Peggy Noonan

Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 21, 2013

The air has been full of 10th-anniversary Iraq war retrospectives. One that caught my eye was a smart piece by Tom Curry, national affairs writer for NBC News, who wrote of one element of the story, the war’s impact on the Republican party: “The conflict not only transformed” the GOP, “but all of American politics.”

It has, but it’s an unfinished transformation.

Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes. The war, and the crash of ’08, half killed it. It’s still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open question.

Here, offered in a spirit of open debate, is what the war did to the GOP:

• It ruined the party’s hard-earned reputation for foreign-affairs probity. They started a war and didn’t win it. It was longer and costlier by every measure than the Bush administration said it would be. Before Iraq, the GOP’s primary calling card was that it was the party you could trust in foreign affairs. For half a century, throughout the Cold War, they were serious about the Soviet Union, its moves, feints and threats. Republicans were not ambivalent about the need for and uses of American power, as the Democrats were in the 1970s and 1980s, but neither were they wild. After Iraq it was the Republicans who seemed at best the party of historical romantics or, alternatively, the worst kind of cynic, which is an incompetent one. Iraq marked a departure in mood and tone from past conservatism.

• It muddied up the meaning of conservatism and bloodied up its reputation. No Burekean prudence or respect for reality was evident. Ronald Reagan hated the Soviet occupation of the Warsaw Pact countries—really, hated the oppression and violence. He said it, named it, and forced the Soviets to defend it. He did not, however, invade Eastern Europe to liberate it. He used military power sparingly. He didn’t think the right or lucky thing would necessarily happen. His big dream was a nuclear-free world, which he pursued daringly but peacefully.

• It ended the Republican political ascendance that had begun in 1980. This has had untold consequences, and not only in foreign affairs. And that ascendance was hard-earned. By 2006 Republicans had lost the House, by 2008 the presidency. Curry quotes National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru at a recent debate at the American Enterprise Institute: “You could make the argument that the beginning of the end of Republican dominance in Washington was the Iraq War, at least a stage of the Iraq War, 2005-06.” In 2008 a solid majority of voters said they disapproved of the war. Three-quarters of them voted for Barack Obama.

• It undermined respect for Republican economic stewardship. War is costly. No one quite knows or will probably ever know the exact financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself. Some estimates put it at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion. Mr. Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office report saying the Iraq operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012. Whatever the number, it added to deficits and debt, and along with the Bush administration’s domestic spending helped erode the Republican Party’s reputation for sobriety in fiscal affairs.

• It quashed debate within the Republican Party. Political parties are political; politics is about a fight. The fight takes place at the polls and in debate. But the high stakes and high drama of the wars—and the sense within the Bush White House that it was fighting for our very life after 9/11—stoked an atmosphere in which doubters and critics were dismissed as weak, unpatriotic, disloyal. The GOP—from top, the Washington establishment, to bottom, the base—was left festering, confused and, as the years passed, lashing out. A conservative movement that had prided itself, in the 1970s and 1980s, on its intellectualism—”Of a sudden, the Republican Party is the party of ideas,” marveled New York’s Democratic senator Pat Moynihan in 1979—seemed no longer capable of an honest argument. Free of internal criticism, national candidates looked daffy and reflexively aggressive—John McCain sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran”—and left the party looking that way, too.

• It killed what remained of the Washington Republican establishment. This was not entirely a loss, to say the least. But establishments exist for a reason: They’re supposed to function as The Elders, and sometimes they’re actually wise. During Iraq they dummied up—criticizing might be bad for the lobbying firm. It removed what credibility the establishment had. And they know it.

* * *

All this of course is apart from the central tragedy, which is the human one—the lost lives, the wounded, the families that will now not be formed, or that have been left smaller, and damaged.

Iraq and Afghanistan have ended badly for the Republicans, and the party won’t really right itself until it has candidates for national office who can present a new definition of what a realistic and well-grounded Republican foreign policy is, means and seeks to do. That will take debate. The party is now stuck more or less in domestic issues. As for foreign policy, they oppose Obama. In the future more will be needed.

Many writers this week bragged about their opposition to the war, or defended their support of it. I’m not sure what good that does, but since I’m calling for debate, here we go. I had questions about an invasion until Colin Powell testified before the U.N. in February 2003. In a column soon after: “From the early days of the debate I listened to the secretary of state closely and with respect. I was glad to see a relative dove in the administration. It needed a dove. Mr. Powell’s war-hawk foes seemed to me both bullying and unrealistic. Why not go slowly to war? A great nation should show a proper respect for the opinion of mankind, it should go to the world with evidence and argument, it should attempt to win allies. A lot of people tracked Mr. Powell’s journey, and in a way took it with him. Looking back I think I did too.”

Mr. Powell told the U.N. Saddam Hussein must be stopped and asserted that Iraq had developed and was developing weapons of mass destruction. That turned out not to be true.

But I believed it, supported the war, and cheered the troops. My break came in 2005, with two columns (here and here) that questioned Mr. Bush’s thinking, his core premises and assumptions, as presented in his Second Inaugural Address. That questioning in time became sharp criticism, accompanied by a feeling of estrangement. In the future I would feel a deeper skepticism toward both parties.

So that was my Iraq, wronger than some at the start, righter than some at the end, and not shocked by the darkening picture I saw when I went there in 2011.

Henry Kissinger said recently that he had in his lifetime seen America enthusiastically enter four wars and struggle in the end to end each of them.

Maybe great nations do not learn lessons, they relearn them.

I called for a serious Republican debate on its foreign policy, but the Democrats need one too. What’s their overarching vision? Do they have a strategy, or only sentiments?

There’s a lot of Republican self-criticism and self-examination going on. What about the Democrats’?

The First Days of Francis

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 20, 2013

It really is quite wonderful, what we’re hearing and seeing from Rome. The plain shoes. The plain watch. The slightly galumphy look as he does his walkabouts. The reason he took his name: “How I wish for a poor church, and for a church for the poor.” The report I received of his taking the employee elevator in the Vatican, not the papal one— “Your Holiness!” exclaimed a surprised Swiss Guard. His kissing of the hands of his “brother cardinals” after they would attempt to kiss his ring. The sweetness of his plunging into the crowds. His stopping the jeep Tuesday morning when he was riding around St. Peter’s Square: He saw a disabled man being held by a friend, and stopped to show affection and gratitude. The surprise walkabout Sunday at church. The surprise phone call he made to thousands of Argentines who held an all-night prayer vigil for him Monday in Buenos Aires: “Thank you for praying, for your prayers, which I need a lot.”

All this can be called mere symbolism but it’s good symbolism, and good Francis knows it is needed.

And some things are more than that. Here is the end of his extraordinary blessing, on the third day of his papacy, to the 5,000 journalists who had converged on Rome. When he was to give his apostolic blessing he made no gestures, no pleasing moves, and simply said, in Italian, “I cordially impart to all of you my blessing.” Then, in Spanish: “I told you I was cordially imparting my blessing. Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God. May God bless you!” Then he left.

That declared respect for the consciences of others, the reluctance to assume or impose—that meant something.

So did the homily he gave at his installation mass, in which he used the word “protect” repeatedly. Power is service, service is protection; a new bishop of Rome must be inspired by the “lowly, concrete and faithful service” of St. Joseph. “He must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important,” including “the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.” “We must not be afraid of goodness, or even tenderness.”

In a way this sounds standard—any pope might say it. But Francis’s language is marked by a particular tenderness—even by a repetition of that word. It made me think of Mother Teresa. I have a pamphlet she thrust in my hand 28 years ago, the day I met her. It contains a poem she had written. “Jesus is the unwanted—to be wanted. . . . Jesus is the Beggar—to give him a smile. Jesus is the Drunkard—to listen to him. Jesus is the Mental—to protect him . . .”

That in turn reminded me of Francis’s first Angelus as pope, on Sunday. He spoke to those massed in St. Peter’s Square of how mercy makes life sweeter. “A little mercy makes the world less cold and more just.” We should never despair of God’s mercy. “The Lord never tires of forgiving. . . . It is we who tire of asking forgiveness!”

* * *

I am thinking of John Paul II as the pope of freedom, in both the spiritual and the political senses. He went home to Poland and told the Soviet Union that it could not stop God and could not hold the people from him. And of course freedom in the deeper, more crucial sense of finding one’s truest freedom only in belief in God. He liked to quote St. Augustine: “To the extent to which we serve God we are free, while to the extent we follow . . . sin, we are still slaves.”

I am thinking of Benedict XVI as the pope of reason and intellect in a world abandoning both for sensation, stimulation and sentiment. I read last night in John Thavis’s “The Vatican Diaries” of Benedict’s informing a crowd at a World Youth Day mass that Holy Communion can be compared to nuclear fission—the Eucharist is an “intimate explosion” that sets off a series of transformations. Benedict was an intellectual and somewhat abstract: It was hard for him to be fully heard, fully understood.

But Francis in these first days—this pope seems to me the pope of sweetness, not of a shallow or sentimental kind but some deep sweetness that has to do with words like tenderness, and mercy, and protection.

The church the past 35 years in the post-Christian West has attempted to reimpose the urgency of its presence, meaning and belief, and to present those things fully to the rising nations.

John Paul and Benedict were bringers, givers, teachers. But Francis seems like a summoner, an inviter. And this seems just right for the world right now.

Anyway, I am finding it impossible not to be interested in what he is doing, and what he will become.

* * *

CPAC Thoughts

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 16, 2013

I watched a lot of the Conservative Political Action Conference on C-Span from New York.

I think members of the media forget, or don’t notice, that CPAC is not a gathering of the Republican Party, it’s a gathering of independent conservative groups. Not inviting Chris Christie was strange—who’s been more successfully conservative in a blue state than Christie? But it didn’t strike me as a scandal—CPAC can invite who they want—and I wondered if someone there wasn’t trying to do Christie a favor. He’s running for re-election in deep-blue New Jersey. How does it hurt him to be snubbed by the right? It doesn’t. It makes Dems back home who like him like him even more. As for not inviting gay groups—politics, as Henry Hyde once said, is a game of addition, not subtraction. Conservatives should not only be pleased and happy there are gay groups that self-identify as Republican, they should be welcoming. “We fight for liberty, all are welcome as soldiers, disagreements are normal, come on in.” “We are not enemies but friends.”

* * *

Of all the speeches I saw and read about, I was most impressed by Bobby Jindal’s. His remarks reflected something I suspect is coming in the GOP in a big way, and that is a shift away from debt and deficits as the primary focus, and toward growth and jobs. It is an argument about emphasis, but it’s also deeply substantive: it has to do with the choosing of a path. One of the reasons I think Jindal’s approach will rise is that Washington, obviously, is stuck. The president probably won’t give Republicans a grand bargain on spending and taxing because if he solves that problem in 2013 the subject will change in 2014 and 2016. And the White House wants the subject to stay the same: Those horrible Republican bean counters want to throw your entitlements off the cliff. What we’re seeing from the White House is strategic passive-aggression: talk, talk, talk, blame, phone, crisis, cliff, crisis, talk, blame, talk. It’s all stuck. The Republicans can’t run the government from the House, so they’re stuck too.

Jindal, by the way, was especially spirited about our incoherent pigsty of a federal tax code and how it retards growth. Let’s blow it up, he said. “Let’s get rid of those loopholes paid for by the lobbyists.” “Let’s get rid of those incentives Washington tries to use to coerce our behavior.” And “tax reform is not about taking more money from the hardworking people of America. . . . That is not tax reform.”

Here’s the speech.

* * *

Under the heading Extremely Shallow Points That Nonetheless Perhaps Should Be Made:

Rand Paul, for his striking speech, marched onto the stage in a suit jacket, tie and jeans. I wear jeans and you wear jeans and it’s not unusual for a man to wear jeans with a tie and jacket. They look like happy farmers, or cable TV anchors whose desks don’t show their legs. That being said, could we not wear grown-up suits when we are running for high office? Additionally, do we have to talk so much about Tupac and Biggie, and how the former’s melodic inventiveness is almost equaled by the latter’s lyrical depth? Could we please not pose pumping iron in our gym shorts while wearing baseball caps backward on our heads? Could we not pose shirtless to show our abs?

Let me tell you why I hate this, and it isn’t only because I like the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer and slobs like Babe Ruth. I hate political figures looking at America and seeing demographic slivers with which a subtle connection must be made. I hate when they go for the demo—young voters, college-educated pre-advanced-degree, affluent suburban voters, older blue-collar peripheral urban ethnic voters. Yes, I know it’s the future, but I hate it.

I like it when candidates are irredeemably themselves and appeal as themselves to the whole country. I just realized I don’t even like it when they go the suburbs of Washington to talk to each other at big confabs full of like-minded people. I like them going to America to talk to Americans. I said once, and I meant it, that Republicans should be going to Brooklyn, to the street fair in Bay Ridge. Everybody’s there, young, old, all colors and religions, all views and conditions. There are immigrants from what looks like every country in the world and they’re here working and getting used to America, and politically they seem to me generally unaffiliated and insufficiently appealed to. Go to Bay Ridge, not National Harbor, Md. They’d love to meet a Republican.

Everything’s up for grabs in modern America. If we’re all slivers, we’re slivers that make a whole. Appeal to the whole.

And by the way, Hillary Clinton? She dresses like a grownup.

‘Go and Repair My House,’ Heard the Saint of Assisi

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 16, 2013

I’ll tell you how it looks: like one big unexpected gift for the church and the world.

Everything about Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election was a surprise—his age, the name he took, his mien as he was presented to the world. He was plainly dressed, a simple white cassock, no regalia, no finery. He stood there on the balcony like a straight soft pillar and looked out at the crowd. There were no grand gestures, not even, at first, a smile. He looked tentative, even overwhelmed. I thought, as I watched, “My God—he’s shy.”

Then the telling moment about the prayer. Before he gave a blessing he asked for a blessing: He asked the crowd to pray for him. He bent his head down and the raucous, cheering square suddenly became silent, as everyone prayed. I thought, “My God—he’s humble.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of it and said so to a friend, a member of another faith who wants the best for the church because to him that’s like wanting the best for the world. He was already loving what he was seeing. He asked what was giving me pause. I said I don’t know, the curia is full of tough fellows, the pope has to be strong.

“That is more than strength,” he said of the man on the screen. “This is not cynical humanity. This is showing there is another way to be.”

Yes. This is a kind of public leadership we are no longer used to—unassuming, self-effacing. Leaders of the world now are garish and brazen. You can think of half a dozen of their names in less than a minute. They’re good at showbiz, they find the light and flash the smile.

But this man wasn’t trying to act like anything else.

“He looks like he didn’t want to be pope,” my friend said. That’s exactly what he looked like. He looked like Alec Guinness in the role of a quiet, humble man who late in life becomes pope. I mentioned that to another friend who said, “That would be the story of a hero.”

And so, as they’re saying in Europe, Francis the Humble. May he be a living antidote.

* * *

He is orthodox, traditional, his understanding of the faith in line with the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He believes in, stands for, speaks for the culture of life.

He loves the poor and not in an abstract way. He gave the cardinal’s palace in Buenos Aires to a missionary order with no money. He lives in an apartment, cooks his food, rides the bus. He rejects pomposity. He does not feel superior. He is a fellow soul. He had booked a flight back to Argentina when the conclave ended.

But these two traits—his embrace of the church’s doctrines and his characterological tenderness toward the poor—are very powerful together, and can create a powerful fusion. He could bridge the gap or close some of the distance between social justice Catholics and traditional, doctrinal Catholics. That would be a relief.

And he has suffered. Somehow you knew this as you looked at him Wednesday night. Much on this subject will come out.

The meaning of the name he chose should not be underestimated. Cardinal Bergoglio is a Jesuit and the Jesuits were founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, who said he wanted to be like St. Francis of Assisi.

One of the most famous moments in St. Francis’s life is the day he was passing by the church of St. Damiano. It was old and near collapse. From St. Bonaventure’s “Life of Francis of Assisi”: “Inspired by the Spirit, he went inside to pray. Kneeling before an image of the Crucified, he was filled with great fervor and consolation. . . . While his tear-filled eyes were gazing at the Lord’s cross, he heard with his bodily ears a voice coming from the cross, telling him three times: ‘Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.’” Francis was amazed “at the sound of this astonishing voice, since he was alone in the church.” He set himself to obeying the command.

Go and repair my house, which is falling into ruin. Could the new pope’s intentions be any clearer?

The Catholic Church in 2013 is falling into ruin. The church has been damaged by scandal and the scandals arose from arrogance, conceit, clubbiness and an assumption that the special can act in particular ways, that they may make mistakes but it’s understandable, and if it causes problems the church will take care of it.

Pope Francis already seems, in small ways rich in symbolism, to be moving the Vatican away from arrogance. His actions in just his first 24 hours are suggestive.

He picks up his own luggage, pays his own hotel bill, shuns security, refuses a limousine, gets on a minibus with the cardinals. That doesn’t sound like a prince, or a pope. He goes to visit a church in a modest car in rush-hour traffic. He pointedly refuses to sit on a throne after his election, it is reported, and meets his fellow cardinals standing, on equal footing. The night he was elected, according to New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Vatican officials and staffers came forward to meet the new pope. He politely put them off: Not now, the people are waiting. Then he went to the balcony.

The church’s grandeur is beautiful, but Francis seems to be saying he himself won’t be grand. This will mean something in that old Vatican. It will mean something to the curia.

* * *

After the conclave, I’m grateful for two other things. First, after all the strains and scandals they still came running. A pope was being picked. The smoke came out and the crowd was there in St Peter’s Square. They stood in the darkness, cold and damp, and they waited and cheered and the square filled up. As the cameras panned the crowd there was joy on their faces, and the joy felt like renewal.

People come for many reasons. To show love and loyalty, to be part of something, to see history. But maybe we don’t fully know why they run, or why we turn when the first reports come of white smoke, and put on the TV or the computer. Maybe it comes down to this: “We want God.” Which is what millions of people shouted when John Paul II first went home to Poland. This is something in the human heart, and no strains or scandals will prevail against it.

I viewed it all initially with hope, doubt and detachment. And then the white smoke, and the bells, and the people came running, and once again as many times before my eyes filled with tears, and my throat tightened. That in the end is how so many Catholics, whatever their level of engagement with the church, feel. “I was more loyal than I meant to be.”

Much will unfold now, much will be seen. An ardent, loving 75-year-old cardinal in the middle of an acute church crisis is not going to sit around and do nothing. He’s going to move. “Go and repair my house, which you see is falling into ruin.”

Choosing a Pope, Day 1

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 12, 2013

The exciting thing is the confounding thing: To a degree I’ve never seen before, nobody knows who the next pope will be. All my smart Catholic friends who tend to have a sense of what’s coming or a good read of the lay of the land—they don’t have a clue. Eight years ago I thought it was Joseph Ratzinger and said so, as he gave his great homily John Paul II’s funeral, to a friend. This time I have no idea. I don’t think the cardinals themselves have any idea. There’s a broad sense that this could be a time of wild cards, of amazing turns and surprises bigger than the normal surprise.

This morning I thought, as I watched the cardinals enter St. Peter’s on TV, that the conclave has been marked and even misshapen by the fact that they are not mourning the death of a pope. Normally they’d be in some sort of at least formal mourning as they begin to choose a new pontiff. And mourning isn’t just a feeling; it does something to you—it sobers, it grounds and stills. It forces you to know that you are in history. I have found myself thinking about that moment during John Paul II’s funeral when he was carried out to the steps of the cathedral and put before the people. A big Bible was placed on top of his plain casket, and a wind suddenly came up and turned the pages—page after page, as if turned by an unseen hand. The whole world saw it on TV, and no one could have seen it without having a feeling of the divine, of the supernatural. It bestowed a sense of Godness, and it would have reminded every cardinal there of the realness of history and the gravity of their choice. God had brought the cardinals to Rome to choose, in their mourning, John Paul’s successor.

Now they’re called to Rome because an 85-year-old man retired. He has all his marbles, as they say in the DSM, and can still stand straight, so even taking into account his age, the pains and limits of it, it seemed a decision made by a man—a worldly decision—that brought them there.

It seems to me the absence of mourning has left things strange, and contributed to the air of Anything Can Happen. Which also prompts the question: Is it good that anything can happen?

* * *

There is a sense too, at least among American Catholics I talk to, that this is in some new way a crucial moment for the church, even though we don’t understand or cannot name exactly why. It’s not only The Scandals, the Vatican bank, that source of half a century’s rumors, or Vatileaks. It’s not only the three cardinals who reportedly made a dossier on the last, bound in red leather and locked away like the third secret of Fatima for the next pope’s perusal. Those cardinals—again, reportedly—wrote of rivalries and ambitions. But what exactly does that mean? Who are the rivals and what are they fighting over? Ambitions for what, to do what? We are all wondering about this.

Anyway, I talk to a lot of Catholics who are publicly sanguine and privately unsettled.

All this is at odds with the burly bonhomie shown in public by those such as New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who in his few days in Rome has always been seen laughing and reaching out, joking and teasing. It’s a good thing to see. I want to feel the way he seems to feel. Maybe by the end of the conclave I will.

Two thoughts:

The first is that we’re all talking about a possible American pope, or a Canadian, or a South American or Central American, or an African, an Asian. God bless them all, we’ll see. But a church whose cardinals might be feeling an almost primal longing for stability in an uncertain world—I don’t know that they are, but at least some would be feeling some tug toward the more coherent past—might make a choice whose headline would be “The Empire Strikes Back.” Meaning an Italian. There hasn’t been an Italian pope in 35 years. Before that they ran the papacy for almost forever and it all sort of worked out, or at least the church is still here. The Italian cardinals have a number of highly regarded papabili, such as Gianfranco Ravasi. You might say “No, that won’t do, that’s the old world.” But maybe everything old is new again; an Italian would be new again.

The second is that there’s a lot of ignorant, tendentious and even aggressive media chatter about the church right now, and it’s starting to grate. Church observers are blabbering away on cable and network news telling the church to get with the program, throwing around words like “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” and phrases like “irrelevant to the modern world.”

I wouldn’t presume to tell Baptists or Lutherans or Orthodox Jews how they should interpret their own theology, what traditions to discard and what new ones to adopt, what root understandings are no longer pertinent. It would be presumptuous, and also deeply impolite in a civic sense. The world I came up in had some virtues, and one was that we gave each other a little more space, a little more courtesy both as individuals and organizations, never mind faiths. That kind of public courtesy is what has allowed America, with all its sharp-elbowed angers and disagreements, to operate.

Right now every idiot in town feels free to tell the church to get hopping, and they do it in a new way, with a baldness that occasionally borders on the insulting. Whatever their faith or lack of it they feel free to critique loudly and in depth, to the degree they are capable of depth. I have been critical of the church over the sex scandals for longer than a decade. Here’s one column—but I write of it because I love it and seek to see it healthy, growing and vital as it brings Christ into the world. Some of the church’s critics don’t seem to be operating from affection and respect but something else, or some things else.

When critics mean to be constructive, they bring an air of due esteem and occasional sadness to their criticisms, and offer informed and thoughtful suggestions as to ways the old church might right itself. They might even note, with an air of gratitude free of crowd-pleasing sanctimony, that critics must, in fairness, speak of those parts of the church that most famously work—the schools that teach America’s immigrants, the charities, the long embrace of the most vulnerable—and outweigh a whole world of immediate criticisms.

But when they just prattle on with their indignant words—gender, celibacy, irrelevant—well, they’re probably not trying to be constructive. One might say they’re being vulgar, ignorant and destructive, spoiled too. They think they’re brave, or outspoken, or something. They don’t have enough insight into themselves to notice they’d never presume to instruct other great faiths. It doesn’t cross their minds that if they were as dismissive about some of those faiths they’d have to hire private security guards.

I once read an account of Anne Boleyn’s death. In the moments after she was beheaded her head was held aloft by her executioner, to show the crowd. Her nervous system was shocked, her neurons misfired, her head didn’t know it was severed from her neck. Her eyes blinked, her mouth moved crazily. Those critics who go on TV now to tear down what they don’t even understand: they are removed and unknowing. They are Anne Boleyn’s head.

Two Senators

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 9, 2013

This is from not-for-attribution interviews with two Republican senators who attended the dinner with the president on Wednesday night at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington.

One was heartened and impressed by the meeting while retaining his skepticism as to whether it might open the way to pronounced progress in pursuit of a so-called grand bargain.

The other was more optimistic and left the meeting moved.

Each independently mentioned one aspect of the conversation that troubled them both: The president, while friendly and forthcoming, seemed to withdraw somewhat when talk turned to continuing the process.

Both senators said that near the end of the two-hour, 20-minute dinner, a senator or senators pressed the president: This has been a good discussion, it’s promising, but we need a plan, a process, so that whatever momentum comes from this talk isn’t squandered.

The Republicans fear that members of the Senate from both parties will not be able to come to serious agreement unless the president is actively involved and puts the prestige of his office behind it.

Senator No. 1: When pressed on the question, the president seemed to step back. “His idea of a process is, ‘You guys figure it out and work with my staff, and if you need me call me.’ But in the end, unless the president really gets engaged and forces meeting after meeting, I don’t see how you get past the logjam.”

He will judge the president’s level of “real sincerity” by this: “Does he follow up?” “If he just takes the standoff attitude—my guess is he’s gotta be smart enough to know that’s not gonna work.”

Senator No. 2: “At the end I mentioned, ‘Share [with us] how you see this going forward.’ ” Here the president “got hazy. . . . I told him this will never work without adult supervision from the White House. I don’t think he comprehends that this is part of getting something done.”

Senator No. 2 said he planned to “press” the president in coming days “to lead, to exert authority.”

* * *

What has been behind President Obama’s reluctance to own and lead negotiations with Congress? Members of his party have taken to conceding that he’s somewhat aloof, doesn’t enjoy the give and take of talking with politicians, tends to prefer the company of family and friends. That is the temperament argument.

Another argument is that nonnegotiating is actually his way of negotiating—drive the other side crazy by withholding involvement and information, talk over Congress’s head to the public.

Both senators said the president, at the dinner, touched on a reason for his uninvolvement.

Senator No. 2: “He’s been under the view that if he gets involved, it poisons something. But no, we want presidential leadership, we want to solve this. . . . He should be the convener.”

Senator No. 1 also used the word “poison” also, which suggests the president himself may have used it.

Here some possibilities arise. One is that the president truly thinks that he’s so personally hated by the Republicans and their base that he feels he damages any effort at progress by seeming to be leading or encouraging it. If he really thinks that, it must be painful on some level. And yet it’s an odd fear. The president just won re-election decisively, and he obviously has a lot of friends and supporters in America. He can move forward and take responsibility, he just has to get around those who really do hate him. But that’s what successful political figures do. They all have people who hate them. Especially presidents. The don’t—they can’t—sit around moaning, “Woe is me, nothing is possible.”

Another possibility is that the president exaggerates in his mind the power of the huge, dark force of the Republican base. (Republican politicians sometimes exaggerate it, too.) This might go under the heading “believing your own propaganda.” Both parties have bases, both bases have darkness within them, but a good portion of both bases would surely like to see Washington function again, see the entitlement crisis eased and the tax code simplified and reformed.

Another possibility is that the president’s claiming he’s poison is just a dodge, a way of subtly putting the onus on his foes: I could help if your team didn’t hate me so unreasonably, but alas they do, so I can do little. And this would be an excuse to continue what appears to me to be his preferred negotiating style, which is the nonnegotiation negotiation: Let them guess where I am, let them guess what I’ll do, I’ll be the calm center while they run around like headless chickens.

My sense: If you really want a grand bargain, that dinner was exactly where you’d make it clear…

The Anti-Confidence Man

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 9, 2013

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis. The debt and the deficit are part of it, part of the general fear that we’re on a long slide and can’t turn it around. The federal tax code is part of it—it’s a drag on everything, a killer of the spirit of guts and endeavor. Federal regulations are part of it. The administration’s inability to see the stunning and historic gift of the energy revolution is part of it.

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

I’m in Pittsburgh, making my way to the airport hotel. The people movers are broken and we pull our bags along the dingy carpet. There’s an increasing sense in America now that the facades are intact but the machinery inside is broken.

The hotel has entrances on two floors. I search for the lobby, find it. Travelers are milling about, but there’s no information desk, no doorman, no bellman or concierge, just two harried-looking workers at a front desk on the second level. The man who checked me in put his phones on hold when I asked for someone to accompany me upstairs. As we walked to the room I felt I should explain. I told him a trial attorney had told me a while back that there are more lawsuits involving hotels than is generally known, and more crime, so always try to have someone with you when you first go to your room. I thought the hotel clerk would pooh-pooh this. Instead he said, “That’s why we just put up mirrors at each end of the hall, so you can see if someone’s coming.” He made it sound like an amenity.

“What should we do then, scream?” I asked. He laughed and shrugged: “Yeah.”

Things are getting pretty bare-bones in America. Doormen, security, bellmen, people working the floor—that’s maybe a dozen jobs that should have been filled, at one little hotel on one day in one town. Everyone’s keeping costs down, not hiring.

What that hotel looked like is America without its muscle, its efficiency, its old confidence.

* * *

On the plane home I read a piece by Mort Zuckerman, who’s emerged as one of the most persuasive and eloquent critics of the president’s economic policy. The unemployment picture is worse than people understand, he explained in U.S. News & World Report. The jobless rate, officially 7.9%, is almost twice that if you include those who have stopped looking, work part time, or are only “marginally attached” to the workforce. “The labor force participation rate . . . has dropped to the lowest level since 1984,” Mr. Zuckerman noted. “It is harder to find work today than it has been in any previous recession.”

Meanwhile, the president is stuck in his games and his history. He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care. And now ObamaCare is being cited as a reason employers are laying people off and not hiring, according to a report from the Federal Reserve.

What a mess.

Conservative media should stop taunting the president because he spent the past month warning of catastrophe if the sequester kicks in, and the catastrophe hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened yet. He can make it happen. He runs the federal agencies. He can decide on a steady drip of catastrophe—food inspectors furloughed on the 15th, long lines at the airport on the 18th, sobbing children missing Head Start on the 20th, civilian contractors pointing to a rusting U.S.S. Truman on the 25th.

He can let them happen one after another, like little spring shoots of doom. And it probably won’t look planned and coordinated, it will look spontaneous and inevitable.

And you have to assume that’s the plan, because that’s kind of how he rolls.

But what is the sequester about? At the end of the day it’s about fewer jobs or fewer hours. In the midst of what is already a jobs crisis.

Right now his attention has turned to dinner with Republican senators and meetings with members of both parties on Capitol Hill. He is trying to show, after a hit in the polls, that he can reach out. He’s trying to convince America he’s capable of making a deal.

The new engagement may work if in the past few days the president has changed his political style, approach and assumptions. But people don’t usually change overnight. On the other hand there’s plenty of reason for him to make a cosmetic reach-out in order to show that whatever happens it’s not really his fault, and if the sequester causes pain at least the responsibility is shared. He didn’t stiff the opposition, he treated them to lamb at the Jefferson Hotel.

It is interesting that almost at the same time as the dinner the president’s people once again begun warning of doom. A blast email from Organizing for Action, signed by Stephanie Cutter, used these words: “Devastating,” “obstructionism,” “destructive,” “this is real.” It claimed 100,000 “teaching jobs” will be cut, along with “70,000 spots for preschoolers in Head Start, $43 million for food programs for seniors, $35 million for local fire department,” and nutritional assistance for “over half a million women and their families.” All this because of loopholes “for millionaires and billionaires” who want their “yachts and corporate jets.”

They aren’t dropping the Frighten Everyone strategy.

Their whole approach is still stoke and scare—stoke resentment and scare the vulnerable into pressuring Republicans.

Barack Obama really is a study in contrasts, such as aloof and omnipresent. He’s never fully present and he won’t leave. He speaks constantly, endlessly, but always seems to be withholding his true thoughts and plans. He was the candidate of hope and change, of “Yes, we can,” but the mood of his governance has been dire, full of warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings, full of words like suffering and punishment and sacrifice.

It’s always the language of zero-sum, of hardship that must be evenly divided, of constriction and accusation.

It’s all so frozen, so stuck. Just when America needs a boost, some faith, a breakthrough.

Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it. He thinks he’s in a wrestling match about taxing and spending, he thinks he’s in a game with those dread Republicans. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs.

Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.

There’s little sense he sees this. Dr. Doom talks about coming disaster when businessmen need the confidence to hire someone. He’s missing the boat on the central crisis of his second term.

Kissinger at the Council on Foreign Relations

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 8, 2013

Friday morning Henry Kissinger took questions at the annual corporate conference of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The room was packed.

Kissinger of course is an iconic figure in the history of foreign affairs, a statesman and historian of statesmanship. He will be 90 soon but he’s taken the opposite of the usual trajectory of those formerly in power. Normally the longer you’ve been from high office the smaller you seem. Kissinger has retained his gravity and presence, and his foreign-policy mystique has in fact grown since he left the secretary of state’s office in 1977. In part this may be because he thinks about, writes about and supports the idea that great nations need grand strategies. In the modern political environment leaders often lose a sense of higher strategy in the demands of the day-to-day. Crises pop up and must be dealt with, public opinion demands focus here and then there, decisions are made quickly. Strategic coherence and continuity are shattered. Long-term thinking comes to seem an indulgence that no longer applies. And yet it is crucial. You have to know where you’re going and why.

From my notes:

On negotiations between nations: “Americans have a tendency to look at negotiations as a psychiatric problem.” Do the negotiators like each other, is the personal chemistry good?

Interviewer Charlie Rose: “You don’t believe that.”

Kissinger: “No.” Nations attempt to act in what they perceive to be their best interests.

Later: “It is best to begin a negotiation telling the other side what you want. It saves a lot of time.”

On Iran: President Obama will likely have to make a decision “in the next 12 months.” Iran is trying to develop a nuclear program; they think it will provide them “a safety net” but instead it will likely bring destabilization as others scramble to be similarly armed. For Israel, “it would be an existential decision to go to war.” When Kissinger speaks to Israeli political figures, he asks them to visualize for him not the day of a decision to move on Iran but the aftermath—“the next 30 days.”

Charlie Rose: “What do they answer?”

Kissinger: “I don’t think they’ve thought about it deeply.”

Do they think somebody else will take care of that scenario? Not just the U.S., said Kissinger, but maybe Russia.

It is possible Israel will move and Iran will start “harassing the Straits of Hormuz.” It is possible Israel will move and Iran will do nothing. “But you can’t base your decision on that hope.”

America would like Iran to be “a nation, not a cause”—a nation that in time could be our ally. Some say if a different regime came to power in Teheran we might face a different reality. Kissinger does not agree. A nuclearized Iran would be a new force and fact in the region, and others would inevitably seek nuclear weapons.

The question American policy makers will have to face in the coming year: “Is the present level of enrichment acceptable?”

On Syria: “Someone who chooses ophthalmology as a career is not a man driven by huge concepts of state.” President Bashar Assad’s father would have been ruthless too in similar circumstances, but also “more skilled in diplomacy.”

“It would be better if Assad left,” Kissinger said. America’s concern is to have “a non-radical outcome.” The question is what Syria would look like after the fall of Assad. “In the abstract, an outcome that permits the various ethnic groups a certain autonomy” is desirable.

We should be aware of Russia’s anxieties. “They are genuinely worried about the spread of radicalism,” he said. “Radicalism that would fall from Syria would reach them first.”

“If we can make a strategic agreement with Russia, we would have to take it to the Arab world.”

“Whatever we do . . . in my life we’ve had four wars which we entered with great enthusiasm and did not know how to end.” We want an outcome that takes account of “humanitarian concerns” and “is not radical.” We should do what we can “short of American ground forces.”

On Egypt: Rose asked what are the consequences of the Islamic government in Cariro. Kissinger: “Nothing is more boring than someone who says, ‘I told you so.’ But I told you so.” This was met with laughter.

What should we have done when President Hosni Mubarak appeared to be falling? “We should have behaved in a manner more respectful. . . . It was not necessary for our people to go on TV and announce Mubarak must leave.”

How should one interpret the revolution? There are democratic revolutions and historic revolutions. “Historic revolutions tend to represent a coming together of resentments” and leave destruction in their wake.

The Egyptian military and the Islamists are the two elements that will emerge. “The nice people from Facebook and Google knew how to get people to a square. They didn’t know what to do afterwards.”

There will eventually be “a showdown between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.” The Islamist government may be there to stay. The question for America: “Can we attach conditions to our support?”

On North Korea: If you look at something that could start a real war, North Korea is “near the top of the list.” For the Chinese, North Korea is of great strategic and symbolic importance. They took on the U.S. there during the Korean War, in the first year of Mao’s government. What he fears is that the North Korean regime “has brutality but no philosophy—it is a family enterprise.” The regime may last 10 years but someday something is going to happen that may lead to its collapse. This in turn could set off “terrible events.” “It is a fundamentally untenable situation.”

On China: He warns against “the tendency of Americans to pay attention to the personality” of individual leaders. China’s new leaders all lived through the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Whether prisoners or prison-keepers, they were formed by that event, forged in the same national trauma. Because of this, “in crisis they may act with greater insistence than the previous group.” The new government may decide it needs a decade to sort out such problems as internal corruption and economic dislocation. They need time to work one these internal issues. But “some strange or surprising occurrence” could disturb this. The tensions between China and Japan over disputed islands in the China Sea “is one of these stupid issues that could escalate and draw us into the conflict because there’s no obvious answer.”

On Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “in my opinion is an Islamist by conviction.” He makes no secret of this, never has. He wants to “re-create Turkish influence.” He looks at Israel as “a metaphor for America” and is carrying on an anti-American foreign policy without attacking America. His government has expanded its influence in every sphere of Turkish life and broken the military.

On Chancellor Angela Merkel: “She is formidable. She is not by nature daring, but “she moves crab-wise toward daring objectives.”

He asks if a program of European austerity imposed by Germany is a manageable enterprise. “Will it really produce growth?” If not, what financial demands will the German political system be able to sustain? The question comes down to “How to have political union in Europe without full economic union.” Could Merkel achieve this? Yes.

On the Obama administration’s foreign policy: “They are skillful in handling tactical aspects of situations.” But “they have not been able to put this together into a strategic overview of where we’re going.” “I don’t think they’re disliked but they’re not fully trusted anywhere. Nobody knows where they’re going.”

John Calhoun

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 6, 2013

Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institute pushes back against Sam Tanenhaus’s recent New Republic essay on the roots of modern conservatism. I’d add only that in almost 40 years of talking about politics and political philosophy with conservative journalists, writers, intellectuals, political practitioners, gadflies and activists, I have never heard anyone say “As Calhoun said . . .,” “As Calhoun demonstrated . . .,” or even “Calhoun.” The 19th-century South Carolina senator just doesn’t exist as an important figure on the conservative mental landscape. He’s referred to now and then in what can be called the conservative canon, but not nearly as prominently as others. So it’s odd to see a respected writer argue that modern conservatism is traceable to him.

I first knew of John C. Calhoun when I read, in 1973 or ’74, a biography of him by Margaret Coit. She was coming to my college, Fairleigh Dickinson, to give a lecture on 19th-century American political figures. It was exciting. We didn’t get Pulitzer Prize-winning historians every day. Anyway, I read Coit’s book before she came. It was scholarly and humane. What I remember: the gravity with which the men of Congress then spoke of great issues—by the 1970s that seriousness of thought was a lost world. I also remember Calhoun’s fearsome visage. Photographs were something new in his day, the first half of the 19th century, and people who sat for them did not then know how to arrange their faces, or even that they should comb their hair and straighten their tie. Calhoun in photographs looks furious and half mad. Many of the statesmen of the era leading up to the Civil War look that way, which had left me wondering, as a teenager, if the Civil War wasn’t a kind of national nervous breakdown.

Calhoun of course was one of the Great Triumvirate of the U.S. Senate, the others being Kentucky’s Henry Clay, the object of unknown admiration from a young wilderness lawyer named Abe Lincoln, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Calhoun and Webster each managed to sum up, in a single sentence, the stands of their part of the nation in the years in which the war approached. Calhoun for the South: “To the Union—next to our liberties most dear.” Webster for the North: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseperable.”

The Tanenhaus and Berkowitz essays reminded me of two recent conversations.

The first was with Vernon Jordan, the veteran civil rights activist and Democrat. We met up on the train to Washington in January and he asked me why people weren’t making more of the appointment a few weeks before of Tim Scott to South Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat. I said it was true that not enough had been made of it, the first black man to serve in the Senate in that state’s history, the first from the South since 1881. I asked Vernon why he was moved at the rise of a conservative Republican. He said, “I didn’t expect when we were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge that we’d all agree on everything when we got to the other side.”

That’s beautifully put, and a truly liberal thought.

The other recent conversation with was a small group of moderate Democrats and progressives. Tanenhaus had suggested in his piece that conservative support of stricter voter ID laws is rooted in racism. The moderate Democrats and progressives saw voter ID as a Republican attempt to suppress minority voters. I shook my head no and told them how I saw it.

First, voting is a unique privilege granted by democracy. As such it is not wrong to ask that voters have identification that shows they are who they are, live where they live, and are eligible to vote. I always bring ID when I vote in New York City, and it always seems friendly and yet makes me uneasy that no one ever asks for it. I just claim to be me, the poll worker looks at the rolls, and I sign below where I signed last time. I could claim to be anyone who’s registered; I could imitate the signature.

Second, it’s true that some people, especially those under economic or other stresses, don’t have a driver’s license or passport. And they should be helped to get that ID from the state and for free, no fee . Everyone’s got something—a birth certificate, a government services ID, an electric bill that can prove residence.

Third, there’s no reason an enhanced voter ID system should result in long lines on Election Day. Waiting hours to vote is a scandal, and particularly abusive to the old and unwell. States and localities should be competent enough to anticipate any problems and add more poll workers, more polling stations, more precincts. This is their job. And it is worth the cost.

Because of point four, the most important. America is in the middle of a revolution in how it votes, from computerized voting to early voting and absentee ballots. It is when you’re changing everything that messes, mischief and mistakes are most likely to occur. We don’t want scandals that shake confidence in the voting system—that, in this time of no trust for institutions, would be deadly. This is the time to do everything possible to ensure the integrity of those parts of the system we can control, voter ID being first and foremost.

We are told computerized voting is more reliable than the old voting machines and old ballot systems. I hope so, but we’re learning that pretty much anything can be hacked, and we have to assume that if it can be it will be. Which makes it all the more important that to the extent we can ensure the overall integrity of the system, we do.

It is crucial that people feel they can believe in and trust official election outcomes. If we lose that we lose everything.

One of my friends protested that there have been no recent big cases of vote fraud. Conservatives, she said, are using scare tactics to whip up anxiety about a problem that doesn’t exist. But then we all started talking about the past—about the first Mayor Daley’s Chicago, and “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson, and the old wards of Boston and Brooklyn. Vote rigging is part of our history. Vote fraud happens. Have we gotten more moral that we were in the 19th and 20th centuries? I haven’t noticed we have. Why not at least be more careful?

Obama Is Playing a New Game

-- The Wall Street Journal: March 2, 2013

Everyone has been wondering how the public will react when the sequester kicks in. The American people are in the position of hostages who’ll have to decide who the hostage-taker is. People will get mad at either the president or the Republicans in Congress. That anger will force one side to rethink or back down. Or maybe the public will get mad at both.

The White House is, as always, confident of its strategy: Scare people as much as possible and let the media take care of the rest. Maybe there will be a lot to report, maybe not, but either way the sobbing child wanting to go to Head Start and the anxious FAA bureaucrat worried about airplane maintenance will be found. This will surely have power.

And in truth, the sequester’s impact may be bad. Rep. Maxine Waters of California, a 22-year House veteran and ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, this week warned of “over 170 million jobs that could be lost.” That’s actually more jobs than America has, and it’s little comfort to say, “But she’s a famous idiot,” because Washington is actually full of famous idiots who are making serious decisions about how the sequester cuts are to be applied.

If the sequester brings chaos and discomfort, it’s certainly possible the Republicans will be blamed. But it’s just as possible President Obama will be. Not because the sequester idea came from his White House—that probably doesn’t interest anybody outside Washington—but because a) he’s the president, and presidents are expected to take care of things and work out agreements, not “force the moment to its crisis,” and b) he’s the chief executive of the federal government, and therefore capable of directing agencies to make sure all cuts are in wholly nonessential offices. I was thinking the other day of the General Services Administration scandal—the red-carpet retreat in Vegas, the toasts, the shows, all paid for by taxpayers. Maybe the president could start there.

* * *

How’s the president’s game going? What’s new is that almost everyone does seem to understand he’s playing games. He used to get more credit. His threats of coming mayhem and his lack of interest in easing it have dimmed his luster.

Certainly in the past few weeks he’s become more aggressive and gameful. A crisis is coming—a series of crises actually, with more ceilings and the threat of a government shutdown—and he is not engaging or taking ownership. The “We’re not speaking” thing with Congress is more amazing and historic than we appreciate. Only a president can stop that kind of thing, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t even seem to think he owes the speaker of the House—the highest elected official of a party representing roughly half the country—even the appearance of laying down his arms for a moment and holding serious talks. He journeys into America making speeches, he goes on TV but only for interviews the White House is confident will be soft.

He doesn’t have time for Congress, but he has time to go on Al Sharpton’s radio show and say Republicans care only about protecting the rich from taxes. Which is the kind of thing that embitters, that makes foes dig in more deeply.

But here’s what seems really new. Past presidents, certainly since Ronald Reagan, went over the heads of the media to win over the people, to get them to contact Congress and push Congress to deal. Fine, and fair enough. But Mr. Obama goes to the people to get them to enhance his position by hating Republicans. He’s playing only to the polls, not to Congress, not to get the other side to the bargaining table. He doesn’t even like the bargaining table. He doesn’t like bargaining.

Where does that get us? We are in new territory. There is a strange kind of nihilism in the president’s approach, it’s a closed, self-referential loop. And it’s guaranteed to keep agreement from happening.

Meanwhile, the president has been receiving some raps on the knuckles from journalists and thinkers who’ve been sympathetic in the past. There’s a lot of coolness toward what the president is doing, to his threats of coming disaster. Howard Fineman in the Huffington Post, in a piece called “The Celebrity President,” noted that Mr. Obama “doesn’t hide his disdain for Congress,” for the “folkways of traditional Washington” or for Congress and the media. The president in the next few months should avoid “cheap theatrics,” Mr. Fineman added: “Somebody has to be an adult in this situation, and it falls to the president.”

Bob Woodward famously slammed the president after he suggested, at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia, that maintenance of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln would be delayed. Before that he’d warned work might have to be slowed or stopped on the USS Truman. Mr. Woodward, on MSNBC: “So we now have the president going out [saying] ‘Because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country.’ That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”

* * *

While the president is bringing a partisan edge and soft-voiced pugilism to the drama, the first lady is becoming . . . let’s call it culturally dominant, and in a way that seems politically related, that seems fully networked and wired. Michele Obama is omnipresent—dancing with Jimmy Fallon, chatting with Rachel Ray, on “Good Morning America” talking about the kids and another show talking about the bangs. On ABC she accidentally said something factually incorrect, and they thoughtfully edited it out. Mrs. Obama’s presence reached its zenith, one hopes, Sunday night at the Academy Awards when she came on, goofily star-struck military personnel arrayed in dress uniforms behind her, to announce the Best Picture award. It was startling and, as she gave her benediction—the movies “lift our spirits, broaden our minds, transport us to places we can never imagine”—even in a way disquieting.

This would not be an accidental assertion of jolly partisan advantage. It seemed to me an expression of this White House’s lack of hesitation to insert itself into any cultural event anywhere. And this in a 50-50 nation, a divided nation that in its entertainments seeks safety from the encroachments of politics, and the political.

I miss Michelle Obama‘s early years, when she was beautiful, a little awkward, maybe a little ambivalent about her new role, as a sane person would be. Now she is glamorous, a star, and like all stars assumes our fascination.

It can be hard to imagine after four years in the White House, whichever party you’re in, that people might do all right for a few minutes if they’re free of your presence. There’s a tendency to assume you enliven with that presence, as opposed to deaden with your political overlay.

All of this—the president’s disdain for Congress and for Republicans, the threats of damage unless he gets his way, the first lady’s forays—is part of the permanent campaign, and the immediate sequester campaign.

But they push it too far. It feels uncalibrated, over some invisible line.

It looks like what critics have long accused this White House of being—imperious, full of overreach, full of itself.