Peggy Noonan

What are some things president Obama might say if he were to talk to the entertainment industry about what it has done and is doing to American culture?

He might take some inspiration from what Hillary Clinton said at an industry gathering in Los Angeles, in the autumn of 1999.  It was not long after the school shooting at Columbine, and the 15 dead.  Rocked by that tragedy, the then first lady and soon to be senate candidate called together her friends and supporters in Hollywood and, as one of them later said, gave them something between a little psychotherapy and the riot act.

The gathering was private, but a friend with a tape recorder was there.  Meeting with Mrs Clinton were all the heads of the big TV and movie studios, all the titans and moguls.  Harvey Weinstein was there, Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks, David Geffen, Rupert Murdoch of Fox, Sumner Redstone.  Sherry Lansing of Paramount was there, and Amy Pascal of Columbia.  Ron Meyer of Universal, Jeff Bewkes of HBO, Howard Stringer of Sony and Edgar Brongman of Universal also attended.  They met in Michael Eisner’s beautiful hillside home.

And this is what Hillary said:

“I want to be candid with you, for candor is a compliment, it speaks of trust and assumes good faith.  And I’ll never speak of this meeting and what is said, and I hope you never do, either.  I want all of us to keep it private.

“We have a problem with our culture, as we all know – particularly those of us who are parents, and who have one night walked into the TV room and seen our kids glued to the tube watching something that is violent or darkly sexual or disturbed.  Or if you’ve ever read the lyrics to the songs they’re listening to, you know what’s up.  And you know we’ve all talked about this before, but I think it bears another look…

“Let me tell you my thoughts.

“First of all, I know what you know, and what any thoughtful person knows:  Hollywood is always fingered as the culture’s central culprit, but Hollywood is not The Culprit. It is A Culprit.  If all of Hollywood started making shows with no violence and no obscene content and no bad messages tomorrow, the country would still be in a mess.  There’s plenty of blame to go around.

“But you know as I do that Hollywood is part of the problem.  And a significant part.  You make our movies and TV, and we are a nation that loves its movies and TV, that almost invents itself each day through what it sees and absorbs and internalizes from our media.  You make the images that live in our minds, that prompt us…

“People who are cynical and uninformed say the only thing that matters in Hollywood is money, but that’s not true.  I’ve been in your homes, I’ve listened to you, and I know money is not the biggest thing on your minds.  What draws the greatest part of your daily interest is the normal mix of human concerns and anxieties – family and kids and workplace problems.  And after that what claims your interest is not money, but status.

“Status trumps money in Hollywood.  Status – the position of respect you hold in the community, your prestige.  You want a high place.  This is understandable.

“Status trumps money in a lot of places, of course.  It does in politics.  I’ve never been rich, but Bill and I have always been at the top of wherever we lived, from Yale to Little Rock to Washington.  Everyone was proud to know us, and wanted to stand next to us at the party, because at Yale everyone knew we were going places and in Little Rock and Washington we had arrived.

“If everything in Hollywood came down to money then TV would be dominated by shows like ‘Seventh Heaven’ and ‘Touched by an Angel’, because those shows are popular and make huge profits.  So if money were all, they’d dominate and set the tone, which they don’t.

“Where do you get status in Hollywood?  There are a lot of ingredients that go to the making of it – fame is part of it, money is part.  But I think the primary ingredient is having a reputation for fearlessness in creating your art – and getting critical acclaim for that fearlessness.  You want to show in your work that you’re daring and independent, that you bow to no norms, that you push the envelope and have no fear of those right wing Christian fundamentalist know-nothings who condemn art…”

She said that shows that celebrate innocence have no cachet, that no one wants to be introduced at a Hollywood party with, “Meet the fearless maverick who produces Hallmark Hall of Fame.”

But there is, she said, another thing that might jeopardize one’s status in Hollywood:  “Taking the wrong side in the ongoing struggle over our culture.  You would lose status if you were perceived by your peers to be going soft on your First Amendment rights to free speech.  You’d lose status if you listened to those who support what you call censorship….”

She continued, “And let’s face it, we always call it censorship.  But you know and I know that it is very convenient for you to interpret it that way.  If every attempt to critique is in fact an attempt to censor, if every attempt to persuade is an attempt to coerce, well, then, you’ll always have complete license.  You can do anything, produce the most vicious and sexualized and nihilistic material, even demonic material, and send it out into the country.  Where, as we all know – let’s just stipulate this – it does harm.”

At this your blogger must tell you this never happened. The meeting never took place. The speech was never given. Read on and I’ll explain more at the end.

“Let’s admit something else,” Hillary said. “It is interesting to me that you produce what you produce, and then take the greatest care to make sure that your children are protected from it.  You buy your way out of the problem you help create.  You send your children to the best, most traditional private schools, where they are insulated from the effects of your work.  You have nannies who play with them on your rolling lawns, and make sure they’re not watching too much TV, and if even with this they develop problems down the road, you have access to the best therapists and advisors.  So your kids are protected from what you do.

“And this is the great unspoken fact of America now, isn’t it?  The powerful – the politicians and producers and pundits, the people who write and edit Time and Newsweek, who produce the movies and talk about them on TV, the executive producers and writers and political operatives – they all support the freedom to make any entertainment we like, they all support the cutting edge.  But they make sure their own kids don’t get cut and bleed from it.

“But what about the children of the powerless?  What about the children of the kind of people we don’t have to be with anymore, the unsuccessful?  They aren’t protected.  Half the kids in our country are growing up in a sicker place, with parents too young or damaged or unsophisticated to protect them.  They don’t have the options of affluence.  They’re coming home from dead schools to dead neighborhoods, putting on the TV, eating junk food while they watch people get killed.”

I’ve read it twice and I think it is.  It’s actually kind of a masterpiece.  It’s George Will at Washington University in St. Louis, on December 4, 2012.   The language, vocabulary, diction, the assumption that the audience knows things and is capable of following a line of argument, even when that argument takes turns or doubles back – all these things are old school, and carry old school’s natural authority.  But Will’s subject matter and message couldn’t be more timely, or more relevant to the fix we’re in.  So it’s a very modern/not modern piece of work.  The Tocqueville quote at the end is like a genius’s description of:  today.

Here’s the text.

Viewed a certain way, the 2012 election can be seen as a gift to Republicans wrapped in ugly paper. The wrapping looked like a hostage note with a message scrawled in crayon: “We hate you.” But inside was a gift, and the gift was time. The party was given the opportunity, when it is still strong, to hold the kind of fresh, open-the-windows debate it would have been forced to have in 2016 anyway, and in less favorable conditions.

If Mitt Romney had won this year, he would have had a very tough presidency, with the left revived and the coffers empty and the president having to move deftly, brilliantly, to summon and keep support. And while there were many things in Mr. Romney’s toolbox, deft political brilliance wasn’t one of them. Meanwhile, demographic and cultural changes would have proceeded apace. So 2016 and after would have been brutal for the party.

But it is well-positioned now for an opening of the windows because everyone, from the establishment to the base, just took a serious shock to the system. Organisms that survive a shock are often able to see their surroundings more acutely. The establishment, hardy self-seeking survivors that they are, already knew the party was in trouble. Now, importantly, the base does. Now local precinct leaders know. The tea party knows, Christian conservatives know. They’re all reading the same data, the same polls.

Right now everyone’s open to the idea of change. The party can either go the way of the Whigs or they can straighten up and fly right, get serious, make their philosophy feel new again, and pick candidates who can win.

But party leaders should start making their new arguments now. There’s no reason to wait, no benefit in it. Everything moves faster now. There’s no particular need to let positions evolve, because they’ve already been quietly evolving for years, though people didn’t always feel free to say so. There are many disagreements in the GOP, but they’ve not always been aired. For the past 10 years the party has operated under an ethic of Questioning the Team Is Disloyal, Dissent Is Disloyal, as Is Criticism.

This has been a recipe not for peace but for disaster. Which is what we saw on Nov. 6.

I say these obvious things—and yes, they are all obvious—because in a small thread of party thinkers I belong to someone recently used the phrase “if the Republicans can change.” I was startled. I said of course they’ll change, all things that are alive want not to die, if Republicans don’t change they’ll die, so they’ll change. This was greeted with a certain kindhearted skepticism, which struck me because they’re all very smart and have worked in the trenches. Someone said, “I wish I shared your optimism.” I didn’t know I was being optimistic, I thought I was just being realistic.

In connection to that, a look at two big speeches, and then some elaboration on a previous point.

The speeches were by Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, at the Jack Kemp Awards dinner last week. Much attention was paid because both are assumed to be running for president, which each joked about, somewhat creepily. We’ve got dire problems and you’re thinking New Hampshire. Good to know.

Rep. Ryan’s speech was OK but insufficient. He didn’t say anything terrible but he didn’t stake out new ground or take chances. Actually, the part where he said Mitt Romney made “a big election about big ideas and offering serious solutions to serious problems” was slightly terrible because it isn’t in a general way true, and it forestalls analysis that might actually be helpful in the long term. Mr. Ryan got points for loyalty but no one doubts he’s loyal, and it undercut his central message, which is that the Republican Party needs “new thinking,” “fresh ideas and serious leadership,” and must find “new ways to apply our timeless principles to the challenges of today.”

Well, yes, that’s true. But what thinking do you suggest? In what area? Which fresh ideas? Do you have one?

The thrust of Mr. Ryan’s remarks seemed to suggest the party has to show its economic stands are aligned with the views of the working and middle classes. Fine. But how, exactly? What changes should be made, not just to message but content?

If conservatives are going to appeal to the nonrich, perhaps we want to be talking about—I don’t know, let’s float an idea—breaking up the banks? Too big to fail is too big to live, didn’t we learn that in 2008? Why aren’t we debating this? How about doing away with the carried interest deduction? Would billionaire hedge-fund contributors not like that? Isn’t that just kind of . . . too bad?

Those are two ideas that, while politically difficult, would have broad populist appeal and are conservative in essence.

This is not the time to be describing the problem—we need “new thinking”—it’s the time to start coming up with the new thinking.

Sen. Rubio had a better speech in that it was deeper, more broadly philosophical and less prescriptive. He told of how he’d spoken, at the August convention, of his father, a bartender in banquet halls. Recently he spoke in a “fancy” hotel in New York—that was rather Sarah Palin, the “fancy”—and the ballroom workers gave him a badge that said “Rubio, Banquet Bartender.” He should wear that badge on his suit every day. It’s better symbolism than Mr. Romney’s car elevator.

But Mr. Rubio also indulged a rhetorical tic that we hear a lot and that is deeply obnoxious. He said the words “middle class” 12 times on the first page alone. Repeating that phrase mantra-like will not make people think you’re concerned about the middle class, it will only make them think you’re concerned about winning the middle class. It is important to remember in politics that people aren’t stupid.

I find both Mr. Ryan’s and Mr. Rubio’s media expertise mildly harrowing—look at the prompter here, shake your head here, lower your voice there, raise it here, pick up your pace in this section. An entire generation of politicians in both parties has been too trained in media, and to their detriment. They are very smooth but it doesn’t make them seem more convincing, it makes them seem phonier. My old boss had actually been an actor, but he didn’t seem like a phony. He talked like a normal person at a podium, with a nice voice, and occasionally stumbling. It’s not bad to be human when you’re trying to appeal to humans.

These speeches were lauded, but they didn’t scour, Abe Lincoln’s term for a speech that says what needs saying. We know we need “new thinking.” Let’s hear it.

A final note, connected to an earlier point.

Republicans are now in the habit of editing their views, and they’ve been in it for 10 years. The Bush White House suppressed dissent; talk-radio stars functioned as enforcers; the angrier parts of the base, on the Internet, attempted to silence critical thinkers. Orthodoxy was everything, or orthodoxy as some defined it.

This isn’t loyalty, it’s lockstep. It has harmed the party’s creativity, its ability to think, when now more than ever it has to. Enough.

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson has put fresh emphasis on a major and underlying aspect of our fiscal disputes: It’s the yoots versus the coots. The young may not be aware of it, but they’ll long bear the tax burden of the entitlement arrangements the old have instituted. Mr. Simpson’s video is both merry—he dances Gangnam style to make his point—and shrewd. He casts the spending story as one involving greedy geezer organizations and sympathizes with the position of the young while teasing them for their preoccupations: “Stop Instagramming your breakfast and tweeting your First World problems . . . and start using those precious social media skills to go out and sign people up on this baby.”

On “Today” he was earnest. “Let me tell you, the young people aren’t organized,” he said. “The senior citizens are so well organized—they got the AARP . . . the Gray Panthers, the silver-head legislators, the pink panthers. They are organized and they don’t give a whip. The younger generation better learn to take part or get taken apart.”

That is the clearest message so far in the fiscal cliff debate, to the extent it’s a debate. The Republican negotiators, to the extent they are allowed to negotiate, are at a disadvantage in terms of explaining what’s at issue. There are a dozen of them, they’re lawmakers, they speak the language of legislation, and when they make statements at press gaggles they’re not talking to the American people but, inevitably, to the president, his staff and the larger political class. So the higher meaning of things, on the Republican side, seems to have gotten a little lost. In fact at the moment they look like a party that is both obsessed with a thing—tax rates—and unable to explain why it’s important.

The president operates under a different dynamic. There’s just one of him, he’s the chief executive, and he was just re-elected. He’s talking not to the Republicans—that’s what Treasury secretaries are for—but to the American people.

He could talk about the higher, deeper meaning of his stands, but he chooses not to. He speaks of immediate intentions—he doesn’t have to meet with the Republicans, “sitting in a room” isn’t the issue—and repeats platitudes about the outcome he desires: “a balanced, responsible approach,” not something “out of balance.”

It’s all so bland and rounded. But his actions are sharper, starker. He’s meeting with businesspeople, out making speeches, giving interviews. And there was his offer last week to Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, made through Treasury Secretary Tim Geither. That offer, reduced to its essentials, appears to have been: Tax increases including rate hikes, more spending, permanent lifting of the debt ceiling—and we may talk entitlement reform down the road.

Mr. McConnell said he laughed. Mr. Boehner said he was “flabbergasted.” Some, including in this space, were startled and saddened. We’re in a debt and deficit crisis, the Republicans just got beat and need an agreement, and you offer a deal they couldn’t possibly back? With the clock ticking toward a sequester deadline that could upset major portions of the economy? During a weak recovery with high unemployment?

But a week’s reflection gives rise to other thoughts.

First, that was a real Michael Corleone move. And that’s how the White House probably saw it. We refer of course to Michael in Las Vegas, when he was trying to get the casino license. He’s insulted by the U.S. senator, Pat Geary, who offers onerous terms for support. “I’ll give you my answer now, Senator. This is what I offer: Nothing.” The senator laughed, and left.

Here we end all further comparisons to the fiscal cliff and various subplot outcomes in “The Godfather Part II.” But Mr. Obama’s opening bid was a tough, brazen, angry move.

*   *   *

That’s just a description of the move. What was behind it?

Our second thought is it was so obvious it was hard to see. Here we thank E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post’s reliable chronicler of and explicator of Democratic Party thinking. After the Geithner meeting, Mr. Dionne wrote a column expressing surprise at other people’s surprise. “An entirely new political narrative is taking shape before our eyes,” he said, and people are missing it. The president “finally has room to move.” His offer to the Republicans “was a compendium of what he’d actually prefer.” The deficit is not the highest national priority, economic growth is. Mr. Obama will favor spending to pump up that economy, not cuts that will take the air out of it.

Suddenly it was obvious: The president doesn’t want to cut spending, he wants to increase it. He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, as he defines them. He does not want the government to be smaller but bigger, or, as he’d probably put it, as big as it has to be.

His actions aren’t only about politics—”crush the foe.” He’s happy to crush the foe, and would see the long-term political benefit in it, but it’s not his primary motive. And its not about economics per se—he knows raising taxes on the rich will not solve our fiscal problems. He’s seen, as he likes to say, the math.

What is motivating him primarily is ideology. And an ideological opening. He doesn’t like the malefactors of great wealth. He wants to “spread the wealth around,” as he told “Joe the Plumber” in Ohio in 2008. His ideological and political affinities are with those he defines as the needy, and his answer to them is to see they are the focus of greater public spending. Period.

His language is bland because his stand is not. He doesn’t want to startle people with clarity. When he was clear with Joe the Plumber, it got him in trouble because a lot of voters didn’t really want what they called redistributionism, which sounds to them like endless high taxing, high spendingand no way out.

Mr. Dionne, in turn, sent me back to “The Promise,” Jonathan Alter’s valuable history of the Obama administration’s first year. Mr. Alter wrote of the 2009 stimulus bill as a big “grab bag that would never get proper credit for being one of the most important pieces of legislation in a generation.” It contained the bank bailout, the extension of unemployment benefits, an expansion of food stamps, and money for states and cities to forestall public employee layoffs. But it contained other elements—infrastructure and education spending, scientific and medical research, clean energy proposals, an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Mr. Alter provides a startling anecdote: “A congressman approached the first lady at a White House reception after the bill’s passage and told her the stimulus was the best antipoverty bill in a generation. Her reaction was, ‘Shhhh!’ The White House didn’t want the public thinking that Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under the guise of merely stimulating the economy, even though that’s exactly what had happened.”

The oddest thing about the leftward part of the president’s base is that they’re always angry with him, always disappointed. A conservative sees it differently: Slowly but surely he has been trying to give them much of what they want. And it wouldn’t be because he disagrees with them.

Funny they don’t notice. Maybe it’s because he’s so careful not to say it.

The president’s inviting Mitt Romney for lunch is a small thing but a brilliant move. It makes Mr. Obama look big, gracious. It implies the weakened, battered former GOP nominee is the leader of the Republican Party—and if the other party has to have a leader, the weakened, battered one is the one you want.

Mr. Romney is not the leader of the party; he left no footprints in the sand. There is no such thing as Romneyism, no movement of which he’s the standard-bearer. Nor is he a Washington figure with followers. Party leaders already view him as a kind of accident, the best of a bad 2012 lot, a hiccup. The bottom-line attitude of Republican political pros: Look, this is a man who’s lived a good life and would have been a heck of a lot better than Obama, and I backed him. But to be a successful Republican president now requires a kind of political genius, and he didn’t have it and wasn’t going to develop it. His flaws as a candidate would have been his flaws as president. We dodged a bullet.

Republicans may be the stupid party, but they’re not the sentimental one. Democrats often like their losers. Republicans like winners, and they find reasons to be moved by them after they’ve won.

To the extent the GOP has an elected face, it is that of Speaker John Boehner. And he is precisely the man with whom Mr. Obama should be having friendly lunches. In fact, the meal with Mitt just may be a clever attempt to obscure the fact that the president isn’t really meeting with those with whom he’s supposed to be thrashing out the fiscal cliff.

At a news conference Thursday, Mr. Boehner looked frustrated. In fact, he looked exactly the way he looked at the end of the debt-ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011—like someone who wanted a deal, was willing to gamble to get it, and failed. There has been “no substantive progress” toward an agreement, he said. In a meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and in a Wednesday night phone call with the president, he saw no willingness to reform or cut entitlement spending. What about an increase in tax rates? “Revenues are on the table.”

In fact the Democratic position on entitlements seems to have hardened.

In a way Mr. Boehner’s press conference was the usual, but in a way it was sad, because it harkened back to the protracted, harum-scarum and unsatisfying fiscal negotiations of the recent past.

The election is over, a new era begins—and it looks just like the old one. A crisis is declared. Confusion, frustration, and a more embittered process follow. This is . . . the Obama Way. Nothing has changed, even after a yearlong campaign that must, at times, have looked to him like a near-death experience. He still doesn’t want to forestall jittery, gloom-laden headlines and make an early deal with the other guy. He wants to beat the other guy.

You watch and wonder: Why does it always have to be cliffs with this president? Why is it always a high-stakes battle? Why doesn’t he shrewdly re-enact Ronald Reagan, meeting, arguing and negotiating in good faith with Speaker Tip O’Neill, who respected very little of what the president stood for and yet, at the end of the day and with the country in mind, could shake hands and get it done? Why is there never a sense with Mr. Obama that he understands the other guys’ real position?

It’s not as if Mr. Boehner and the Republicans wouldn’t deal. They’ve been weakened and they know it. A year ago they hoped winning the Senate and the presidency would break the stasis. They won neither. Mr. Obama not only was re-elected, it wasn’t that close, it was a clean win. If the president was clear about anything throughout the campaign, it was that he wanted to raise taxes on those he calls the rich. So you might say that a majority of the American people just endorsed that move.

No one would know this better than Mr. Boehner, who has risen to where he is in part because he’s good at seeing the lay of the land and admitting what’s there.

The president would only benefit from showing he has the command and capability to meet, argue, press and come to agreement. It would be heartening to the country to see this, and would impress the world. And the Republicans would like to get it done.

In narrow, purely political terms, they need two things quickly. One is that it now looks to everyone—even to them!—like the entire domestic agenda of the Republican Party is tax-cutting, and any party’s agenda has to be bigger than that. The other is that when they try to protect people from higher tax rates they always look like Diamond Jim Brady enjoying the company of the wealthy and not noticing anybody else. Republicans need time to work through, within their party, their own larger economic stands.

So they’re weakened, they want this particular crisis to end, and they badly need to win entitlement reforms that would, in the end, buttress the president’s historical standing—and the president isn’t working with them every day and making a deal?

*   *   *

Here’s just one thing they should be discussing. Mr. Obama wants to raise tax rates on those earning $250,000 or more, as we know, on the assumption that they are “the rich.” But if you are a man with a wife and two kids making that salary and living in Westfield, N.J., in no way do you experience yourself to be rich, because you’re not. You pay federal payroll and income taxes, state income and sales taxes and local property taxes, and after the mortgage, food and commuting costs you don’t have much to spare.

Tighten the squeeze on that couple, and they’ll change how they live. They’ll stop sending the struggling son to a neighborhood tutor, they’ll stop going out to dinner once a week, they’ll cut off the baby sitter, fire the guy who once a month does yard work, and hold back on new clothes. Also the guy will peruse employment ads in Florida and Texas, potentially removing from blue-state New Jersey his heartening, taxpaying presence.

It really is worth a discussion, isn’t it? A closer look at the numbers? Shared thoughts on how Americans really live?

*   *   *

In an interview last year, shortly after the debt-ceiling debate, Mr. Boehner spoke of how much he’d wanted a deal. He wanted entitlement reforms, cuts in spending, was happy to increase revenues through tax reform. He thought our fiscal realities the great issue of his speakership, said he meant it when he told staffers if it resulted in the end of his speakership then so be it. He’d have walked out of Congress knowing “I did the right thing.”

That’s who Obama should be negotiating with—in good faith, and with his eye not on ideology but on the country.

Instead, it’s going to be a long four weeks. Scratch that, it’s going to be a long four years.