no longer on the network—they’ll like it even less.

Weeks ago they were talking of the possibility of a death spiral, but ObamaCare is in a death spiral.

So the Democrats’ moving against it would be realistic, practical. Successful politicians are by definition survivors. They’ve been loyal to Mr. Obama for a long time, but most of them don’t really know him. They don’t owe him much. And he is tanking their brand. Democrats can claim a special reason for reversing their earlier support—they believed the president when he said you could keep your coverage. But now, having seen the anxiety the people back home are feeling, they’re bravely standing up to the administration to protect the constituents they love. “We need national health-care relief. The system has long been broken, but let’s face it, this program isn’t working and won’t work. It’s time to start over again and get things right.” That’s the way to go for Democrats, “Get things right.” They shouldn’t give up on the issue—the trauma of the past few weeks will likely, and ironically, leave Americans more open to a simple single-payer approach—but they should give up on ObamaCare. And they should always call it that, to distance their own future programs from it.

Or they can hunker down and lose in 2014. They can take the advice of Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Run on ObamaCare, go home and explain how great it is. Which is another way of saying stand by the limp and tattered flag, draw all the fire and die on the field.

More and more it seems obvious that the vast majority of the politicians who pushed the bill in the House and Senate never read it. They didn’t know what was in it. They had no idea. They don’t understand insurance—they’re in politics, a branch of showbiz.

Some of them would have tried to read it, but it was 2,000 pages of impenetrable paragraphs—real word-clots, word-slabs—accompanied by long lines of swimming numbers. Comprehensive bills are never comprehensible ones—they are meant to lack clarity. Administrations get bills passed and then let administration regulators interpret them. That’s why Nancy Pelosi said: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” It was literally true!

After failing to read or understand the bill, members of Congress relied on briefings from some guy from the White House, some kid from the speaker’s office, and whichever Ezekiel knockoff was available as an expert.

Lawmakers listened. They took notes.

The briefers thought—hoped—they themselves understood what they were saying. But they were never sure either! You can sort of think you know what you’re saying when you say things like, “When each local exchange module launches it will reflect a national weighting of ‘invincibles’ and ‘ancients’ that will stabilize prevailing market realities while providing broader access not only to the poor but to those who currently have non-grandfathered or insufficient plans. So in the end it’s win-win for everyone.” Would they have known what any of that would mean in terms of real-world application?

The congressmen tried, in their distracted way, to understand. And gave up. And went on “Hardball” saying, “It’s win-win—broader and better coverage for all!”

Most of them had no idea what they were voting for. They’re as surprised as anybody at what’s happened. And it’s not only because so many of them are idiots. They believed what they were told and, more important, they wanted to believe it. And, I suspect, they had a magical and almost touching belief in the ability of the U.S. government to do anything. It’s done anything in the past, why wouldn’t it now? (Because in the past it wasn’t asked to construct huge, sprawling, incoherent Rube Goldberg machines? And because government hasn’t always executed brilliantly, but often just well enough not to make everybody cry?)

One thing about the progressives of Congress: They really drank the Kool-Aid. They really did think government could do anything. They were sincere! They really thought there were no limits.

I wonder if this will sober them up.

People are wondering if we are seeing the end of liberalism. We are not. Liberalism, a great and storied American political tradition, will survive this. But progressivism—liberalism without blood—has been badly, deeply damaged. We are seeing the end of its first major emanation, ObamaCare.

ObamaCare Is the Story

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored. We are not seeing pieces on Captol Hill Democrats rethinking their four-year-long lockstep backing of a program that is failing massively and before the nation’s eyes. I’m not seeing “Pelosi Agonistes: The Speaker Who Said ‘We Have to Pass It to Find Out What’s In It’ Has Some Regrets.” We’re not seeing “Democratic House Group Meets, Anguishes, Decides on New Path.” We’re not reading “Dem Sens From Red States Bolt: ‘It Only Takes One to Start a Jailbreak.’”

The focus of political journalism now should be on what’s happening on the Democratic side, because ObamaCare is a Democratic program. They bought it, they built it, what now?

Democrats aren’t talking about that, at least on the record, and none of them colorfully. They’re in the domestic political/policy debacle of their lives and their reaction is discretion. Some of them are loyal, some of them are kind. Some of them think in terms of blind team-ism. Some of them fear reprisal from the party’s enforcers. Some are stupid and don’t understand the fix they’re in. But many of them are simply disciplined.

What are we seeing on the Republican side? Nonstop taking of the press’s boob bait. “Potential Christie Rival Says He’s Not Conservative,” “GOP Readies for 2016 Battle Reflecting Party Divisions,” “GOPer: ‘Moderation the Path,’” “GOPer: Why Do Women Hate Us?” “Establishment Hates Grass Roots,” “Grass Roots Hates Establishment,” “Libertarians Hate Everyone,” “Everyone Hates Them,” “Republican: Even I Hate Me.”

Someone should tell Republicans that the story now, next week and this winter is ObamaCare, not 2016. It is what to do about ObamaCare. 2016 is not the subject now, it is a changing of the subject.

Is the press beginning to focus on the Democrats and 2016? To a small degree. Mostly they’re fixed on Hillary Clinton. Someone said on cable this morning that there’s the Elizabeth Warren story, she’s being mentioned. Somebody else said Sen. Warren’s in the news as a possible contender because the press needs a 2016 story on the Democratic side, it’s no fun to cover a coronation. True enough. But even truer is this: Hillary needs a fight. She has to prove she can win, not glide. She needs someone to defeat. Democrats understand Mrs. Clinton’s eventual future primary win will be tarnished, even clouded, if no one serious gets in to do battle with her. She has to appear to have fought for it. So they’re in search of a few interesting contenders who can fight hard and lose well.

*   *   *

Back to ObamaCare.

More than four years ago, in July 2009, I wrote a column in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered President Obama some wisdom on health care. Obama’s newly proposed plan—the Affordable Care Act—wouldn’t work, said FDR. In fact, Obama’s proposal put him in a “lose-lose” position. “If you don’t get a bill along the lines you’ve announced, you’ll look ineffective and weak—a loser. If, on the other hand, you win, if you get what you asked for, it will all be a mess and all be on you. The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute properly, the costs will be huge.” FDR said the Obama plan would “thoroughly discombobulate things” and ruin the Democrats’ prospects in the 2010 election.

But FDR had an idea—a sly one, as his ideas usually were. First, he told Obama, drop your current bill. Second, take everyone aback by talking constantly about the national medical program that already exists, Medicare. Show your love for it, insistently—but also admit very freely what isn’t quite perfect about it. “Get your people in Congress to focus on making the system ‘healthier.’ It’s rife with waste, fraud and abuse, everyone knows that. And there’s the demographic time bomb. Come together in a great show of bipartisan feeling with our Republican friends and announce some serious cost-saving measures that are both legitimate and farsighted. Be ‘Dr. Save the System.’ On thorny issues like end-of-life care, put together a bipartisan commission, show you’re open to Republican suggestions.”

The sly fox was telling the young president to show good faith to Republicans by admitting problems, and reassure Democrats by showing his heart and commitment to federal solutions. “Then, at the end,” said FDR, “get your Democratic majorities to make one little change in the program—it’s now open to all. You don’t have to be 65. The uninsured can enroll. Do it in the dead of night if you have to, you’ve got the votes.” Such a program, he said, after so many institutional and structural changes, would of course have to have a new name. “I’d suggest ‘The National Health Service.’”

“Voilà. You now have the single-payer system you wanted.” “Everybody wins. You get expansion, Republicans get cost control, the system is made more secure, and the public for once isn’t terrified.”

Would it make Republicans happy to think they beat Obama back on his original boondoggle? Sure. “But people will start referring to the National Health Service every day, and they’ll believe they have one, and they’ll believe you gave it to them. And you can run in ’12 saying you did. That’s what I’d do!”

I still believe FDR was more or less right. It was 2009, Obama had just been elected, we looked to be at the beginning of a big liberal wave. America was anxious, coming to terms with a terrible recession, maybe worse than that. And everyone knew the health-care system was a mess. There would have been plenty of space for turning it around by cleaning up and repairing, and then broadening, deepening and enriching, the health structure we already had. And not inventing a new one.

Comprehensive new programs have a million moving parts. Programs with a million moving parts are less likely to succeed. ObamaCare hasn’t, and won’t.

*   *   *

A final word on Democrats on the Hill and ObamaCare. In the past month they’ve dealt with the disaster through talking points. That’s what parties in duress do, have kids in the back room write press releases based on the pushback guidance of combative consultants. Those talking points have gone, more or less, from “heavy demand caused the website to crash” to “the website will soon be fixed” to “every big program has bumps at the beginning” to “wait till the American people see their benefits!” to “not that many policies have been cancelled” to “not that many premiums have gone up” to “not that many people will lose their doctors.

Not one of the talking points has worked. Because incoming data, day by day, kept washing over them and sinking them.

The new talking point is that ObamaCare was damaged and fell due to Republican “sabotage.” Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to vote for it, refused to like it and support it. They tried repeatedly to repeal it and defund it.

And all this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition. The Republicans thought the ACA a bad piece of work, a bad bill that would make things worse, not better.

Still, Republicans should take the sabotage charge seriously, because it is not a claim aimed at the consideration of the American people but of history. Democrats are admitting with this charge that ObamaCare is a disaster. They no longer want to argue that it is not. They are arguing that it is a disaster brought about by Republicans. That will be what they argue for history and feed their journalistic historians.

As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with ideas, he was rebuffed.

The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work, and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness (it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

‘Politics Is a Feeling’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

All my friends in politics on the Republican side are feeling dour, angry, frustrated, furrow-browed. That’s understandable. Progressivism may look tottery at the moment, but Republicans don’t know how to knock it down and are at odds over what to replace it with. Interparty friction is high: The GOP is a bird with a lot of wings. Intellectuals on the conservative side are doing their best to argue through the party’s stands, but for all their earnest efforts there’s that simmering and intractable thing, the problem with the Republican brand. Everyone’s fretful.

Which is why time spent with Gov. Chris Christie this week felt like a tonic, an antidote to the prevailing mood. What I saw as he kicked off a seven-day New Jersey bus tour was the lost pleasure of politics. We forget: It’s supposed to be fun. Mr. Christie is cruising to a big win as a red-state figure in a deep blue state, so he’s got a lot to be happy about. But his pleasure in the game and the meaning of the game—his remembering that on some level it is a game, to be won or lost, to cheers or boos—is a clue to the mood with which a great party might approach its work. So here we put aside policy questions to take a look at what winning looks like, and sounds like.

First Lady Mary Pat and Governor Chris Christie
As New Jersey First Lady Mary Pat Christie leads the way, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as greets supporters in Linden, N.J., during a campaign stop.
Mr. Christie on the trail: hustle, bustle, applause, cameras, hugging—a lot—autographing. Everybody’s smartphone in the air. “Governor, Governor!” The crowds are big and enthusiastic. A stop in Linden had people lined up four and five deep more than half a block down the main street. It was the kind of crowd a presidential candidate gets early on. A woman—60s, retired from a hospital—said, “I’m so excited, I feel like I’m meeting a movie star. He’s like me. I feel like he’s telling the truth.” Is she a Republican? “I’m a registered Democrat. I don’t care what party you’re from.” A woman at the Ritz Diner in Livingston told why she’s for Mr. Christie: “He can get things done because he can go between the aisles. Harry Reid and the president won’t even talk to the other side.” This was a prevailing theme: a yearning for bipartisan progress, and support for his abilities in this area. Ellie Cohen, a Democrat who knew Mr. Christie’s mother, Sandy, described her as colorful, funny, direct. “She was . . . Thelma Ritter, if you know what I mean. He’s like her.”

You forget Mr. Christie’s a rock star because he’s been one for a while. But he is, at least at home. There are 700,000 more registered Democrats in Jersey than Republicans. It is one of only a handful of states Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than in 2008. Mr. Christie, in the poll of polls on RealClearPolitics, is ahead by 25.4 points.

In the bus, in a big, business-class kind of seat in his big, billowing white shirt, Mr. Christie took questions.

What’s the magic number below which people like me will say, “Hmmm, Christie’s win was not as big as expected”?

“I have no idea what the magic number is because it changes all the time, because what the press does is react to the latest poll.” However, “historically if we do anything near what the public polls are now then there will be only one person in the history of the Republican party in New Jersey who will have done better.” That’s Thomas Kean, who won the governorship with 69.6% of the vote in 1985. “I’m not gonna beat Tom Kean.”

How do people treat him now, compared with four years ago, when he first ran?

“It’s an enormous difference. . . . Four years ago I think I was a bit of a curiosity. Now . .  people greet me like they really know me.”

What do you think you have become to the people of New Jersey?

“I’m one of them.” And they know it. “That’s the most powerful thing we’ve accomplished.” Livingston is upper-middle-class, Linden is blue-collar. It doesn’t matter: “I’m one of them.”

What changed everything was Hurricane Sandy. Before that he’d been tough, fast, YouTube man, toe to toe with angry teachers. That was his image. After Sandy people saw him as not only a battler but someone they could rely on, who could lead, who was “compassionate.” “I think that people got to know me.”

He quickly understood that how he handled Sandy would either bind him forever to the state or loosen and kill all binds. Thousands were without the basics—water, electricity. He realized that people felt “cut off—literally.” They needed information. In his news conferences he was specific, detailed.

But not every leader gets a storm, and not every leader handles it well. How do you get Democrats to consider voting for a Republican?

“You gotta show up—regularly, consistently. And you gotta listen. You can’t always talk at people, you have to listen.” He said he’s spent the past three years in town halls, at community meetings, ignoring counsel to skip places where he can’t win. He mentions Irvington, in Essex County. “I got 4.7% of the vote four years ago.” He went there anyway “and took lots of really hard questions.”

To show up is to show respect. “If you show up and let them know you care about them, they’re willing to give you a chance.” That doesn’t mean you’ll change their minds, but “everybody’s the same . . . people want to be paid attention to.”

Is Jersey a microcosm of America?

“No. New Jersey is more liberal than America.” But there is one way it is like America: ethnic diversity. “What we have in New Jersey is you have everyone that’s in America today.”

I asked what reporters and pundits and movement conservatives and liberals miss when they look at modern politics.

“I would say this: I think that people who observe what’s going on in New Jersey . . . many of them completely misevaluate what’s going on here in this election. They misunderstand what people want from someone in political life right now. I think [voters] want someone who’s going to solve their problems. And who’s gonna be practical. And who’s gonna listen to them. And who has a philosophy that they can live with—not that they [always] agree with. The only person that I agree with all the time is me. I don’t agree with anybody else all the time, and I think most people are like that.

“I think what [pundits] are missing here is everybody tries to kinda put everything in a little box . . . and I don’t think that’s what politics is. Politics is a feeling. It’s a visceral reaction to someone. Especially when you’re voting for an executive.

“So I think that everybody who tries to analyze this and put it into little boxes—which boxes does he check, which boxes doesn’t he check—I don’t think that’s the way people vote. And if that is the way people vote then no one’s going to be able to explain next Tuesday. No one will be able to explain it.”

The ‘Establishment’ Fights Back

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Washington

It is a month since the government shutdown and a day after the election. The minority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, longest-serving senator in Kentucky history (1985 to the present, up for a sixth term in 2014), is seated in his office talking about the stresses, strains and estrangements that mark the relationship between what is called the tea party and what is called the GOP establishment, which at the moment seems to consist of everyone who isn’t in the tea party. Mr. McConnell is soft-spoken, contained, a person of habitual discretion. What seemed to be on his mind was something like “Star Wars: The Establishment Fights Back.” What he expressed was more like “The Establishment Voices Some Aggravation.”But it’s a start.

“The most important election yesterday wasn’t the governor of New Jersey and it wasn’t the governor of Virginia, it was the special election for Congress in South Alabama, where a candidate who said the shutdown was a great idea, the president was born in Kenya, and that he opposed Speaker Boehner came in second.” The victory of a more electable Republican, is significant, Mr. McConnell says. To govern, parties must win. To win, parties must “run candidates that don’t scare the general public, [and] convey the impression that we could actually be responsible for governing, you can trust us—we’re adults here, we’re grown-ups.”

Republicans must enter the 2014 election cycle remembering the advice of William F. Buckley : “He always said he was for the most conservative candidate who could win.”

Is the GOP in civil war? “No, I don’t think so.” Everyone agrees on the central issue: “We would all love to get rid of ObamaCare. If we had the votes to do it we’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in modern times.”

But “we have a disability right now—it’s called in the Senate ’55 of them and 45 of us.’ I’m not great at math, but 55 is more than 45. . . . I think it’s irresponsible for some people to characterize themselves as sort of true conservatives, to mislead their followers into believing you can get an outcome that you can’t possibly get.”

Senator Mitch McConnellThe tea party, he says, consists of “people who are angry and upset at government—and I agree with them.” But “I think, honestly, many of them have been misled. . . . They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit. . . . They raise money . . . take their cut and spend it” on political action that hurts Republicans.He refers to the Senate Conservatives Fund. “That’s the one I’m prepared to be specific about.” The fund “has elected more Democrats than the Democratic Senatorial Committee over the last three cycles.” The group is targeting Mr. McConnell with ads slamming his leadership during the shutdown. “Right now they’re on the air in obvious coordination with Harry Reid’s super PAC—Harry Reid’s!—in the same markets, at roughly the same amount, at the same time.”

But he says he isn’t worried about his own race: “I don’t wanna be overly cocky, but I’m gonna be the Republican nominee next year.”

Are members of the tea party on the ground being fooled by operators, profit makers and cynics? “Yes,” he said, followed by a brief silence. He declined to say more, but emphasized again that “I make a distinction between the leaders and the followers. I mean, I think a lot of well-meaning people are sending money to organizations having no idea they’re gonna spend all that money against Republicans. Because they’re being misled.”

During the government shutdown there was significant tension and discord among various Republicans on the Hill. Where does that fit in this story?

“It was a strategy that I said both publicly and privately could not work, and did not work.” The idea that a Democratic president and Senate might abandon their signature legislation was “a fantasy—in other words, it was not the truth.”

“All it succeeded in doing was taking attention off of ObamaCare for 16 days. And scaring the public and tanking our brand—our party brand. One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is that there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

The lesson? “Learn from your mistakes, and realize that had we been talking ObamaCare during that 16 days, instead of people being consumed with the shutdown, we’d probably have a generic party ballot lead right now.”

ObamaCare itself is “a catastrophic failure. It’s a lot bigger than the website—sooner or later they’re gonna get the website fixed—but from a strictly political point of view,” the fallout for Democrats will be serious and long-lasting. “Not a single Republican voted for it, not one in the House or Senate. Every single Republican voted to defund it, to delay it, to get rid of it in any way.”

But is that enough? I suggested there is a void in the GOP reaction to ObamaCare. Wave one of the story was debut, website, failure. Wave two was “Oh my God, I just got my cancellation.” Wave three: “Oh my God, I wasn’t cancelled but they hiked my premiums.” All this is making millions of Americans anxious and resentful—they have a sense the president lied to them. How does the Republican Party right now step in to help? What can it offer people who are suffering from the dislocations?

“Yeah, well, I hate to keep repeating myself, but to have the kind of relief the country needs, I think we change the government. Change the Senate, change the presidency. To get relief between now and then will require wholesale [Senate] Democratic defections. And it’s going to be interesting to watch them running away from this. Just three weeks ago they were all in lockstep, voting against any effort to delay it or defund it or anything else. Now a number of them, particularly who happen to be running in red states in 2014, are saying ‘Whoops, maybe we ought to do this or do that.’ So if there’s a jailbreak on the other side, so that the president is put in an awkward position with his own members demanding adjustments, it could happen.”

But “a lot of Democrats would have to start to defect, in a big way, to force onto a reluctant president massive changes.” And “I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. I think what [Democrats] will do is sort of pick around the edges and try to put some distance between themselves and the implementation.”

Is Mr. MConnell going to them and saying, “Guys, it would be very helpful to the country if you would begin to defect”?

No. “I’m waiting for them to come to us, because that’s when you know you’ll have real leverage.”