Peggy Noonan

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.

“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” That was the acute observation of Dr. Johnson, to Boswell. It does say something about us as a people that our Pilgrims invented, Washington formalized, and Lincoln normalized the putting aside of one day each year simply to be thankful for what we’ve been given.

From a few dozen email correspondents this year came a strong flavor of personal gratitude. When I asked what they were most thankful for, they didn’t have to think: family, friends, good health. But unprompted there was an outpouring of tender feeling—pride and gratitude—for America. It came from left, right and center, from those disappointed in the recent election and those cheered by it.

First, the personal. People went straight to the essentials. “I am thankful for my life being quiet but not boring,” said a lawyer. “My wife and son are good. This is huge. Politics keeps me caffeinated, without the coffee. I am grateful for it all.” From a writer: “The love of friends. Full stop.” From a philanthropic figure: “We have our health, when so many we know do not. We are very grateful for that.” From a television executive: “I’m most grateful for the good health and well being of my friends and family, and also for the good luck of being alive and happy.” A nurse in New Jersey gave thanks for the friends and family who put her up for 12 days when she lost power in Hurricane Sandy: “I am grateful for the roof over my head. And to the National Guard for free gas.” A woman on public assistance in Staten Island said she’s grateful for electricity, and to the Marines who came to help: “They were awesome.” She added she is thankful for whoever invented text messaging.

A New York journalist said: “I’m thankful for my friends with kids. Not because the kids are cute. (Most of them are.) Having kids has made my friends more patient, less ‘caught up’ and happier. Their behavior will hopefully influence mine. If not, then I guess I’ll have to get some kids of my own.”

The editor of a news site who lives near a forest told me he is grateful for “love, nature, innocence.” I pressed him: We’re all thankful God created love, without it we’d be tree stumps, but what do you love right now that you’re grateful for? He shot back a photo. “Buddy the cat. He literally came out of nowhere one night, and has never left since. He sleeps in the window most of the time, and looks in as if to say: ‘I’m home.’ He always lets the others in the pack eat first. ‘Slow down,’ I say to myself. The world on my screen may be spinning and sizzling, but Buddy’s ends up being the preferred reality.”

*   *   *

On almost all minds, the election. People in conversation say, “I’m glad it’s over,” but no one said that in the Thanksgiving emails. They said they were glad it yielded a clear outcome, that we’re not still counting votes. A lawyer who’d been asked to pack his bags to be on a plane the next morning if necessary is at home now with his family, where he hoped to be.

A friend noted his relief that the Electoral College vote and the popular vote were aligned. “I’m happy we don’t have to argue about that one!”

But then people spoke of something bigger. We just experienced a national election, and once again that miracle occurred, that historic marvel: Awesome power and authority were fought over, contested; people put time, labor and money on the line. And then the people voted, peacefully, with no fuss, and everyone absorbed the decision and accepted it. From a Republican businessman: “I am thankful for living in the greatest country on earth, where 59 million people voted against someone and no tanks rolled, no bombs exploded in the town square, no innocents were slaughtered in the name of some deity or orthodoxy. . . . We went about our business, with an eye towards the future.”

From a right-leaning policy intellectual: “I am thankful for living in this free country. Sappy but sincere.”

From a left-leaning journalist: “That we live in a country where there is a lack of censorship, that we are . . . a place with an ongoing geyser of genius, creativity and innovation.” She mentioned the iPhone, the TV show “Homeland” and the movie “Lincoln”—all “made in the USA.” Our democratic traditions are vibrant. “Some people waited on line for 10 hours to vote—that is democracy at full tilt.”

From a disappointed Republican operative: “Throughout America’s history, elections happen on time—regardless of war—and the occupant of 1600 Penn leaves when his legal term is up. That’s pretty cool.” And free speech: “The right and left both have censorious streaks, but the ability of the public to flip the bird to authority is a strength. The ability of the press to hold government accountable (as uneven as it may be) is a strength.” And he is thankful for America’s people. “We can be rude and surly and not even like each other. And yet, we can get stuff done as individuals, as communities and as a nation. We can rise to the occasion.”

*   *   *

And I am thankful for all of the above, and this:

• For the young people I saw running through the streets of Georgetown, down M Street and Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, on election night. They were boisterous, elated. Political joy is a good thing to see in the young. Things aren’t all flat, stale and cynical, something’s always being born.

• For my Thanksgiving with friends—same time, same place for many years now, same kids, some married and having children of their own. There will be the same reading of a play on the meaning of Thanksgiving, written for a little girl of 5 who’s now a college freshman. This year Harry will again read the part of the Pilgrim governor, William Bradford: “Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of corn, wheat, peas and beans . . . and because he has made the forests to abound with game, and the sea with fish and clams . . . and inasmuch as he has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience—Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims . . . gather at ye meeting house . . . to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye almighty God.”

As I write, the day before Thanksgiving, I wonder if Harry’s eyes will fill with tears again, and his voice shake, to his own shy wonder.

Well, they are moving words. And Harry is an immigrant.

• For the neighborhood delivery man from Pakistan, who on Tuesday, as he turned to close the door turned back and said: “And also, happy Th—” He searched for the word.

“Thanksgiving!” It was so beautiful the way he said it. Like it was new.

Happy Thanksgiving to America—the great and fabled nation that is still this night the hope of the world.

We are becoming a conceited nitwit society, pushy and self-aggrandizing. No one is ashamed to brag now. and show off. They think it heightens them. They think it’s good for business.

It used to be that if you were big, you’d never tell people how big you were because that would be kind of classless, and small. In fact it would be a proof of smallness.

So don’t be showy. The big are modest.

Ha.

There is the issue—small but indicative of something larger—of how members of the U.S. military present themselves, and the awe they consciously encourage in the public and among the political class. The other day on his Daily Beast blog, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader noting the way officers are now given and relentlessly wear on their dress uniforms ribbons, markers and awards for pretty much everything they do—what used to be called fruit salad. Mr. Sullivan posted two pictures we echo here, one of Gen. David Petraeus and one of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is the Eisenhower of D-Day, of the long slog through Europe in World War II. He didn’t seem to see the need to dress himself up and tell you what he’d done. Maybe he thought you knew. He didn’t wear all the honors to which he was entitled, though he could have used them to dazzle the masses if that had been what he was interested in.

Top brass sure is brassier than it used to be. And you have to wonder what that’s about. Where did the old culture of modesty go? Ulysses S. Grant wore four stars on his shoulder and nothing else on his uniform. And that was a fellow who’d earned a few medals.

Jump now to the woman who is the main focus in the Petraeus scandal, Paula Broadwell. She was a person of impressive achievement right from the start—high school valedictorian, West Point grad, master’s degrees, Army officer. But even that wasn’t enough ribbons. In YouTube videos she brags about her security clearance, her inside knowledge—”That’s still being vetted”—and the Ph.D. she’s working on. She calls herself a biographer, but biographers actually do something arduous—they write biographies. Ms. Broadwell contracted with a professional, reporter Vernon Loeb, to organize, synthesize, think and write. On Twitter, Ms. Broadwell describes herself as “Author . . . National Security Analyst; Army Vet; Women’s Rights Activist; Runner/Skier/Surfer; Wife; Mom!” On her website she noted that in her free time she is an Ironman triathelete “and a model and demonstrator for KRISS, a manufacturer of .45-caliber machine guns.” “When Paula is not on the frontlines, online, or writing lines,” she and her husband run, ski and surf together.

My goodness. All hail. This isn’t describing yourself in the best possible light, this is bragging about yourself to a degree and in a way that is actually half mad.

But it’s kind of the way people talk about themselves now. And I have to say, this is new. Not new in history but new as a fully developed and enveloping national style. You know why they loved us in Europe in World War II? I mean aside from because we won? Because they thought we were kind of strong and silent—modest, actually—like Gary Cooper in “Sergeant York.” Now we still do ratta-tat-tat, but it’s on Facebook and it’s about how great we are.

We used to worry that kids would be victims of the self-esteem movement, that constant praise would keep them from an honestly earned, and therefore stable, self-respect, and steer them toward mere conceit. Now parents have it.

The other young woman in the story, Ms. Broadwell’s apparent nemesis, felt harassed when her role became known. Jill Kelley called 911 and quickly informed the operator of her status. “You know, I don’t know if by any chance, because I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability.” She suggested “diplomatic protection” might be in order. But she isn’t a diplomat, she’s a lady who gives parties and knows a lot of people. She even knows an FBI agent who opened an investigation for her because she felt harassed by anonymous emails. This really was a confusing part of the story. Just about everyone, certainly every woman, in the public eye in America receives aggressive, insulting, menacing emails. We didn’t know we could get FBI investigations opened for that! Maybe our mistake is not being honorary consuls with inviolability.

*   *   *

These are just the players in the scandal of the week. Have we noticed a certain lack of modesty in our political figures? Thank goodness, therefore, for Mitt Romney, who in a conference call with donors said he got beat and beat bad, that his campaign was lacking, that his gut on the big issues was probably off, that he shouldn’t have allowed his campaign to become (in the grandiose, faux-macho lingo of campaign consultants who wish they wore fruit salad) an air war and not a ground war, and that they were smoked in get-out-the-vote. He added, with an eye to concerns larger than his own, that he wanted to help the party analyze and define what didn’t work in 2012 so it would be stronger in 2016.

Sorry. Kidding! He didn’t say that.

He said the administration gave “gifts” to interest groups, and the groups appreciated the gifts, and, people being the little automatons they are, said yes, sire, and voted for him.

In a way it was as bad as the old “47%” tape. Because it was so limited.

*   *   *

Which gets us to the president. He’s looking very stern. You don’t have a problem with Susan Rice, you have a problem with me, he says, with a scowl. He talks about the fiscal cliff but not in a way that shows a real eagerness for compromise. He does not define areas of potential give, potential progress. He won, after all. He doesn’t have to.

What is needed is bigness, magnanimity. It’s not all about him, his party, it’s not all about self. It is not even all about one’s deepest political intentions. There are other ways and schedules for moving forward there.

Get the Republicans leaders on the Hill together. Suggest in subtle ways you’ll let them save face. Quietly acknowledge you weren’t the best negotiator in the world the first time ’round, and neither were they. Maybe no one was quite their best. But the nation faces a real challenge and there will be economic repercussions in mishandling it. “Let’s make a deal and let’s make it quickly. We all have to play games but not too much and not too long.”

And mean it. And deal.

This would be good for the president, good for his legacy, good for the country. This is a man who could show that in a time of crisis he and Speaker John Boehner could re-enact Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. Which is something the country would be relieved to see. “Look—it still works!”

It might take some of the bitterness, some of the long, grinding, partisan poison out of the system.

Might we see that?

Or just instead the stern face, the old soft, nebulous aggression, in the age of the outsized ego?