Peggy Noonan

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.”

*   *   *

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.”

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.