Peggy Noonan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the United States in systemic decline?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s good news.

A beautiful Passover, a stirring Easter to all.

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’?

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.”

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.