Peggy Noonan

It’s official. Congress is now less popular than cockroaches and colonoscopies, though more popular than the ebola virus and gonorrhea. Really. The numbers came, this week, from a Public Policy Polling survey. The House and Senate have an approval rating of 9%.

GOP governors are the party’s most esteemed leaders, but they’re not in Washington. The Republican voice and presence in our national debates comes from its members on the Hill. They’re the ones America sees on the news every day, which is unfortunate because they are, largely, deal makers, legislators and even plain speakers who are not necessarily gifted explainers or thinkers.

They are up against the Democratic voice and presence. That would be President Obama (approval rating in the low to mid 50s) and his White House. He is just off a major electoral win, commands the national mic, is about to be celebrated at a second swearing-in, and will soon give a nationally covered inaugural address. Also he just won on the fiscal cliff, for now. We’ll see the blowback. Payroll taxes have just gone up, ObamaCare is yet to be fully instituted and will be costly, things are about to get more expensive for everybody. But at the moment he’s king.

And what the Republican Party has each day going up against him—presenting the party’s case, explaining its thinking—is a disparate and fractious lot of varying talent who, again, are connected to an institution less popular than cockroaches.

It doesn’t, at the moment, seem a fair fight.

Normally we see Republican congressmen and senators in a gaggle, and their message always seems to get lost. They’re usually talking about pieces of things, some part of a bill, or an amendment. Little they say seems to cohere, or to connect with a higher purpose, intent or meaning. What they say doesn’t amount to a cacophony—it’s not that lively. Their message always seems muted and blurred.

Congressional Republicans haven’t been able to come up with an immediate and overarching goal or a strategy to achieve it. Many feel as if they’re always in the dark, unclear on what the leadership is thinking or about to do.

But a goal and strategy are needed. Without them, everything will seem ad hoc, provisional, formless, meaningless. The public will see it that way, especially in comparison to the president, who seems these days to have a surer sense of what he’s about, and a greater confidence that you’ve finally twigged on to it, too.

So here’s an idea for Republicans in Congress. It has to do in part with policy, in part with attitude and approach.

They should starkly assess their position. It isn’t good. They just lost an election, they’re up against the wall, they have to figure out how to survive and thrive as a party that stands for something, while attempting each day to do the work that needs doing for a country in trouble. The challenges are huge, the odds long.

They can sit back and be depressed and whine. Or they can decide: It’s pirate time.

And really, it is.

Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to be, and that is interesting.

Now’s the time to put a dagger ‘tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy’s galleon. Take the president’s issues, steal them—they never belonged to him, they’re yours!

In political terms this means: Reorient yourselves. Declare for Main Street over Wall Street, stand for the little guy against the big interests. And move. Don’t wait for the bill, declare the sentiments of your corner..

Really, it’s pirate time.

Examples of what might be done:

If you are conservative you are skeptical of concentrated power. You know the bullying and bossism it can lead to. Republicans should go to the populist right on the issue of bank breakup. Too big to fail is too big to continue. The megabanks have too much power in Washington and too much weight within the financial system. People think the GOP is for the bankers. The GOP should upend this assumption. In this case good policy is good politics.

If you are a conservative you’re supposed to be for just treatment of the individual over the demands of concentrated elites. Every individual in America making $400,000 a year or more just got a tax hike that was a blow to the gut. Regular working people are seeing their payroll deductions increase. But private-equity partners who make billions enjoy more favorable tax treatment. Their income is treated for tax purposes as a capital gain, so they’re taxed at far lower rates. This is called the carried interest exemption, and everybody knows it’s a big con.

The Republican Party should come out against it in a big way. Let the real rich pay the same percentage the not-actually-rich-but-formally-declared-rich are paying. If the Republicans did this they’d actually be joining the winning side, because carried interest will not survive the new era. If congressional Republicans care about their party they’ll want it to get credit for fairness, as opposed to the usual blame for being lackeys of the rich.

Republicans make too much of order and discipline. Sometimes a little anarchy is a good thing, a little disorder a sign of creativity and independence of thought. If there are voices within the GOP that are for some part or parts of gun reform it would be good for them—and for the party—to come forward now. I love the Second Amendment and I’m not kidding, but I have to say tens of millions of assault weapons in the hands of gangbangers and unstable young men couldn’t be what the Founders had in mind.

We need a little moderation here, a little give.

Finally, Republicans should shock everyone, including themselves, by pushing for immigration reform—now. Don’t wait for the president, do it yourselves, come forward individually or in groups with the argument for legalization of who lives here now. Such bills should include border control and pathways for citizenship, but—and most important—they shouldn’t seem punitive or grudging and involve fines and lines and new ways to sue employers. The world has changed. Ease up now. In the past 10 years immigrants, legal and illegal, have fought our wars. We need to hurry in those who are trying to bring gifts we need into the USA. Whoever comes here learns to love our crazy country, or at least appreciate it. If we do a better job of teaching them why the goodness we have even exists, we will do OK.

The point here is to have the GOP lead in terms of good policy. But it’s also important for the Republicans to show the variety, disagreement and alive-ness that exists within the party. It is not some grim monolith, some thought-free zone, or was not meant to be. It’s not bad to be unpredictable. Living things are.

Members should loosen up, speak for their corner, put together caucuses, go forward, move. Go on TV, dagger and sword, and make your case.

Really: It’s pirate time.

We’re all talking about Republicans on the Hill and their manifold failures. So here are some things President Obama didn’t do during the fiscal cliff impasse and some conjecture as to why.

He won but he did not triumph. His victory didn’t resolve or ease anything and heralds nothing but more congressional war to come.

He did not unveil, argue for or put on the table the outlines of a grand bargain. That is, he put no force behind solutions to the actual crisis facing our country, which is the hemorrhagic spending that threatens our future. Progress there—even just a little—would have heartened almost everyone. The president won on tax hikes, but that was an emotional, symbolic and ideological victory, not a substantive one. The higher rates will do almost nothing to ease the debt or deficits.

He didn’t try to exercise dominance over his party. This is a largely forgotten part of past presidential negotiations: You not only have to bring in the idiots on the other side, you have to corral and control your own idiots.

He didn’t deepen any relationships or begin any potential alliances with Republicans, who still, actually, hold the House. The old animosity was aggravated. Some Republicans were mildly hopeful a second term might moderate those presidential attitudes that didn’t quite work the first time, such as holding himself aloof from the position and predicaments of those who oppose him, while betraying an air of disdain for their arguments. He is not quick to assume good faith. Some thought his election victory might liberate him, make his approach more expansive. That didn’t happen.

The president didn’t allow his victory to go unsullied. Right up to the end he taunted the Republicans in Congress: They have a problem saying yes to him, normal folks try to sit down and work it out, not everyone gets everything they want. But he got what he wanted, as surely he knew he would, and Republicans got almost nothing they wanted, which was also in the cards. At Mr. Obama’s campfire, he gets to sing “Kumbaya” solo while others nod to the beat.

Serious men don’t taunt. And they don’t farm the job of negotiating out to the vice president because no one can get anything done with the president. Some Republican said, “He couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag.” But—isn’t this clear by now?—not negotiating is his way of negotiating. And it kind of worked. So expect more.

Mr. Obama’s supporters always give him an out by saying, “But the president can’t work with them, they made it clear from the beginning their agenda was to do him in.” That’s true enough. But it’s true with every American president now—the other side is always trying to do him in, or at least the other side’s big mouths are always braying they’ll take him down. They tried to capsize Bill Clinton, they tried to do in Reagan, they called him an amiable dunce and vowed to defeat his wicked ideology.

We live in a polarized age. We have for a while. One of the odd things about the Obama White House is that they are traumatized by the normal.

A lot of the president’s staffers were new to national politics when they came in, and they seem to have concluded that the partisan bitterness they faced was unique to him, and uniquely sinister. It’s just politics, or the ugly way we do politics now.

After the past week it seems clear Mr Obama doesn’t really want to work well with the other side. He doesn’t want big bipartisan victories that let everyone crow a little and move forward and make progress. He wants his opponents in disarray, fighting without and within. He wants them incapable. He wants them confused.

I worried the other day that amid all the rancor the president would poison his future relations with Congress, which in turn would poison the chances of progress in, say, immigration reform. But I doubt now he has any intention of working with them on big reforms, of battling out a compromise at a conference table, of having long walks and long talks and making offers that are serious, that won’t be changed overnight to something else. The president intends to consistently beat his opponents and leave them looking bad, or, failing that, to lose to them sometimes and then make them look bad. That’s how he does politics.

Why?

Here’s my conjecture: In part it’s because he seems to like the tension. He likes cliffs, which is why it’s always a cliff with him and never a deal. He likes the high-stakes, tottering air of crisis. Maybe it makes him feel his mastery and reminds him how cool he is, unrattled while he rattles others. He can take it. Can they?

He is a uniquely polarizing figure. A moderate U.S. senator said the other day: “One thing not said enough is he is the most divisive president in modern history. He doesn’t just divide the Congress, he divides the country.” The senator thinks Mr. Obama has “two whisperers in his head.” “The political whisperer says ‘Don’t compromise a bit, make Republicans look weak and bad.’ Another whisperer is not political, it’s, ‘Let’s do the right thing, work together and begin to right the ship.’” The president doesn’t listen much to the second whisperer.

Maybe he thinks bipartisan progress raises the Republicans almost to his level, and he doesn’t want to do that. They’re partisan hacks, they’re not big like him. Let them flail.

This, however, is true: The great presidents are always in the end uniters, not dividers. They keep it together and keep it going. And people remember them fondly for that.

In the short term, Mr. Obama has won. The Republicans look bad. John Boehner looks bad, though to many in Washington he’s a sympathetic figure because they know how much he wanted a historic agreement on the great issue of his time. Some say he would have been happy to crown his career with it, and if that meant losing a job, well, a short-term loss is worth a long-term crown. Mr. Obama couldn’t even make a deal with a man like that, even when it would have made the president look good.

We take political pleasure where we can these days, so we’ll end with the fact that 20 women were sworn into the U.S. Senate Thursday, up from the previous record of 17. In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, they spoke of the difference they feel they make. Susan Collins (R., Maine) said that “with all due deference to our male colleagues . . . women’s styles tend to be more collaborative.” Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said women in politics are “less confrontational.” Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) said they are more supportive of each other. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) suggested women have less “ego.” Diane Feinstein (D., Calif.) said they’re effective because “we’re less on testosterone.”

It was refreshing to see so much agreement. It was clear they saw their presence as to some degree an antidote to the roughness and pointless ego of the Senate. To me they seemed an antidote to the current White House.

This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — that will put the federal government, and the idea of government itself, more at the center of American life. Mr. Obama means to be more revolutionary than LBJ, a big spender in a time of affluence, and as revolutionary as FDR, who changed fundamental assumptions about the citizen’s relationship to the state.

Americans will, day by day, in the coming year and over the next four, decide what they think of the new dispensation, whether it is good or bad, and if bad what can be done about it.

Republicans in DC are feeling bleak. Should they? Nah. Demographic and culture changes lean against them but despair is for sissies, and in any case the pendulum swings, even if its arc is sometimes wider or higher than expected. What’s going on in the states, with the economic rise of the Reds, and the relative sinking of the Blues, is instructive, and Americans will take note. Long term pessimists should maintain a daily optimism, a happiness and vigor in the day to day. This is a time for creativity and guts. Which means: it’s an exciting time to be alive.

This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions.  The big story of 2013?  Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead.  A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — that will put the federal government, and the idea of government itself, more at the center of American life.  Mr. Obama means to be more revolutionary than LBJ, a big spender in a time of affluence, and as revolutionary as FDR, who changed fundamental assumptions about the citizen’s relationship to the state.

Americans will, day by day, in the coming year and over the next four, decide what they think of the new dispensation, whether it is good or bad, and if bad what can be done about it.

Republicans in DC are feeling bleak.  Should they?  Nah.  Demographic and culture changes lean against them but despair is for sissies, and in any case the pendulum swings, even if its arc is sometimes wider or higher than expected.  What’s going on in the states, with the economic rise of the Reds, and the relative sinking of the Blues, is instructive, and Americans will take note.  Long term pessimists should maintain a daily optimism, a happiness and vigor in the day to day.  This is a time for creativity and guts.  Which means: it’s an exciting time to be alive.

This was a great election year, and every political writer in the country was one way or another in the fray. “South Carolina just may go Santorum,” they’d say, or “From the turnout at the rallies it looks like Gingrich has a good chance.” Columnists, bloggers—they’re all trying to understand what’s happening pretty much in real time. In this space we’ve tended less toward specific predictions than to trying to sense what might be unfolding and what it means. But you can make mistakes there, too. So, a quick look at some of the things we got right and wrong in 2012. Bonus lesson at the end.

*   *   *

Early on it was clear that the best candidates on the GOP side gave shape to the entire election . . . by not showing up. We hoped for Mitch Daniels. He, John Thune, Haley Barbour and Jeb Bush didn’t get in, leaving the way for Mitt Romney, who we assumed would be the nominee. We got South Carolina wrong after spending time there asking Republicans what they were seeing and who they were for. Romney, Romney, we heard. Newt Gingrich crushed him. But we didn’t see a big future for the “angry little attack muffin.”

A few months into an increasingly bruising primary season, we worried about Republican prospects. “We all know politics ain’t beanbag, but it’s not supposed to be a clown-car Indy 500 with cars hitting the wall and guys in wigs littering the track.” We saw Mr. Obama’s campaign veering between listlessness and brutality. On the stump he was the former. His ads tearing down Mr. Romney were the latter.

Mr. Romney meanwhile couldn’t seem to gain his footing. In July we noted the strange nature of the race. We were in the midst of “a crisis election” and yet such elections tend to “bring drama—a broad sense of excitement and passion” among the people. That wasn’t discernible on either side. The reason: Voters know America right now needs to be led by “a kind of political genius” and “they know neither of the candidates is a political genius.” Mr. Romney couldn’t articulate a way forward, and nobody knew what his presidency would look like. Mr. Obama seemed “to view politics as his weary duty, something he had to do on his way to greatness.” Both men seemed “largely impenetrable.”

That still seems true.

That same month we made the most wrongheaded criticism of the year. The thing I denigrated not only turned out to be important—it was probably the most important single element in the entire 2012 campaign.

In writing about what struck as the president’s essential aloofness, I said there were echoes of it even in his organization. I referred to a recent hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. “It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’ “

This struck me as “high tech and bloodless.” I didn’t quite say it, but it all struck me as inhuman, unlike any politics I’d ever seen.

It was unlike any politics I’d ever seen. And it won the 2012 campaign. Those “Martians” were reinventing how national campaigns are done. They didn’t just write a new political chapter with their Internet outreach, vote-tracking data-mining and voter engagement, especially in the battleground states. They wrote a whole new book. And it was a masterpiece.

Hats off. In some presidential elections, something big changes, and if you’re watching close you can learn a lesson. This was mine: The national game itself has changed. And it’s probably going to be a while before national Republicans can duplicate or better what the Democrats have done.

*   *   *

We saw the Republican convention as solid, but the nominee’s speech as a missed opportunity. And there was a strange flatness on the floor. People weren’t standing and cheering. The speakers were good but often spoke too much about themselves. The Democrats in comparison seemed happy, and though there were some sinister undertones beneath, overall the Democrats successfully portrayed a sense of community.

I didn’t mention something that occurred to me a few weeks later: The party conventions revealed something essential about each party’s nature. The Republicans are all for individualism and entrepreneurship, for freedom, but some of their speakers were too entrepreneurial—they were in business for themselves. They told their own stories, lauded their own history—a whole lot of I, I, I. They didn’t speak enough about Mr. Romney or the party, which seems as an institution to garner little loyalty even from its stars. The Democrats, on the other hand, were more communal. There was a lot of “us” and “we”—we are together, we are part of something, we are united, we are Democrats.

The “we-ness” of the Democrats would seem more attractive to a lot of voters in modern, broken-up America. I wish I’d noted that here.

*   *   *

We were right, and early, about the significance of the first presidential debate. We signaled in advance that it might be a bad night for Mr. Obama because four years in, presidents are no longer used to being challenged. They don’t like it when they are, and they often respond poorly.

In September we launched a spirited critique of the Romney campaign, saying it was unimaginative, unserious and incompetently managed. We saw the race as “slipping out of Romney’s hands” and called for party elders to make “an intervention.” We summed up the campaign with two words: “rolling calamity.”

In retrospect this holds up nicely, though maybe we were too soft.

Finally, our wrong call on the election’s outcome. Normally if you want to make a political prediction you make it about something months or years away, so if you’re wrong no one will remember, and if you’re right you can modestly remind them. But such circumspection is for the timid.

On Nov. 5 we said we thought Mr. Romney was sneaking up on Mr. Obama, that we had a feeling he would win. We were all focusing on data, but maybe a surprising outcome was quietly unfurling around us: the building rallies, a steadied campaign, an improved candidate, the air of momentum . . .

It turns out, and I’m sure you’ve noticed this, that the numbers, the data—at least the data Democrats had—was right. What was it somebody said? “I’ll be smiling soon as the swelling goes down.”

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Lesson? For writers it’s always the same. Do your best, call it as you see it, keep the past in mind but keep your eyes open for the new things of the future. And say what you’re saying with as much verve as you can. Life shouldn’t be tepid and dull. It’s interesting—try to reflect the aliveness in your work. If you’re right about something, good. If you’re wrong, try to see what you misjudged and figure out why. And, always, “Wait ‘til next year.”

What I keep thinking when the subject turns to Newtown is that childhood is often remembered as a time of joy and innocence, but it’s a time of terrible fears and great frights, too. The young are darkly imaginative.

I knew a 5-year-old girl who was so afraid of ET that when she saw a picture of him she’d scream. A friend, a sturdy American journalist, remembered being a child of 6 or 7. “I had monsters in the closet and under my bed. They walked across phone wires into my bedroom window, they slithered up the sides on my mother’s car. Sometimes they had tall pointy heads.”

At 7 or so I developed a fear so deep it kept me from sleeping. One night when the moon was bright and the wind was moving the trees, I looked from my bed into the shadowed closet . . . and suddenly the clothes and the things on the shelf above had transformed themselves into Abraham Lincoln, in top hat and shawl, staring at me and waiting to be shot. That fear came every night for years. At some point a neighbor saw my nervousness or overheard my obsession, asked what was wrong, came to my house, opened my closet and announced triumphantly “See? Lincoln isn’t there!” I knew she meant well, but how dumb can you get? Lincoln only came at night.

A friend, a seasoned lawyer, also was afraid of monsters in the closet, and of “Blackbeard’s ghost materializing in my room at night, from some pirate movie I saw.”

His son, about the same age now as the lawyer when he was hiding from Blackbeard, also has childhood fears. He told his father he’s glad he’s at his grade school because “the middle school is only two stories and it isn’t safe.” He can’t wait to get to the high school “because it’s next to the police station.”

After Newtown, I’m not sure we know what we’re asking of children when we tell them to go to school after this week of terrible images and stories, after hearing “another school shooting” on the news. They all know what happened, or have the general outlines. And children are scared enough.

“What’s so terrible for the little kids who hear about Newtown is that the ‘dream’ monster is now real,” said a friend.

Tragedies are followed by trends, and we know where the conversation is going—gun control, laws for the incarceration of the mentally ill, help for parents with unstable children. But I have a feeling there will be another trend beginning, that it will be slow but long-term: more home schooling. Because more parents aren’t going to want to send their kids to school now, and more kids will not want to go. It is a terrible thing to lose the illusion of safety.

*   *   *

Something else about this story. I know so many people who in past tragedies were glued to the TV. They wanted to hear the facts of Columbine, Aurora, Tucson. They wanted to hear what happened so they could understand and comprehend. After Newtown, I’d mention some aspect of the story and they didn’t know, because they weren’t watching. And they’re not going to watch anymore. “Too depressing” they say, softly.

Even journalists who by nature and training want to know the latest fact aren’t, unless they’re working the story, closely following it. Because it’s too painful now, because they’re not sure anything can be done to turn it around and make better the era we’re in. This new fatalism is . . . well, new. And I understand it, but there’s something so defeated in turning away, in not listening to or hearing the stories of the parents and the responders and the teachers.

*   *   *

Many religious people and leaders have come forward to try to speak of the meaning of the event, and the answers to it, but the most powerful words came from the psychologist and former priest Eugene Kennedy, professor emeritus at Loyola University of Chicago. The 85-year-old was interviewed, in a podcast at Investors.com, by the political columnist Andrew Malcolm and blogger Melissa Clouthier.

Religion, said Mr. Kennedy, “isn’t supposed to explain such things” as Newtown. “That’s not the task of religion, never has been.” Religion has to do with the central mystery of existence—”the tremendous and gripping mystery” of being alive. “Joseph Campbell once said people don’t need an explanation of their lives as much as they need an experience of being alive.”

Newtown, like 9/11, reminds us of “the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are.” The world is imperfect, broken, “with cracks running through it.” A central fact of our lives, said Mr. Kennedy, is that “We are all vulnerable. Anything can happen to anybody at any time.” We have to understand and recognize our vulnerability “as humans on the earth.” We see and experience it every day, “from small disappointments . . . to blows of the heart.” And Newtown is a blow of the heart.

But, again like 9/11, Newtown contained within it “the ongoing fact of revelation.” Both 9/11 and Newtown were marked by a revealing of “the goodness of normal people, which is seldom celebrated” but is central to the balance of the world. When the teachers tried to shield the children—as when on 9/11 people who knew they were about to die called someone to say they loved them—that was “a revelation of their goodness.” It is important in part because “by the light of the goodness of others—by that light we can see ourselves.”

We attempt to respond to tragedies politically. We try to take actions that will make our world safer, and this is understandable. But there is no security from existence itself. The only answer is to “plunge into” life. “We have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails, or we won’t be alive at all.”

He added: “It is better to suffer pain than to live in a world in which you don’t allow yourself to be close enough to anybody to have the experience that’s bound to give you suffering.” And “love guarantees suffering.”

“We’re all on a hero’s journey,” said Mr. Kennedy, from where we began to where we will end. The hero faces challenges along the way. We are like King Arthur’s knights, entering the forest each day without a cut path, and “finding our way through is what we are called to do.” Here, Mr. Kennedy suggested, faith offers not an explanation but the only reliable guide. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’ That is not a metaphor.”