Peggy Noonan

The Benghazi story until now has been a jumble of factoids that didn’t quite cohere, didn’t produce a story that people could absorb and hold in their minds. This week that changed. Three State Department officials testifying under oath to a House committee changed it, by adding information that gave form to a growing picture. Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom were authoritative and credible. You knew you were hearing the truth as they saw and experienced it. Not one of them seemed political. You had no sense of how they voted. They were professionals. They’d seen a bad thing. They came forward to tell the story. They put the lie to the idea that all questioning of Obama administration actions in Benghazi are partisan and low.

What happened in Benghazi last Sept. 11 and 12 was terrible in every way. The genesis of the scandal? It looks to me like this:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed.

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don’t if it’s an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

Why couldn’t the administration tolerate the idea that Benghazi was a planned terrorist event? Because they didn’t want this attack dominating the headline with an election coming. It would open the administration to criticism of its intervention in Libya. President Obama had supported overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi and put U.S. force behind the Libyan rebels. Now Libyans were killing our diplomats. Was our policy wrong? More importantly, the administration’s efforts against al Qaeda would suddenly come under scrutiny and questioning. The president, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, had taken to suggesting al Qaeda was over. Al Qaeda was done. But if an al Qaeda offshoot in Libya was killing our diplomats, the age of terrorism was not over.

The Obama White House didn’t want any story that might harm, get in the way of or lessen the extent of the president’s coming victory. The White House probably anticipated that Mitt Romney would soon attempt to make points with Benghazi. And indeed he did pounce, too quickly, the very next morning, giving a statement that was at once aggressive and forgettable, as was his wont.

The president’s Republican challenger was looking for gain and didn’t find it. But here’s the thing. More is expected from the president than mere politics. That’s why we tend to re-elect them. A sitting president is supposed to be bigger, weightier, more serious than his rival.

This week’s testimony from Messrs. Hicks, Thompson and Nordstrom was clarifying, to say the least.

Mr. Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the time of the attack, said the YouTube video was never an event in Libya, and no one in Benghazi or Tripoli saw what was happening as a spontaneous street protest. Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, sent an email on Sept. 12 saying: “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.” Mr. Hicks himself said he spoke to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at 2 a.m. Benghazi time the day after the attack and told her it was a planned attack, not a street protest.

Still, the administration stuck to its story and sent out Susan Rice—the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., someone with no direct connection to the event—to go on the Sunday talk shows and insist it was all about a video. They sent someone who could function as a mouther of talking points, someone who was told what to say and could be relied upon to say it. Mr. Hicks said that when he saw what Ms. Rice said his jaw dropped.

All of this is bad enough. Far worse is the implied question that hung over the House hearing, and that cries out for further investigation. That is the idea that if the administration was to play down the nature of the attack it would have to play down the response—that is, if you want something to be a nonstory you have to have a nonresponse. So you don’t launch a military rescue operation, you don’t scramble jets, and you have a rationalization—they’re too far away, they’ll never make it in time. This was probably true, but why not take the chance when American lives are at stake?

Mr. Hicks told the compelling story of his talk with the leader of a special operations team that wanted to fly to Benghazi from Tripoli to help. The team leader was told to stand down, and he was enraged. Mark Thompson wanted an emergency support team sent to the consulate and was confounded when his superiors in Washington would not agree.

Was all this incompetence? Or was it politics disguised as the fog of war? Who called these shots and made these decisions? Who decided to do nothing?

From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they said it was too far in the past: “Benghazi happened a long time ago.” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, really said that.

Think of that. They can’t give answers when the story’s fresh because it just happened, they’re looking into it. Eight months later they don’t have anything to say because it all happened so long ago.

Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.

Will this story ever be completely told? Maybe not. But it’s not going to go away, either. It’s a prime example of the stupidity of all-politics-all-the-time. You make some bad moves for political reasons. And then you suffer politically because you made bad moves.

I think we’re all agreed the president is fading—failing to lead, to break through, to show he’s not at the mercy of events but, to some degree at least, in command of them. He couldn’t get a win on gun control with 90% public support. When he speaks on immigration reform you get the sense he’s setting it back. He’s floundering on Syria. The looming crisis on implementation of ObamaCare has begun to fill the news. Even his allies are using the term “train wreck.” ObamaCare is not only the most slovenly written major law in modern American history, it is full of sneaked-in surprises people are just discovering. The Democrats of Washington took advantage of the country’s now-habitual distractedness: The country, now seeing what’s coming in terms of taxes and fees, will not be amused. Mr. Obama’s brilliant sequester strategy—scare the American public into supporting me—flopped. Congress is about to hold hearings on Boston and how the brothers Tsarnaev slipped through our huge law-enforcement and immigration systems. Benghazi and what appear to be its coverups drags on and will not go away; press secretary Jay Carney was reduced to saying it happened “a long time ago.” It happened in September. The economy is stuck in low-growth, employment in no-growth. The president has about a month to gather himself together on the budget, tax reform and an immigration deal before Congress goes into recess. What are the odds?

Republicans don’t oppose him any less after his re-election, and Democrats don’t seem to support him any more. This week he was reduced to giving a news conference in which he said he’s got juice, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. It was bad. And he must be frustrated because he thinks he’s trying. He gives speeches, he gives interviews, he says words, but he doesn’t really rally people, doesn’t create a wave that breaks over the top of the Capitol Dome and drowns the opposition, or even dampens it for a moment.

Mr. Obama’s problem isn’t really the Republicans. It’s that he’s supposed to be popular. He’s supposed to have some sway, some pull and force. He was just re-elected. He’s supposed to have troops. “My bill is launched, unleash the hounds of war.” But nobody seems to be marching behind him. Why can’t he rally people and get them to press their congressmen and senators? I’m not talking about polls, where he hovers in the middle of the graph, but the ability to wield power.

The president seems incapable of changing anything, even in a crisis. He’s been scored as passive and petulant, but it’s the kind of passivity people fall into when nothing works. “People do what they know how to do,” a hardened old pol once said, meaning politicians use whatever talent they have, and when it no longer works they continue using it.

There’s no happy warrior in there, no joy of the battle, just acceptance of what he wearily sees as the landscape. He’d seem hapless if he weren’t so verbally able.

So, the president is stuck. But it’s too early to write him off as a lame duck because history has a way of intervening. A domestic or international crisis that is well-handled, or a Supreme Court appointment, can make a president relevant. There are 44 months left to Mr. Obama’s presidency. He’s not a lame duck, he’s just lame.

*   *   *

Which has me thinking of two things that have weakened the Obama presidency and haven’t been noted. One was recent and merely unhelpful. The other goes back, and encouraged a mindset that became an excuse, perhaps a fatal one.

The recent one: In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they’d done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don’t say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans.

This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president’s position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.

What damaged the Obama presidency more, looking back, was, ironically, the trash-talking some Republican leaders indulged in after the 2008 campaign. It entered their heads at the Obama White House and gave them a warped sense of the battlefield.

In a conference call with conservative activists in July 2009, then-Sen. Jim DeMint said of the president’s health-care bill, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Not long after, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying that the GOP’s primary goal was to make Mr. Obama a one-term president.

The press hyped this as if it were something new, a unique and epic level of partisan animus. Members of the administration also thought it was something new. It made them assume no deals with Republicans were possible, and it gave them a handy excuse they still use: “It’s not us, they vowed from the beginning they wouldn’t work with us!”

But none of it was new. The other side always vows to crush you. Anyone who’d been around for a while knew the Republicans were trying to sound tough, using hyperbole to buck up the troops. It’s how they talk when they’re on the ropes. But the president and his staffers hadn’t been around for a while. They were young. They didn’t understand what they were hearing was par for the course.

Bill Clinton’s foes made fierce vows about him, the enemies of both Bushes did the same. The opposing party always gets on the phone or gathers in what used to be Georgetown dens to denigrate the new guy and vow to fight him to the end. That’s how blowhards blow. When Reagan came in they vowed to take him down, and it was personal. Speaker Tip O’Neill called him “ignorant” and a “disgrace” and said it was “sinful” that he was president. He called Reagan “a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America” and said: “He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.” Chris Matthews, an O’Neill staffer, says he once greeted Reagan in the Capitol with the words: “Mr. President, welcome to the room where we plot against you.”

They did. Reagan knew it.

Yet he had no problem dealing successfully with O’Neill. He didn’t moan, “Oh they hate me, it’s no use!”

Note to the next White House: There’s always gambling at Rick’s place. It’s never a shock and not an excuse. It’s business as usual. And if you’re a leader you can lead right past it.

Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 because he was not George W. Bush. In fact, he was elected because he was the furthest thing possible from Mr. Bush. On some level he knew this, which is why every time he got in trouble he’d say Bush’s name. It’s all his fault, you have no idea the mess I inherited. As long as Mr. Bush’s memory was hovering like Boo Radley in the shadows, Mr. Obama would be OK.

This week something changed. George W. Bush is back, for the unveiling of his presidential library. His numbers are dramatically up. You know why? Because he’s the furthest thing from Barack Obama.

Obama fatigue has opened the way to Bush affection.

*   *   *

In all his recent interviews Mr. Bush has been modest, humorous, proud but unassuming, and essentially philosophical: History will decide. No finger-pointing or scoring points. If he feels rancor or resentment he didn’t show it. He didn’t attempt to manipulate. His sheer normality seemed like a relief, an echo of an older age.

And all this felt like an antidote to Obama—to the imperious I, to the inability to execute, to the endless interviews and the imperturbable drone, to the sense that he is trying to teach us, like an Ivy League instructor taken aback by the backwardness of his students. And there’s the unconscious superiority. One thing Mr. Bush didn’t think he was was superior. He thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who’d worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn’t seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself.

Mr. Bush could be prickly and irritable and near the end showed arrogance, but he wasn’t vain or conceited, and he still isn’t. When people said recently that they were surprised he could paint, he laughed: “Some people are surprised I can even read.”

Coverage of the opening of his presidential library Thursday was wall to wall on cable, and a feeling of affection for him was encouraged, or at least enabled, by the Washington press corps, which doesn’t much like Mr. Obama because he’s not all that likable, and remembers Mr. Bush with a kind of reluctant fondness because he was.

But to the point. Mr. Obama was elected because he wasn’t Bush.

Mr. Bush is popular now because he’s not Obama.

The wheel turns, doesn’t it?

Here’s a hunch: The day of the opening of the Bush library was the day Obama fatigue became apparent as a fact of America’s political life.

When Bush left office, his approval rating was down in the 20s to low 30s. Now it’s at 47%, which is what Obama’s is. That is amazing, and not sufficiently appreciated. Yes, we are a 50-50 nation, but Mr. Bush left office in foreign-policy and economic failure, even cataclysm. Yet he is essentially equal in the polls to the supposedly popular president. Which suggests Republicans in general have some latent, unseen potential of which they’re unaware. Right now they’re busy being depressed. Maybe they should be thinking, “If Bush could come back . . .” Actually, forget I said that. Every time Republican political professionals start to think that way, with optimism, they get crude and dumb and think if they press certain levers the mice will run in certain directions.

*   *   *

The headline of the Bush Library remarks is that everyone was older and nicer.

Jimmy Carter, in shades, with wispy white hair, was gracious and humorous. Anyone can soften with age, but he seemed to have sweetened. That don’t come easy. Good for him.

George H.W. Bush was tender. He feels the tugs and tides of history. “God bless America, and thank you very much.” He rose from his wheelchair to acknowledge the crowd. That crowd, and the people watching on TV—the person they loved and honored most was him.

Bill Clinton does this kind of thing so well—being generous to others, especially former opponents. “We are here to celebrate a country we all love,” he said. He was funny on how he wanted Mr. Bush to paint him and then saw Mr. Bush’s self-portrait in the bath and thought no, I’ll keep my suit on. He got a laugh when he called himself the black sheep of the Bush family.

I said everyone was older and nicer. It’s occurred to me that the Clintons and both Bushes were president when baby boomer journalists were in their 30s and 40s and eager to rise. Everyone was meaner, both the pols and the press, because they were all young. Now they’re in their 60s. When they went through the 9/11 section of the library, the day before the opening, some had tears in their eyes. They understood now what that day was. Young journalists: You’re going to become more tolerant with time, and not only because you have more to tolerate in yourself. Because life will batter you and you’ll have a surer sense of what’s important and has meaning and is good.

President Obama was more formal than the other speakers and less confident than usual, as if he knew he was surrounded by people who have something he doesn’t. “No matter how much you think you’re ready to assume the office of the president, it’s impossible to understand the nature of the job until it’s yours.” This is a way of seeming to laud others when you’re lauding yourself. He veered into current policy disputes, using Mr. Bush’s failed comprehensive immigration reform to buttress his own effort. That was manipulative, graceless and typical.

George W. Bush was emotional: “In the end, leaders are defined by the convictions they hold. . . . My deepest conviction . . . is that the United States of America must strive to expand the reach of freedom. I believe that freedom is a gift from God and the hope of every human heart.” He then announced that on Saturday he would personally invade Syria.

Ha, kidding. It was standard Bush rhetoric and, in its way, a defiant pushing back against critics of his invasions and attempts to nation-build. Who isn’t for more freedom? But that bright, shining impulse, that very American impulse, must be followed by steely-eyed calculation. At the end Mr. Bush wept, and not only because the Bush men are weepers but because he means every word of what he says, and because he loves his country, and was moved. John Boehner weeps too when he speaks about what America means to him. You know why they do that? Because their hearts are engaged. And really, that’s not the worst thing.

Back to the point. What was nice was that all of them—the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons—seemed like the old days. “The way we were.” They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren’t . . . creepy.

Anyway, onward to Obama fatigue, and the Democratic Party wrestling with what comes next. It’s not only the Republicans in a deep pit.

London

The funeral of Margaret Thatcher was beautiful, moving, just right. It had dignity and spirit, and in that respect was just like her. It also contained a surprise that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was a metaphor for where she stood in the pantheon of successful leaders of the 20th century.

The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, LG, OM, FRS—so she was called on the front page of the service program—was a great lady, and the greatest peacetime prime minister of England in the 20th century. She unleashed her nation’s economy, defeated selfish bullies who before her had always emerged victorious, and stood with the pope and the president against Soviet communism. The main project of her career was to advance the cause of human freedom and individual liberty. As David Cameron’s education minister, Michael Gove, noted the other day, she saw economics not as a science but as one of the humanities. It wasn’t about “immutable laws,” it was about “the instincts and values” of human beings, their sense of justice and rightness. She was eloquent, stirring and had tons of guts. And of course she was a woman, the first British prime minister to be so. She made no special pleading in that area and did not claim to represent what we embarrassingly call women’s issues. She was representing England and the issues British citizens faced. She did not ignore her sex and occasionally bopped political men on the head with small, bracing recognitions of their frailty. “The cocks will crow, but it’s the hen that lays the eggs,” she said. She noted that if you want anything said get a man but, if you want something done get a woman. All this she uttered in a proud but mock-stern tone. She was no victim. An oddity of her career is that she was routinely patronized by her inferiors. It seems to have steeled her.

A supporter told me in London of her frustrations with staff. She said once to her aides: “I don’t need to be told what, I need to be told how.” Meaning I have a vision, you have to tell me how we can implement it. That stayed in my mind. Politics now, in England as well as America, is dominated by politicians who are technicians. They always know how to do it. They just don’t know what to do.

Thatcher’s funeral was striking in that it was not, actually, about her. It was about what she thought it important for the mourners to know. The readings were about the fact of God, the gift of Christ, and the necessity of loving your country and working for its betterment. There were no long eulogies. In a friendly and relatively brief address, the bishop of London lauded her kindness and character. No funeral of an American leader would ever be like that: The dead American would be the star, with God in the position of yet another mourner who’d miss his leadership.

The pageantry, for an American, was most moving. The English as always do this brilliantly but I wonder if they understand—they must, but it’s not something they acknowledge—that when they bring out and put forward their splendor they are telling the world and themselves who they are and have been. Leading the procession into St. Paul’s was the lord mayor of London, in velvet coat, breeches and buckled shoes. On his coat he wore Sir Thomas More’s gold chain of office, taken from him before he was killed in the Tower. Imagine a nation that puts such a man to death, contemplates it, concludes in the end it was wrong, and now proudly displays the saint’s chain at its greatest events. When I saw it I thought of a recent trip to the Vatican. Touring its archives, we were shown one of its proudest possessions: a letter from Galileo.

Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they’re great.

It mattered that the funeral was in august and splendid St. Paul’s, mattered that Thatcher’s coffin, placed under the great dome, stood directly over the tombs of Nelson and Wellington in the crypts below. (Marcus Binney in the Times said conservatives will note the above; happy to oblige.) This placing of Thatcher with the greats of the past, and the fact that the queen and Prince Philip came to her funeral, as they have for no prime minister since Churchill in 1965, served as an antidote to British television coverage surrounding her death.

It was terrible. They could not in any sustained way mark her achievements or even show any particular respect. All they could say was that she was “divisive and controversial,” although sometimes they said “divisive and—well, really divisive.” Anchors reported everything as if from a great distance, with no warmth; they all adopted the cool, analytical look they use when they mean to project distance. But as Tony Blair’s aide Peter Mandelson, speaking at the think tank discussion at which Mr. Gove appeared, said, “to decide is to divide.” He was quoting Mr. Blair.

And the more decisive, the more divisive.

In the past week left-wing political groups held death parties, all heavily reported, and threatened to demonstrate at the funeral. The head of the London police seemed to invite them to come. (Less important, but worth mentioning: The White House embarrassed itself by not sending a delegation of high-level current officeholders. Did the British notice? Oh yes. It’s another way they think we’re slipping.)

All this—the media, the left—had the effect of telling people: you’ll look stupid if you speak in support of Thatcher, you’ll look sentimental, old. And it may be dangerous to attend the funeral—there could be riots!

I wonder if certain people pushed this line so hard so that the day after the funeral they could report no one came.

So then, the surprise that was a metaphor.

At the end of the funeral they all marched down the aisle in great procession—the family, the queen, the military pallbearers carrying the casket bearing the Union Jack. The great doors flung open, the pallbearers marched forward, and suddenly from the crowd a great roar. We looked at each other. Demonstrators? No. Listen. They were cheering. They were calling out three great hurrahs as the pallbearers went down the steps. Then long cheers and applause. It was electric.

England came. The people came. Later we would learn they’d stood 30 deep on the sidewalk, that quiet crowds had massed on the Strand and Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. A man had held up a sign: “But We Loved Her.”

“The end is where we start from.” That is T.S. Eliot, whose “Little Gidding” she loved. When they died, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher were old and long past their height of power. Everyone was surprised when Reagan died that crowds engulfed the Capitol; people slept on sidewalks to view him in state. When John Paul died the Vatican was astonished to see millions converge. “Santo Subito.”

And now at the end some came for Thatcher, too.

What all three had in common: No one was with them but the people.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, rest in peace.

I found myself engrossed this week by the calm, incisive wisdom of one of the few living statesmen in the world who can actually be called visionary.

The wisdom is in a book, “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World,” a gathering of Mr. Lee’s interviews, speeches and writings.

Mr. Lee, of course, is the founder and inventor of modern Singapore. He made it a dynamo. He pushed it beyond its ethnic divisions and placed a bet that, though it is the smallest nation in southeast Asia has few natural resources, its people, if organized and unleashed within a system of economic incentive, would come to constitute the only resource that mattered. He was right. When he took office as prime minister, in 1959, per capita income was about $400 a year. Last year it was more than $50,000.

He is now 89, a great friend of America, and his comments on the U.S. are pertinent to many of the debates in which we’re enmeshed.

He is bullish about our immediate prospects but concerned about our longterm trajectory. He believes what made us great is the ancestral nature of our people—creative, inventive, original, inclusive.

His advice on immigration: keep it up but keep your culture.What threatens America? A political culture stuck in the shallows, and a mass-entertainment edifice that is destabilizing, destructive and injurious to the national character.

Is the United States in systemic decline?

“Absolutely not.” It is the most militarily powerful and economically dynamic nation in the world. America faces debt, deficit and “tremendously difficult economic times” but “for the next two to three decades” it “will remain the sole superpower.”

America has shown over its history “a great capacity for renewal and revival.” It doesn’t get stuck in “grooved thinking” but is able to think pragmatically and imaginatively. Its language “is the equivalent of an open system that is clearly the lingua franca” of all the economic and political leaders and strivers in the world. In the coming decades “it is the U.S. that will be pre-eminent in setting the rules of the game. No major issue of world peace and stability can be resolved without U.S. leadership.”

A major factor in America’s rise and economic dominance: All the brightest people in the world know “Americans will let you work for them in America and in their multinational corporations abroad.” But America will lose its technological edge unless it is able to continue attracting talent.

The American advantage in coming economic and technological contests? A “can-do” approach to life. Americans always believe a problem can be solved. An “entrepreneurial culture” that sees both risk and failure “as natural and necessary for success.” The U.S. is still “a frontier society.” “The American culture . . . is that we start from scratch and beat you.” They would settle an empty area, call it a town, and say, “You be the sheriff, I am the judge, you are the policeman, and you are the banker, let us start.” Not long ago the U.S. was losing to Japan and Germany in manufacturing. “But [Americans] came up with the Internet, Microsoft and Bill Gates, and Dell. . . . What kind of mindset do you need for that? It is part of their history.”

America is great not only because of its power and wealth. After World War II its “magnanimity and generosity” helped it “rebuild a more prosperous world.” “Only the elevating power of her idealism” can explain this. “The United States is the most benign of all the great powers.”

What worries him about America? Our elections have become “a never-ending process of auctions” in which politicians outbid each other with promises. America’s leaders seem captive to popular sentiment. They must break out of this and do what is necessary for America, “even if they lose their re-election.”

Our consumer society and mass communications “have made for a different kind of person getting elected as leader.” Politicians hesitate to speak needed truths: “A certain coyness or diffidence seems to have descended on American politicians.”

Mr. Lee is “amazed” that “media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him . . . into a different personality. . . . A spin doctor is a high-income professional, one in great demand. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a de Gaulle can emerge!”

What worries him about the prevailing U.S. culture? a lot: “guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public—in sum, the breakdown of civil society.”

“The ideas of individual supremacy . . . when carried to excess, have not worked,” and the world has taken note: “Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model. . .  The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash [but] if you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess. . . . To have, day to day, images of violence and raw sex on the picture tube, the whole society exposed to it, it will ruin a whole community.”

Asians visiting the U.S. are often “puzzled and disturbed by conditions there.” including “poverty in the midst of great wealth.”

In spite of this, America often now exhibits to the world a sense of its own “cultural supremacy.” When the American media praise a country such as the Philippines for becoming democratic, “it is praise with condescension, compliments from a superior culture patting an inferior one on the head.” America criticizes Singapore as too authoritarian. “Why? Because we have not complied with their ideas of how we should govern ourselves. But we can ill afford to let others experiment with our lives. Their ideas are theories, theories not proven.”What can destroy America is “multiculturalism,” which he speaks of as not an appreciation of all cultures but a gradual surrendering of the essential culture that has sustained America since its beginning. That culture—its creativity and hardiness, its political and economic traditions—is great, and it would be “sad for America to be changed even partially.” Will waves of immigrants from the south assimilate, or will America become “more Latin American?” America must continue to invite in all the most gifted and hard-working people in the world, but it must not lose its culture, which is the secret of its success.

And America goes the way of modern Europe at its peril: “If you follow the ideological direction of Europe, you are done for.” There are always people who require help, but “addressing their needs must be done in a way that does not kill incentive.”

“Americans and European governments believed that they could always afford to support the poor and the needy: widows, orphans, the old and homeless, disadvantaged minorities, unwed mothers. Their sociologists expounded the theory that hardship and failure were due . . . to flaws in the economic system. So charity became ‘entitlement,’ and the stigma of living on charity disappeared.” Welfare costs grew faster than the government’s willingness to raise taxes. They “took the easy way out by borrowing to give higher benefits to the current generation of voters.” The result: deficits and dangerously high public debt.

In line with tradition Pope Francis this holy week washes the feet of the poor. In a departure from tradition he did it in a juvenile prison in Rome. In line with tradition he will live in the Vatican. In a departure from tradition he will live not in the apostolic palace but in a small suite (Room 201) in the Vatican guest house where cardinals stay in conclave. In line with tradition he quickly reappointed the department heads of the curia. In a departure from tradition he reappointed them temporarily.

He is a man of some surprises; he does not fear the ad hoc. He’d known for at least eight years that he was a possible pope but apparently never gave a thought to the name he would take if elected. When he was, a friend implored him to remember the poor. Which made him think of Francis of Assisi.

He is not drawn to pomp and finery, but took time in his homily on Holy Thursday in St Peter’s basilica to praise and explain “the beauty . . . of liturgical things.” It is not about “trappings and fine fabrics” but reflects “the glory of our God resplendent in his people.”

He knows the church has deep troubles, but does not see the answer as turning inward in self-examination. Havana’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega was quoted in a Cuban Catholic magazine this week saying that hours before his election, the future pope told his fellow cardinals the Vatican must turn away from self-absorption and “theological narcissism.” Instead, an embrace of others: The church must focus its energies on the “peripheries,” which Cardinal Ortega understood to be not only a geographic reference but a reference to those who feel, or have been treated as, peripheral—the poor, the damaged, the unbelieving.

Francis often refers both to the center of things and the margins. He speaks of the centrality of Christ to the church’s efforts. But he often spoke this week of “the edges” of things: The power of a good priest “overflows down to the edges.” He even spoke of the edge of Christ’s cloak. A papal tweet: “Being with Jesus demands that we go out from ourselves, and from living a tired and habitual faith.”

All this suggests the new pope’s coming approach: into the world, out to the suffering. And all of it, says Chris Lowney, a former Jesuit, reflects the training, spirituality and culture of Francis’s Jesuit order. After seven years as a seminarian, Mr. Lowney entered the business world, where for 17 years he worked for J.P. Morgan. His book, “Heroic Leadership,” is his take on the “best practices” of the 450-year-old order, and how they apply to other spheres.

“There are a lot of things I really love about his style,” he said of Francis. “I love the idea that when he [came in] No. 2 in the last conclave—everyone who ever worked in a company knows what you’re supposed to do” if you want to win in the future. “You get a job in Rome, you network, get to know people, be ready for the next time around. Instead, he immediately goes back to Argentina, in no way does he raise his profile, he spends time with the poor—and the poor don’t vote for pope!”

Mr. Lowney says Francis’s use of words like “frontier” and “periphery,” and his repeated references to taking action, are all part of “the Jesuit DNA.” Ignatius Loyola, the order’s founder, said his priests should live “with one foot raised,” ready to go into the world. “The other religious orders have monasteries and houses, but a Jesuit’s most comfortable home is the mission.” Jesuits are agile, even ad hoc: “There’s a powerful sense of bottom-line mission but . . . you give up whatever needs to be given up to satisfy it.”

He did not know Jorge Mario Bergoglio but had heard a story about him that struck him as “very Jesuit”: “When he was cardinal in Buenos Aires, they did some study that said the ambit of real influence of a church is about 600 meters. So he said, ‘Why don’t we have storefronts—put people out there, have more impact?'” A priest answered: “If we did that people might not come to the church.” Cardinal Bergoglio asked: “How many people are coming to the church anyway?”

The point, said Mr. Lowney, is to be out there, among the people, like the earliest apostles: “We should not be talking to ourselves, we should be looking for the poor sheep . . . and not be condemning things we don’t like.”

He sees the church, particularly in America, as roughly divided between those who see themselves as progressive and those who see themselves as traditional—what he called “the social-justice people and the personal-morality people.” He thought Francis might “come up with a unifying force that gets us beyond that.”

“If you take over a company your question is: ‘Can I get people aligned together on a mission instead of going in different directions? Can I pull people together in a fundamental mission?'” He thinks some of the pope’s “personal behaviors and example, which have been so winning,” might help bridge divisions.

That may happen. Francis so far seems to embody the best hopes of both sides—for tradition but open for action, for the truth and for the poor. He may come to remind people that they have more in common than perhaps they understood. His love for simplicity is something both sides have in common and perhaps didn’t know it, or didn’t fully credit within each other. But who now wouldn’t want more simplicity and humility, for their own sake but also as a sign the church knows it must turn away, in a manner that is vivid and unmistakable, from an unconscious arrogance—the kind human beings are prey to when they hold high office in a great institution. In the past 50 years, some church leaders became like military officers who wear all their medals and spend too much time dreaming up new ones to award themselves. Scandals followed that.

Francis’s love for the poor comes both as a relief and a reordering fact. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? Everyone yearned for this, but not everyone knew it until they saw it.

Another thing in common on both sides: a unifying hope for the rise of women in the church to positions of higher authority. The issue of female priests aside, and it will be aside for a long time, pretty much everyone left, right and center honors and trusts the nuns of the church and is eager to see their position enhanced. The scandals of the past 50 years would not have happened, or happened so systemically, if the nuns hadn’t been shooed from the rectories.

The church needs more women in powerful positions—more laywomen and women religious—in the Vatican, the curia and the cardinal’s offices back home. Some orders in America have been rebuked in the recent past. This would be a good time to begin to praise, raise and elevate. Nuns save the world.

Anyway, it’s stirring to see so much promise in Rome.

It’s good news.

A beautiful Passover, a stirring Easter to all.