Peggy Noonan

It is hard, if you’ve got a head and a heart, to come down against a strong U.S. response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its civilian population. This is especially so if you believe that humanity stands at a door that leads only to darkness. Those who say, “But Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons—the taboo was broken long ago,” are missing the point. When Saddam used gas against the Kurds it was not immediately known to all the world. It was not common knowledge. The world rued it in retrospect. Syria is different: It is the first obvious, undeniable, real-time, YouTubed use of chemical weapons. The whole world knew of it the morning after it happened, through horrified, first-person accounts, from videos of hospital workers and victims’ families.

The world this time cannot “not know,” or claim not to know. And though Bashar Assad has made his pro forma denials, it does not seem believable that this was not a government operation. The rebels may or may not be wicked enough to use such weapons, but it is hard to believe they are capable.

When something like this happens and the world knows and does not respond, you won’t get less of it in the future, you’ll get more. And the weapons will not only be chemical.

So the question: What to do?

After 10 days of debate in Europe and America, the wisest words on a path forward have come from the Pope. Francis wrote this week to Vladimir Putin, as the host of the G-20. He damned “the senseless massacre” unfolding in Syria and pleaded with the leaders gathered in St. Petersburg not to “remain indifferent”—remain—to the “dramatic situation.” He asked the governments of the world “to do everything possible to assure humanitarian assistance” within and without Syria’s borders.

But, he said, a “military solution” is a “futile pursuit.”

And he is right. The only strong response is not a military response.

The world must think—and speak—with stature and seriousness, of the moment we’re in and the darkness on the other side of the door. It must rebuke those who used the weapons, condemn their use, and shun the users. It must do more, in concert—surely we can agree on this—to help Syria’s refugees. It must stand up for civilization.

But a military strike is not the way, and not the way for America.

Francis was speaking, as popes do, on the moral aspects of the situation. In America, practical and political aspects have emerged, and they are pretty clear.

The American people do not support military action. A Reuters-Ipsos poll had support for military action at 20%, Pew at 29%. Members of Congress have been struck, in some cases shocked, by the depth of opposition from their constituents. A great nation cannot go to war—and that’s what a strike on Syria, a sovereign nation, is, an act of war—without some rough unity as to the rightness of the decision. Widespread public opposition is in itself reason not to go forward.

Can the president change minds? Yes, and he’ll try. But it hasn’t worked so far. This thing has jelled earlier than anyone thought. More on that further down.

What are the American people thinking? Probably some variation of: Wrong time, wrong place, wrong plan, wrong man.

Twelve years of war. A sense that we’re snakebit in the Mideast. Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t go well, Libya is lawless. In Egypt we threw over a friend of 30 years to embrace the future. The future held the Muslim Brotherhood, unrest and a military coup. Americans have grown more hard-eyed—more bottom-line and realistic, less romantic about foreign endeavors, and more concerned about an America whose culture and infrastructure seem to be crumbling around them.

The administration has no discernible strategy. A small, limited strike will look merely symbolic, a face-saving measure. A strong, broad strike opens the possibility that the civil war will end in victory for those as bad as or worse than Assad. And time has already passed. Assad has had a chance to plan his response, and do us the kind of damage to which we would have to respond.

There is the issue of U.S. credibility. We speak of this constantly and in public, which has the effect of reducing its power. If we bomb Syria, will the world say, “Oh, how credible America is!” or will they say, “They just bombed people because they think they have to prove they’re credible”?

We are, and everyone knows we are, the most militarily powerful and technologically able nation on earth. And at the end of the day America is America. We don’t have to bow to the claim that if we don’t attack Syria we are over as a great power.

Are North Korea and Iran watching? Sure. They’ll always be watching. And no, they won’t say, “Huh, that settles it, if America didn’t move against Syria they’ll never move against us. All our worries are over.” In fact their worries, and ours, will continue.

Sometimes it shows strength to hold your fire. All my life people have been saying we’ve got to demonstrate our credibility—that if we, and the world, don’t know we are powerful by now we, and they, will never know.

Finally, this president showed determination and guts in getting Osama bin Laden. But a Syria strike may become full-scale war. Is Barack Obama a war president? On Syria he has done nothing to inspire confidence. Up to the moment of decision, and even past it, he has seemed ambivalent, confused, unaware of the implications of his words and stands. From the “red line” comment to the “shot across the bow,” from the White House leaks about the nature and limits of a planned strike to the president’s recent, desperate inclusion of Congress, he has seemed consistently over his head. I have been thinking of the iconic image of American military leadership, Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” There Washington stands, sturdy and resolute, looking toward the enemy on the opposite shore. If you imagine Mr. Obama in that moment he is turned, gesturing toward those in the back. “It’s not my fault we’re in this boat!” That’s what “I didn’t set a red line” and “My credibility is not at stake” sounded like.

And looked like.

[dingbats]

A point on how quickly public opinion has jelled. There is something going on here, a new distance between Washington and America that the Syria debate has forced into focus. The Syria debate isn’t, really, a struggle between libertarians and neoconservatives, or left and right, or Democrats and Republicans. That’s not its shape. It looks more like a fight between the country and Washington, between the broad American public and Washington’s central governing assumptions.

I’ve been thinking of the “wise men,” the foreign policy mandarins of the 1950s and ’60s, who so often and frustratingly counseled moderation, while a more passionate public, on right and left, was looking for action. “Ban the Bomb!” “Get Castro Out of Cuba.”

In the Syria argument, the moderating influence is the public, which doesn’t seem to have even basic confidence in Washington’s higher wisdom.

That would be a comment on more than Iraq. That would be a comment on the past five years, too.

Two small points on an end-of-summer weekend. One is connected to Labor Day and the meaning of work. It grows out of an observation Mike Huckabee made on his Fox show a few weeks ago. He said that we see joblessness as an economic fact, we talk about the financial implications of widespread high unemployment, and that isn’t wrong but it misses the central point. Joblessness is a personal crisis because work is a spiritual event.

A job isn’t only a means to a paycheck, it’s more. “To work is to pray,” the old priests used to say. God made us as many things, including as workers. When you work you serve and take part. To work is to be integrated into the daily life of the nation. There is pride and satisfaction in doing work well, in working with others and learning a discipline or a craft or an art. To work is to grow and to find out who you are.

In return for performing your duties, whatever they are, you receive money that you can use freely and in accordance with your highest desire. A job allows you the satisfaction of supporting yourself or your family, or starting a family. Work allows you to renew your life, which is part of the renewing of civilization.

Work gives us purpose, stability, integration, shared mission. And so to be unable to work—unable to find or hold a job—is a kind of catastrophe for a human being.

There are an estimated 11.5 million unemployed people in America now, and those who do not have sufficient work or who’ve left the workforce altogether inflate that number further.

This is the real reason jobs and employment are the No. 1 issue in America’s domestic life. And what I have been thinking in the weeks leading up to this weekend is very simple: “Thank you, God, that I have a job.” May more of us be able to say those words on Labor Day 2014.

And may more political leaders come up who can help jobs happen, who can advance and support the kind of national policies that can encourage American genius. One of the things missing in the current political scene is zest—a feeling that can radiate from the political sphere that everything is possible, the market is wide open.

In the midst of the economic malaise of the 1970s the TV anchormen spoke in sonorous tones about the dreadful economic indicators—inflation, high interest rates, “the misery index.” But Steve Jobs, in his parents’ garage, was quietly working on circuit boards. And strange young Bill Gates was creating a company called Microsoft. All that work burst forth under the favorable economic conditions and policies in the 1980s and ’90s.

What is needed now is a political leader on fire about all the possibilities, not one who tries to sound optimistic because polls show optimism is popular but someone with real passion about the idea of new businesses, new inventions, growth, productivity, breakthroughs and jobs, jobs, jobs. Someone in love with the romance of the marketplace. We’ve lost that feeling among our political leaders, who mostly walk around looking like they have headaches. But American genius is still there, in our garages. It’s been there since before Ben Franklin and the key and the kite and the bolt of lightning.

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The second point is about a kind of cultural unease in the country that is having an impact on the national mood. I think it’s one of the reasons the right track/wrong track polls are bad.

To make the point, we go back in political time.

Really good politicians don’t try to read the public, they are the public. They don’t try to be like the people, they actually are like them. Ronald Reagan never thought of himself as a gifted reader of the public mind, but as a person who had a sense of what Americans were thinking because he was thinking it too. That’s a gift, and a happy one to have—the gift of unity with the public you lead. The lack of that quality can be seen in many current political figures, who often, when they speak, seem to be withholding their true thoughts. As if the people wouldn’t like it, or couldn’t handle it.

Reagan was a good man, and part of his leadership was that he thought Americans were good too. He had high respect for what he saw as the American character. He liked to talk about the pioneers because he was moved by their courage, their ability to endure and forge through hostile conditions. He thought that was a big part of the American character. He was similarly moved by the Founders. He talked about the men who founded Hollywood, too, because those old buccaneers were great entrepreneurs who invented an industry. He admired their daring and willingness to gamble. They were wealth creators—that’s who Americans are. He liked to talk about inventors who create markets—that’s us, he thought. He liked to talk about barn raisings—the practice out West of local settlers coming together to build some neighbor’s barn, so pretty soon they’d have a clearing and then a town.

By celebrating these things he felt he was celebrating not the America that was, but the America that is. That America, he felt, was under threat of being squashed and worn down by the commands and demands of liberalism. He would fight that and, he thought, win, because Americans saw it pretty much as he did.

So Reagan didn’t just have something, the ability to lead. He was given something—the America he grew up in, knew and could justly laud.

To today: I’ve been thinking about the big bad stories of the summer, the cultural ones that disturb people. The sick New York politician who, without apparent qualms, foists his sickness into the public sphere again. The kids who kill the World War II vet because they’re bored. The kids who kill the young man visiting from Australia because they too are bored, and unhappy, and unwell. The teacher who has the affair with the 14-year-old student, and gets a slap on the wrist from the judge. The state legislator who’s a sexual predator, the thieving city councilor and sure, the young pop star who is so lewd, so mindlessly vulgar and ugly on the awards show.

We’re shocked. But we’re not shocked. And that itself is disturbing. We’re used to all this, now, this crassness and lowness of public behavior. The cumulative effect of these stories, I suspect, is that we’re starting to fear: Maybe that’s us. Maybe that’s who we are now. As if these aren’t separate and discrete crimes and scandals but a daily bubbling up of the national character.

It would be good if we had some political leaders who could speak of this deflated and anxious feeling about who we are. Conservatives have been concerned about our culture for at least a quarter-century. Helpful now would be honest liberal voices that speak to our concerns about who we fear we’re becoming. They might find they’re thinking the way the American people are thinking, which is step one in true leadership.

Three items on the continuing National Security Agency controversy: the information that came out this week, a prescient warning from a veteran British intelligence hand, and a prophecy from an interesting source.

Siobhan Gorman and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reported in this newspaper that the NSA, which is supposed to have only limited authority to spy on U.S. citizens, has built a surveillance network that covers substantially more communications than had been disclosed. The system is able to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic: “In some cases it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone call made with Internet technology.” Sources on the story were current and former intelligence and government officials.

Also this week, a finding was revealed that the NSA violated the Constitution for three years running by collecting as many as 56,000 purely domestic communications without appropriate privacy protections. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court slammed the agency for “misrepresenting” its practices to the court, and noted it was the third time in less than three years the government misrepresented the scope of a collection program.

All this in just the past few days. Makes you wonder what might be coming in a Labor Day weekend document dump, doesn’t it?

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Readers of my columns and blog posts see an NSA theme: There are too many built-in dynamics that make the national-security state want to grow, from legitimate fears of terrorism, to bureaucratic pride, to the flaws in human nature. And there are too many dynamics that will allow it to grow. The aftermath of 9/11 happened to coincide with a new burst in American technological innovation and discovery: The government has the ways and means to do pretty much anything now, and if they can do it they will do it.

If the citizens of the United States don’t put up a halting hand, the government can’t be expected to: It is in the nature of security professionals to always want more, and since their mission is worthy they’re less likely to have constitutional qualms, to dwell on such abstractions as abuse of the Fourth Amendment and the impact of that abuse on the First. If you assume all the information that can and will be gleaned will be confined to NSA and national security purposes, you are not sufficiently imaginative or informed. If you believe the information will never be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent. If you assume you can trust the administration on this issue you are not following the bouncing ball, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who told Congress under oath the NSA didn’t gather “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans” (he later had to apologize) to President Obama, who told Jay Leno: “We don’t have a domestic program.” What we do have, the president said, is “some mechanism that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.”

Oh, we have more than that.

Almost every politician in America lives in fear of one big thing: a terrorist attack they can later be accused of not having done everything to stop. And so they’ll do anything. They are looking to preserve their political viability and historical standing. We, as citizens, must keep other things in mind, such as the rights we are born with as Americans, one of which is privacy.

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I happened to pick up “Open Secret,” the memoir of Stella Rimington, who in the early 1990s served as director-general of MI5, the British domestic spy agency. I knew a little of her. She was the agency’s first female chief, she fell into spy work by accident, and she didn’t come from a fancy English family, meaning she didn’t proceed professionally with an air of entitlement or a crouch of guilt. So I thought she might have her head screwed on right regarding the surveillance state. She does.

In the preface of the 2002 edition she is already concerned about a loss of civil liberties. Terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11, she says, it has been with the modern world since at least the late 1960s, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. We must commit ourselves to do everything we can, within the law and within our most valued traditions, to oppose and thwart it. But, she suggests, you don’t want to lose your country—the thing you are so anxious to defend—in your effort to save your country.

In a career in what she calls “the secret state,” she learned that at the heart of countering terrorism is intelligence, and the most valuable sources against terrorism are human beings—long-term penetration efforts. This must be heavily supplemented by technical intelligence—phones, the Internet—and the more expert the better.

But democratic nations must always balance “the citizens’ right to live their lives in freedom, with minimum interference with their privacy from the security agencies” against the governments’ responsibility “to protect their citizens from harm.” That balance, she warned, had already begun to swing toward “more emphasis to our safety than our civil liberties.” It has become more acceptable “for the government . . . to take more powers.” She laments this. Pointedly: There is a danger, she observes, that “security can become an industry in itself and will not be protecting what is truly at risk.”

Terrorism will continue to appeal to extremists, to “weak minded” individuals drawn by passionate causes. But lack of attentiveness to our liberties will not help us succeed against them, and it can damage us. I wrote in the margins: “She’s saying we can’t become suicide bombers of our own rights.”

*   *   *

Finally, I heard this week from a respected former U.S. senator, a many-termed moderate conservative who was never known as the excitable type. He wrote in reaction to Nat Hentoff’s warnings regarding the potentially corrosive effect of extreme surveillance on free speech. “All this scares me to death,” the former senator wrote. “How many times do we have to watch government, with the best of intentions, I am sure (or almost so), do things ‘for us’? Now ‘security’ and ‘terrorism’ argue for and justify the case for ever more intrusions—all in the name of protecting us. The truly frightening thing is that we are told we have to depend on government to police itself. Not a comforting thought, for we already have far too much evidence of the lack of such self-supervision. These actions, as Nat Hentoff said, will sooner than later curtail free speech. If so, I am fearful that this will ultimately lead a nation of sullen paranoids, ever more dependent upon government, ever more fearful of it. A free society, it will not be.”

“A nation of sullen paranoids.” Boy, is that it. This picks up on a point a friend, a veteran of Republican White Houses, said near the time the controversies were beginning. He told me of a sophisticated person he knew, experienced in journalism and the ways of government, who thought the U.S. government might have had the reporter Michael Hastings killed.

He said, musingly, “The future is paranoia.”

Unless, of course, we stop it.

What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious?

Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past?

We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror.

Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens’ communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

*   *   *

Among the pertinent definitions of privacy from the Oxford English Dictionary: “freedom from disturbance or intrusion,” “intended only for the use of a particular person or persons,” belonging to “the property of a particular person.” Also: “confidential, not to be disclosed to others.” Among others, the OED quotes the playwright Arthur Miller, describing the McCarthy era: “Conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration.”

Privacy is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things—the innards of your head and heart, the workings of your mind—and the boundary between those things and the world outside.

A loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications. That is the view of Nat Hentoff, the great journalist and civil libertarian. He is 88 now and on fire on the issue of privacy. “The media has awakened,” he told me. “Congress has awakened, to some extent.” Both are beginning to realize “that there are particular constitutional liberty rights that [Americans] have that distinguish them from all other people, and one of them is privacy.”

Mr. Hentoff sees excessive government surveillance as violative of the Fourth Amendment, which protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that warrants be issued only “upon probable cause . . . particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

But Mr. Hentoff sees the surveillance state as a threat to free speech, too. About a year ago he went up to Harvard to speak to a class. He asked, he recalled: “How many of you realize the connection between what’s happening with the Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment?” He told the students that if citizens don’t have basic privacies—firm protections against the search and seizure of your private communications, for instance—they will be left feeling “threatened.” This will make citizens increasingly concerned “about what they say, and they do, and they think.” It will have the effect of constricting freedom of expression. Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.

All of a sudden, the room became quiet. “These were bright kids, interested, concerned, but they hadn’t made an obvious connection about who we are as a people.” We are “free citizens in a self-governing republic.”

Mr. Hentoff once asked Justice William Brennan “a schoolboy’s question”: What is the most important amendment to the Constitution? “Brennan said the First Amendment, because all the other ones come from that. If you don’t have free speech you have to be afraid, you lack a vital part of what it is to be a human being who is free to be who you want to be.” Your own growth as a person will in time be constricted, because we come to know ourselves by our thoughts.

He wonders if Americans know who they are compared to what the Constitution says they are.

Mr. Hentoff’s second point: An entrenched surveillance state will change and distort the balance that allows free government to function successfully. Broad and intrusive surveillance will, definitively, put government in charge. But a republic only works, Mr. Hentoff notes, if public officials know that they—and the government itself—answer to the citizens. It doesn’t work, and is distorted, if the citizens must answer to the government. And that will happen more and more if the government knows—and you know—that the government has something, or some things, on you. “The bad thing is you no longer have the one thing we’re supposed to have as Americans living in a self-governing republic,” Mr. Hentoff said. “The people we elect are not your bosses, they are responsible to us.” They must answer to us. But if they increasingly control our privacy, “suddenly they’re in charge if they know what you’re thinking.”

This is a shift in the democratic dynamic. “If we don’t have free speech then what can we do if the people who govern us have no respect for us, may indeed make life difficult for us, and in fact belittle us?”

If massive surveillance continues and grows, could it change the national character? “Yes, because it will change free speech.”

What of those who say, “I have nothing to fear, I don’t do anything wrong”? Mr. Hentoff suggests that’s a false sense of security. “When you have this amount of privacy invasion put into these huge data banks, who knows what will come out?” Or can be made to come out through misunderstanding the data, or finagling, or mischief of one sort or another. “People say, ‘Well I’ve done nothing wrong so why should I worry?’ But that’s too easy a way to get out of what is in our history—constant attempts to try to change who we are as Americans.” Asked about those attempts, he mentions the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Red Scare of the 1920s and the McCarthy era. Those times and incidents, he says, were more than specific scandals or news stories, they were attempts to change our nature as a people.

What of those who say they don’t care what the federal government does as long as it keeps us safe? The threat of terrorism is real, Mr. Hentoff acknowledges. Al Qaeda is still here, its networks are growing. But you have to be careful about who’s running U.S. intelligence and U.S. security, and they have to be fully versed in and obey constitutional guarantees. “There has to be somebody supervising them who knows what’s right. . . . Terrorism is not going to go away. But we need someone in charge of the whole apparatus who has read the Constitution.”

Advances in technology constantly up the ability of what government can do. Its technological expertise will only become deeper and broader. “They think they’re getting to how you think. The technology is such that with the masses of databases, then privacy will get even weaker.”

Mr. Hentoff notes that J. Edgar Hoover didn’t have all this technology. “He would be so envious of what NSA can do.”

Dan Balz’s “Collision 2012” is the best presidential campaign chronicle in many years. It is a great book, in part because it isn’t about what happened as much as about how people in the campaigns were thinking. It is unusual in that it gives proper place to the impact of thought on political outcomes.

The Obama campaign had a lot going for it in 2012, but a lot going against it, too, most obviously the economy. A year before the election Americans weren’t sure who the president was. He held himself at bay, observes Mr. Balz: “An Obama friend once suggested to me that the teleprompter was a perfect metaphor for the president, a physical symbol of how he kept the world at arm’s length.” His ties with the institutional Democratic Party were “minimal.” Members of his own White House were still trying to explain his ideology and leadership style. One compared the president’s relationship with the left to Lincoln’s with the radical Republicans who thought him too cautious, when in retrospect he was daring.

Others around President Obama said he was no centrist like Bill Clinton. He saw no particular virtue in staking out the middle or splitting differences. Compared with Mr. Clinton, Obama “had less capacity to put himself in the minds of his opponents, to understand where they were coming from and why,” Mr. Balz writes. That hindered his ability to negotiate successfully with Republicans in Congress, which in turn damaged his reputation for competence.

So the Obama campaign faced real challenges. But they loved research and data, which they used to help think it all through.

They knew the economy was the president’s biggest obstacle to re-election, that they couldn’t win a referendum on his economic stewardship. They wanted a way to “leapfrog” the immediate economic debate. In Iowa they convened a focus group of independents who had supported Obama in 2008 but voted Republican in 2010. They found themselves fascinated by one frustrated man in his 50s. An Obama adviser summed up the man’s stated grievances: “I can’t send my kid to college next year. . . . I haven’t had a raise in five years. . . . I am sick and tired of giving bailouts to the folks at the top and handouts to the folks at the bottom. I’m going to fire people [politicians] until my life gets better.”

That is as succinct a summation as I’ve seen of how the American middle class has been thinking the past few years: The guys at the top and the bottom are taken care of while I get squeezed.

The Obama people took his comments seriously. It would be nice to say they were primarily looking for policies to help him, but their job was politics: They sought ways to reach him, to make him an Obama voter.

What followed was a “massive research effort” to help the Obama campaign develop a message. They came to see a long erosion, in the words of an aide, “of what it meant to be middle class in America.”

The campaign asked middle-aged, middle-income Americans to keep online financial journals. Over 100 people took part, twice a week for three weeks. The Obama campaign did not reveal it was behind the effort. Participants were asked such questions as whether or not they were putting off various purchases, or buying a used car rather than a new one. They were also asked: When was the last time you were treated unfairly at work? The journals yielded 1,400 pages of raw material.

I’ll add here that when I told a young friend, a professional in her 20s, about this, she asked: “Do they have to do things like that to understand their own country?” Yes, they do. Ideology is only part of it. The American political consultant class lives rarefied lives. Business is good for them in the modern democracies and likely always will be. That’s true of those on the Republican side, too.

What followed the journals was a series of focus groups in which members, according to an aide, “shared a strong sense that America was changing in a way that was out of their control.” They felt the old rules of the economy no longer applied. They didn’t know how to get ahead anymore, and they feared sliding behind.

The groups revealed that the American dream meant less to younger workers than to older ones. Here a departure from the book: There is pervasive confusion about what the American dream is. We seem to have redefined it to mean the acquisition of material things—a car, a house and a pool. That was not the meaning of the American dream a few generations ago. The definition then was that in this wonderful place called America, you can start out from nothing and become anything. It was aspirational. The limits of class and background wouldn’t and couldn’t keep you from becoming a person worthy of respect, even renown. If you wanted to turn that into houses and a pool, fine. But you didn’t have to. You could have a modest job like teacher and be the most respected woman in town.

When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we’ve defined as success in a straitened economy.

Back to the book. The Obama campaign’s research produced three findings. The first was obvious: People were dissatisfied with the economy. Second, people hadn’t quite given up on the president. Third, they weren’t sure he was up to the job. They feared the nation’s problems were bigger than he was, and they criticized his failed negotiations with the Republicans in Congress. Amazingly, people in focus groups kept bringing up Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to knock heads and twist arms. A campaign aide told Mr. Balz, “I’ve never had so many damned references to Lyndon Johnson in my life!”

Washington journalists usually blame Mr. Obama’s failures to work with Congress on the GOP—its tea-party nuttiness, its “nihilism.” But the president’s own focus groups, which didn’t contain Obama haters on the assumption they were unreachable, put the onus on him: It’s your job, make it work, get it done.

The Obama campaign decided not to make the campaign about the state of the economy, but about who could look after the interests of the middle class in a time of historic transition. At the same time they decided to go after Mitt Romney hard, and remove him as a reasonable alternative. His selling point was that he understood the economy and made it work for him: He was rich. They turned that into a tale of downsizing, layoffs and rapacious capitalism. An Obama adviser: “He may get the economy, he may know how to make money . . . but every time he did, folks like you lost your pensions, lost your jobs.”

Somehow the Romney campaign never saw it coming.

Republicans, now and in 2016, should remember the colorful but not at all high-minded approach of Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. “My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” he told Mr. Balz. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore.” Obama’s people punched first, and hard.

Bits and pieces:

I like everything Pope Francis is doing because he’s trying to shake things up. The minute popes become popes they become insiders. They are inside the Vatican, inside the curia, inside the papal apartments, daily presented with inside information on the operation of the church. But Francis seems to be preserving his role as the outsider—the priest from Buenos Aires, the man who gets along with everyone but isn’t of them. He doesn’t want to do the showbiz—the regalia. He doesn’t want to live in the apartments. He doesn’t want to do the grandness, including the perpetual security machine that keeps normal people away.

Americans started this—the over-the-top security apparatus with the hundreds of guards and the bulletproof glass—and now every leader imitates it. The rationale, a serious one, is physical protection, but the underlying message is that those who are guarded are magical, irreplaceable—dainty little eggs being carried through the world on thrones of lettuce leaves. Safety is protected but vanity is projected: “I’m better than you, I’m special. You little people jumping to touch my hand—you can’t touch me.”

This is all, obviously, not Francis’s way. You could see it last week during World Youth Day in Rio de Janiero, where he was in the heart of the crowds, unafraid and unassuming.

There’s a quality in certain popes so that when you see them go by in the popemobile, or just on a TV screen, your soul sort of jumps and you find yourself moved in a way you can’t explain. John Paul II was like that—I remember a businessman, a casual Protestant, turning to me once when the pope was on TV and saying: “I can’t figure it out but every time I see him my eyes fill up.”

I don’t remember that being true of Pope Paul VI, who preceded John Paul, and it wasn’t true of Benedict, who followed him, but it is true of Francis. This week he had words on homosexuality, and they made big news. In part this was surprising and in part not. What the pope told reporters was nothing Catholics wouldn’t say and haven’t said in common conversation. Asked about his views on priests who are homosexual and celibate, Francis responded, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

He made it clear priests must do the true work of priests—helping people. But as to what is in a human heart, who is to judge? A modern pope hadn’t said anything quite like that in public, which is why it was news. It has been called tolerant, but it wasn’t tolerant—it was loving, which is what a Christian should be. Church teaching is church teaching, doctrine is doctrine, they’re often complex and requiring of assertion and explanation. But when a pope speaks plainly the kind of actually humble thought Catholics actually hold in their hearts it can be powerful. And this was. Good.

Francis continues as a breath of fresh air. I hope he stays seemingly simple and doesn’t become too clever. Guilelessness and humility are not only virtues, they have real practical force.

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Connected to the thoughts on security, I have a friend who once told me the difference between cats and dogs. When you get up in the morning and feed your dog he looks up at you and thinks: “She comes, finds my food and pours it for me—she must be a god.” A cat thinks: “She comes, finds my food and pours it out for me—must be a god.”

Politicians—no matter how they started out, with what modesty or inner sense of stability—tend to wind up as cats. They come to think “the people” are there to meet their needs—to provide the money they allocate, for instance. They come to think taxpayers are there to pay for their staffers, who in turn are there to meet their needs, and their benefits packages.

We are a cat-encouraging system. Probably the only thing that would change this, in a practical sense, is an old idea: term limits.

Term limits—a maximum three terms in the House, say, and two in the Senate—would limit the opportunity for a dog to turn into a cat. It would also change the reward system. If you’re not spending all your time advancing the prospects of a lifetime career in government, at the end of which you’ll be an object of respect, you may just spend your time advancing the interests of your country, which in the end will truly enhance your reputation.

Term limits are simple and clear. They’d make things better. We don’t focus on this simple fix. One reason is that there are always so many pressing crises that dominate the daily political conversation. But another is that we look to Washington for leadership in this area. And Washington will never vote to limit its own power without enormous pressure from outside.

By the way, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is not running for re-election and will leave in 2015 after two terms because when he first ran for the Senate he term-limited himself, and he’s keeping his word. Before he entered the Senate he was a popular representative who term-limited himself, and departed when his time was up. This is remarkable, that he kept to his word. It’s one of the reasons he is respected in Washington.

They know something unusual when they see it. That fella stayed a dog.

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The bankruptcy and decay of Detroit puts the spotlight again on corrupt public officials (the Motor City has been rich in them) one-party rule (it was a Democratic town, pretty much top to bottom, for 50 years) and public-employee unions and the long-term implications of their demands on what used to be called the public purse.

The deal years ago, and everyone knew it, was this: If you work for the government you may be paid less competitive wages than the general marketplace offers, and your workplace would likely not be as dynamic and afford as much advancement as the private sector. But in return for these agreed-upon limits you got one important advantage: job security.

A government job was a comparatively safe job. And that was worth a lot, especially when you saw your neighbors get laid off in various cycles and contractions.

Now that original agreement has been turned on its head. Government workers are relatively well paid. They have benefit packages and pension plans that are the envy of their neighbors. As for job security, they are so secure they pretty much can’t be fired—witness Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth in the IRS scandal, who appears in fact to be at the center of that scandal, and who apparently refused to resign and is still on paid leave.

None of this is what was intended. None of it is how it was supposed to work.

We weren’t supposed to be ruled by cats.