The Year the Debates Mattered

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The presidential debates this year have been more consequential than such debates have ever been.

They’ve been historic, shifting the mood and trajectory of the race. They’ve been revealing of the personalities and approaches of the candidates. And they’ve produced a new way in which winners and losers are judged. It’s a two-part wave now, the debate and the postdebate, and you have to win both.

In a way this has always been true. That’s why there are spin rooms. But this year it’s all more so—more organic, more spontaneous and powerful. And everyone knows what spin is. They’re looking for a truth room. Through a million websites and tweets they’re trying, in some rough, imperfect way, to build one.

Mitt Romney won the first debate clearly and decisively, we know that. But even more he won the days and weeks after the debate, when public opinion congeals in certain directions. It was in the postdebate that people, very much including Democrats, let out for the first time their dismay at Barack Obama and their dislike of the personality he presented.

The vice presidential debate seemed more or less a draw, with Joe Biden maybe having an edge. But it was in the postdebate, in the days afterward, that Mr. Biden seemed to slip, because the national conversation didn’t move off his antics—the chuckles, the grimaces, the theatrical strangeness of it all. A draw, or a victory, began to seem like a loss.

Mr. Obama won the second debate Tuesday night with a vigorous, pointed performance. He showed up, fought, landed some blows. It was close and he was joyless, a bit of a toothache, but he emerged in marginally better shape than he entered. But he doesn’t seem to be winning the postdebate. No one is talking about his excellence or his stunningly good performance—no one is talking about that. Instead the national conversation has been about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. Did the president tell the truth at the time? Was he telling it now? Did Mr. Romney fail to unmask his dishonesty? People are asking what is the truth of the economy, as opposed to the factoids deployed. Have drilling permits on federal lands been cut or not? These issues are not good for the president, and they’ll be the subject of discussion up until the next debate.

In the postdebate, the president’s win is starting to look like a draw.

*   *   *

At some point after the Hofstra debate, we are going to find out whether a certain part of the old school American political style is now officially gone, or whether Mr. Obama, in ignoring it, paid a certain price. This is how the president started out: “Gov. Romney’s says he’s got a five-point plan? Gov. Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate.” Mr. Romney, the president said, likes a world in which “you can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money.”

This was the president of the United States standing with the other major party’s presidential candidate and saying things that were harsh and personal—you’re selfish and greedy, you care for nothing but yourself, you have no sense of responsibility to others. Later Mr. Obama called Mr. Romney “a good man” who “loves his family,” but it sounded pro forma and hollow because it was. He does not think Mr. Romney is a good man: He’d started the evening telling us at some length that he was a bad one.

What the president said at the debate was nothing he hadn’t said on the trail. His campaign has been personal, accusatory and manipulative. But there in the room on a tiny stage, for a sitting president to come out with that kind of put-down—I couldn’t imagine a JFK doing it, with his cool, or a Jerry Ford with his Midwestern decency, or a Reagan, or the Bushes. When you are president, you don’t stand next to an opponent and accuse and attack. You keep a certain almost aesthetic distance. You know the height of the office you hold. You let the debate come to you, and if at some point you get an opening to uncork a joke or a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger criticism, you move.

The president was trying to look strong and commanding, to take control. Did he look strong, or did he look like a hack, like a tough Chicago pol who isn’t quite big enough to be where he is?

We may look back on 2012 as the point at which old school officially ended, and some new school began. Maybe the public isn’t so impressed by old school. Maybe this is how people like their politics now.

It was Mr. Obama’s aggressive foray that allowed Mr. Romney to diss him in return. When he said the president is weak on energy—”I don’t think anyone really believes that you’re a person who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal”—he wasn’t critiquing a policy but a person. When Mr. Obama attempted to jump in, Mr. Romney stopped him cold: “You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.”

If Mr. Romney wins, that’s going to be one cold, stony limo ride they share from the White House on Inauguration Day.

*   *   *

The heart of the debate? Romney and the price of gas: “The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you’re paying at the pump. If you’re paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you’re paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it’s $4 a gallon. The price of electricity is up. If the president’s energy policies are working, you’re going to see the cost of energy come down.”

Mr Obama’s reply seemed like a non sequitur: Gas prices were lower when he came in “because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

*   *   *

And so on to the third and final debate, on foreign policy. The most pressing questions there are the biggest, and have remained largely unanswered throughout the campaign: What is our role in the world now? What is our job? What is it we should be trying to do? What are our priorities?

And true or false:

Everything—America’s military might, its ability to defend itself, its ability to have an army and a navy and a diplomatic corps, its ability to be a friend and encourage good trends—depends on one thing: American wealth. If we are wealthy, we can be strong. If we are not wealthy, we won’t be strong for long. Our foreign policy depends on our economic policy. True or not?

Tonight

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

has to win this one if for no other reason than pride, and the president’s supporters seem increasingly confident that he will do well. But when I ask them what “well” would look like, what they imagine when they imagine his victory, they’re not sure. They don’t say things like, “The president knocks him out in the first round,” or “The president wears Romney out with successive tough questions and answers.”

It’s a tough format. No one knows what to expect.

*   *   *

The rough circumstances going in:

The last time Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debated, the press was itching to write the Romney Comeback story. Now they’re itching to write the Obama Comeback story. This matters because people tend to see what they expect to see and have trouble seeing the unexpected even when it unfolds before their eyes.

The hardest thing about the debate for Mr. Obama is that he really needs to bring it to Mr. Romney, to push and challenge—but it may be difficult to find and hold the exact degree of aggression required because both men, in the town hall format, will be surrounded by an audience of happy Americans. I don’t suppose a politically mixed audience of voters wants to see an American president snarl, slice or attack. He will have to find the sweet spot and throw consistent hardballs but not beanballs.

The hard things for Mr. Romney will be winning for a second time in a row, and winning so vividly that his victory is clear in the coverage. Last time he surprised a lot of people. This time his competence and command won’t come with the force of a discovery. It will be factored in. If Mr. Romney has a good night it will be because we’ll know, within a day or so, that his first victory was not a fluke. The second debate will be absorbed by viewers as more proof that he’s a pair of safe hands, a person who could be trusted with the presidency.

*   *   *

The president’s overall imperative is to erase the memory of the Oct. 3 disaster. He has to make people forget it. He has to blur the memory by providing a new memory: Obama engaged, Obama attractive, Obama in the moment, Obama responding with confidence and challenging his opponent. Obama replying with wit, or with soft, sure indignation, to something Romney said that he believes not to be true.

So the president has to erase and replace. That’s hard.

Mr. Romney doesn’t have to erase, only reinforce. He doesn’t come in as a stranger now. Seventy million Americans met him in a new way two weeks ago, and he impressed them. He has to hold his ground. He cannot let up on his challenges to the president. In his courteous way, he will likely lay out the essentials of what hasn’t worked the past four years, and why and how he can turn it around.

*   *   *

A guess on how it will go? Mr. Obama will attempt to seize and establish momentum and command early. Mr. Romney will expect this and be ready. Mr. Obama will throw out a charge or a challenge, Mr Romney will answer and try to turn it around into a countercharge, a counterchallenge. Both men will want to engage with the audience, but Mr Obama needs to most urgently: If he shows a high comfort level with the people in the hall, and gets them smiling or nodding, it will suggest to viewers watching on TV that the president has a friendly relationship with the American people. Boy, does he need to demonstrate that!

There won’t be any stalking on the stage, à la Al Gore in 2000. But how each candidate holds himself, what physical attitude he takes, will be noticed and commented upon later.

I wonder if the campaign in Chicago thinks Mr. Romney has a glass jaw? I wonder if they’re thinking he can’t take a series of hard hits? I wonder how many times the phrase “the 47%” will be used? I wonder if Mr. Romney will answer—with “No, 100%” or “No, I care about all the people.” Meaning I wonder if he knows that on this issue he should steer clear of words like “percent.” What lines has Mr. Obama practiced to suggest Mr Romney believes in nothing, has changed his mind on central issues and so cannot be depended upon?

*   *   *

This time, say his supporters, the president has taken debate prep seriously. This time he knows his friends are nervous. This time he can’t just try to crowd-surf on a nonexistent wave, he’s got to fight.

It is not likely he’s been demoralized by the Oct. 3 disaster. He’s probably been focused by it. He loves to compete. He’ll enjoy hearing the “Obama Comeback” stories, and in a way they’re already being written, because that’s the moment in the narrative we’re at: the comeback story. It will be almost as much fun for the mainstream press to write as the disaster story.

*   *   *

One thing Mr. Romney might properly accentuate:

Mr Obama will probably claim, and legitimately, what he always claims: that the day he walked into the White House, he was faced with a true economic catastrophe, one left to him by a Republican administration. The president may also say he’s worked as hard as he could and can name some progress—and this in spite of a Republican Party that wouldn’t work with him.

He always says this; he believes it is true.

A thing that is not pointed out often enough is that in his first year, Mr. Obama was in a brilliantly promising political position. He had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, he had sky-high poll ratings, he was hailed throughout the world, and he had the latitude—the latitude—iimparted by crisis. His political opponents were demoralized. The American people would have given him a lot of running room to come up with and institute new programs and approaches on joblessness and the debt, the two essential and growing issues of the moment. Instead he took his first two years and went on a long strange trip in which he gave all his time and attention to a vanity production called ObamaCare. It was a huge, lumbering, barely coherent, anxiety-inducing and expensive program, and the American people hated it—still hate it. The president didn’t understand his moment. He didn’t understand the depth and duration of the economic crisis. This was the fatal mistake of his administration. At bottom it’s the central critique of his leadership.

As for the Republicans who wouldn’t work with him, there are always people in the other party who say they’ll never work with you. You have to scare them into line. That’s what presidents do. They go over the heads of Congress and the media and straight to the people, in TV addresses, and they win the support of the people—”This is what I’m doing, this is why, this is why it will help, please give me support and please tell your senators and congressmen to support me.” Suddenly senators and congressmen start getting told when they’re back in the district, “I like our fella there in the White House, help him out.” Tip O’Neill didn’t run into the Reagan White House, fling himself into Ronald Reagan’s arms and say, “Where’s the scotch? Let’s talk turkey and make progress for our nation!” He got scared into it. His own conference members were telling him what they were hearing back home.

Why didn’t Mr. Obama go over the heads of the Congress to the people? Or, actually, why did he do it a few times and it didn’t work, and nothing moved in Washington, and everything stayed stuck?

More to the point, why did the president not spend the past 3½ years meeting with Republican Congressional leaders, or even that many Democratic leaders? Because he doesn’t like people that much? That’s an odd thing in a political leader. Did this personal idiosyncrasy become an actual political dynamic, the thing that more than anything else led to the current stasis? Everybody in Washington talks about this. Maybe it should be aired, as courteously as possible, in our next-to-last presidential debate.

Confusing Strength with Aggression

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The vice presidential debate was uniquely important because if Paul Ryan won it or did well, the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum would be continued or speed up. If he did not, that momentum would slow or stop. So the night carried implications.

The debate, obviously, was the Republican versus the Democrat, a particular kind of conservative versus a particular kind of liberal, one philosophical approach versus another. Beyond that there was some iconic weight to it. It was age versus youth; full, white-haired man versus lean, black-haired man. Youth is energy—new ideas and new ways. But age can stand for experience, wisdom. Youth can seem callow, confident only because it is uninformed. But age can seem reactionary, resistant to change in part because change carries a rebuke: You and your friends have been doing things wrong, we need a new approach.

Joe Biden had to do what the president failed to do—seem alive, bring it, show that he respects America so much he’d bother to fight for it. Mr. Biden is voluble, sentimental, scrappy. Could he focus his scrappiness enough to deliver targeted blows?

Mr. Ryan had to introduce himself to the American people in a new way—at length, in a contentious environment. He had to communicate: “I haven’t been a national figure long, but I know what I’m doing. I’m not radical or extreme and I’m not here to destabilize, I’m here to help make things safer by putting them on firmer ground.”

History is human; both men had things to prove. Mr. Biden had to show the White House, the Democratic base and himself that he still has it, that he’s not the doddering uncle in the attic. Whatever happens, at almost 70 this is his last grand political moment. Would his career end with a whiff or a hit? And the debate was his opportunity to save Barack Obama. Might that be personally satisfying? Obama staffers are often quietly condescending about Ol’ Joe. What sweet revenge to publicly save the leader of those who privately patronized you. If I read Mr. Biden correctly, this would have crossed his mind.

Mr. Ryan had to show the voters, the GOP and the political class that Mitt Romney did not make a mistake in choosing him. There were other candidates, some impressive. He had to demonstrate that Mr. Romney’s faith was well and shrewdly placed.

So: a pat on the back and a gold watch for the old man? Or a “Thanks for coming in, we’re going in another direction but let’s stay in touch” for the young one?

*   *   *

So, to the debate:

There were fireworks all the way, and plenty of drama. Each candidate could claim a win in one area or another, but by the end it looked to me like this: For the second time in two weeks, the Democrat came out and defeated himself. In both cases the Republican was strong and the Democrat somewhat disturbing.

Another way to say it is the old man tried to patronize the kid and the kid stood his ground. The old man pushed, and the kid pushed back.

Last week Mr. Obama was weirdly passive. Last night Mr. Biden was weirdly aggressive, if that is the right word for someone who grimaces, laughs derisively, interrupts, hectors, rolls his eyes, browbeats and attempts to bully. He meant to dominate, to seem strong and no-nonsense. Sometimes he did—he had his moments. But he was also disrespectful and full of bluster. “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!” he snapped at one point. It was an echo of Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle, in 1988. But Mr. Quayle, who had compared himself to Kennedy, had invited the insult. Mr. Ryan had not. It came from nowhere. Did Mr. Biden look good? No, he looked mean and second-rate. He meant to undercut Mr. Ryan, but he undercut himself. His grimaces and laughter were reminiscent of Al Gore’s sighs in 2000—theatrical, off-putting and in the end self-indicting.

Mr. Ryan was generally earnest, fluid, somewhat wonky, confident. He occasionally teetered on the edge of glibness and sometimes fell off. If I understood him correctly during the exchange on Iran, he seemed to suggest to moderator Martha Raddatz that a nuclear war in the Mideast would be preferable to a nuclearized Iran. Really? That easy, is it? Mr. Biden had one of his first good moments when he said, essentially, “Whoa.” Actually he said war should always be a very last resort, which is always a good thing to say, and to mean.

Because the debate was so rich in charge and countercharge, and because it covered so much ground, both parties will be able to mine the videotape for their purposes. On the attack in Benghazi, the question that opened the debate, Mr. Biden was on the defensive and full of spin. He pivoted quickly to talking points, a move that was at once too smooth and too clumsy. He was weak on requests for added security before the consulate was overrun and the ambassador killed. “We will get to the bottom of this.” Oh. Good.

Mr. Ryan was strong on spending and taxes. On foreign affairs and defense spending, he was on weaker ground. Medicare and Social Security were probably a draw. Mr. Ryan coolly laid out the numbers and the need for change, but Mr. Biden emoted in a way that seemed sincere and was perhaps compelling. He scored when he knocked Mr. Romney for his 47% remarks, saying those who pay only payroll taxes pay a higher rate than many of the rich, including Mr. Romney. Mr. Ryan in turn scored on the unemployment rate in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden’s hometown. It is 10%. It was 8.5% when the recession began. “This is not what a real recovery looks like.” Mr. Ryan on abortion was personal and believable. Mr. Biden seemed to be going through the pro-choice motions.

*   *   *

I have just realized the problem with the debate: it was the weird distance between style and content, and the degree to which Mr. Biden’s style poisoned his content.

In terms of content—the seriousness and strength of one’s positions and the ability to argue for them—the debate was probably a draw, with both candidates having strong moments. But in terms of style, Mr. Biden was so childishly manipulative that it will be surprising if independents and undecideds liked what they saw.

National Democrats keep confusing strength with aggression and command with sarcasm. Even the latter didn’t work for Mr. Biden. The things he said had the rhythm and smirk of sarcasm without the cutting substance.

And so the Romney-Ryan ticket emerged ahead. Its momentum was neither stopped nor slowed and likely was pushed forward.

Meaning that things will continue to get hotter. The campaign trail, commercials, all sorts of mischief—everything will get jacked up, cranked up. Meaning the next debate is even more important. Which means, since the next debate is a town hall and won’t be mano-a-mano at the podium, that the third debate, on foreign policy, will be the most important of all.

Ms. Raddatz acquitted herself admirably, keeping things moving, allowing the candidates to engage, probing. There was a real humanity to her presence. We just saw Jim Lehrer beat up for what was also good work. May her excellence go unpunished.

Put a Chair Out

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

A friend in Texas told me of some local difficulties in getting big Romney lawn signs. Its possible there’s been a run on those signs since the first debate, and maybe local GOP organizations are running out. You know what Romney supporters who cant find lawn signs should do? Put an empty chair on the lawn instead. Just one big empty chair. Says it all. Says it better.

Romney Deflates the President

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Out on a limb, where the breeze is best:

The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know. It’s going to affect thinking more than we know, and it’s going to start showing up in the polls, including in the battlegrounds, more dramatically than we guess.

It wasn’t just Mitt Romney’s strong performance. It was President Obama’s amazingly weak one. He’s never been punctured before. But by debate’s end Wednesday night, if you opened the window this is what you could hear: Ssssssss. The soft hiss of air departing from a balloon.

And—amazingly again—he did it to himself. He didn’t fight, he didn’t show, he wasn’t awake and hungry. He just said the same-old-same-old and let it go. He couldn’t even meet Mr. Romney’s gaze, never mind his arguments.

Is all this dispositive? Has it changed everything? No.

Balloons can get patched. Opportunities can be squandered. Luck can turn.

But this whole race is on the move again, it’s in play again, and it’s going to get fun.

But it’s going to get hot, too. And probably dirty.

*   *   *

America got its first, sustained look at the good and competent Mr. Romney. And it really was a first. He wasted his convention but showed up for his debate, and an estimated 58 million people were watching. Many of them were taking his measure for the first time. What did they see? He was confident, gracious, in command of the facts. He looked like a president, acted like one. He was easily the incumbent’s equal and maybe more than that, so he became for the first time a real alternative to the incumbent, a living one, not just a name on a ballot.

He has been painted as Richie Rich, a too-tightly-wound reject from the Republican Animatronic Presidential Candidate Factory. But again, that’s not who he was. He was a normal, smart adult, and he knew things both about America and about public policy. He’s supposed to be extreme, but he was not in the least extreme. He spent his time talking not just to Republicans or conservatives but to the American people, a huge and varied lot. He reminded many of them of something they’d perhaps forgotten along the way: We don’t like the Obama economy! We don’t like ObamaCare! We don’t like not having jobs! Nothing personal, but this didn’t work!

Forced by time constraints to be clear and concise in his statements, he was both. Here we must stop and note: The way Mr. Romney spoke in the debate was the real Romney. The faux-flowery “prairie fire of debt” one we hear on the stump is the not-real Romney. He flowers himself up on the stump because he thinks it makes him sound better. It doesn’t. The real Romney is the one who can communicate. He’s straight and direct and not fancy, forgivably jargony, but worried about America and sincere. That’s the Romney who showed up for the debate. Stay that guy!

*   *   *

All the books being written about the 2012 race will tell us the background and circumstances of Mr. Obama’s surprising and deeply unimpressive performance. For now what can be said is this is how journalists described it in real time: passive, listless, effete, detached, flaccid, dull-brained, disengaged, professorial. The last is unjust. Professors are often interesting. When Mr. Romney gave him the sweet-faced “You’re a cute little shrimp” look, and he gave it to him all night, Mr. Obama couldn’t even look at him. When Mr. Obama stared down and nodded at his notes it looked, as someone observed in an email, like his impersonation of a bored wife. Everything he said—everything—was something you’d heard too many times. Mr. Romney gave the president some openings. The president didn’t take them. Why? It crossed my mind he was playing possum. But possums wake up at some point.

Mr. Obama’s likability numbers are about to go down. It’s going to be a reverse Sally Field: You don’t like me, you really don’t like me.

Jim Lehrer has been criticized as an inadequate moderator. He was old-school and a pro. He didn’t think it was about him. How quaint. He asked questions, allowed a certain amount of leeway to both candidates, which allowed each to reveal himself, and kept things moving. Most of the criticism seems to have come from those who hoped Mr. Obama would emerge triumphant. Mr. Lehrer should not take it personally. Every shot at him was actually a warning shot aimed at the next moderator, Martha Raddatz. She’s being told certain outcomes are desirable.

*   *   *

The next Obama-Romney debate will be different. The same Obama will not show up. He’s been embarrassed. He’ll bring his LeBron. He’ll be tough, competitive, and he’ll go at Mr. Romney professionally and personally: “We know you love cars, you’ve even got an elevator for them!” This is where Sen. Rob Portman, in future debate prep, has to go. He has to play a newly energized and focused Chicago pol. But then he knows that.

Advice to the Romney campaign:

1. There’s no way to know if the debate changed everything but for the next few weeks Pretend it has. Underscore the gain in stature your candidate now enjoys. Makes things new, dress it up.

2. Everyone at podiums. Stop with the rambling man with the cordless mic on the empty stage. Forget the bales of hay and the tired local GOP activists in the background. Keep the candidate looking like a president. Weeks ago you threw together a stage with a podium, flags and deep blue curtains. It was for Mr. Romney’s Libya statement, which flopped. But the setting was good. Get it back.

3. Everyone in suits and ties. Enough with the high-thread-count, open-collar shirts with the sleeves rolled up. The presidency is not a TED conference. Especially for Paul Ryan. You know what we like to see in a 42-year-old man who wants to change a 45-year-old program? Grown-up clothes.

4. Maintain the rhetorical tone and tenor of the debate—sharp but respectful—Debate Romney, not Prairie Fire Romney.

5. Watch out for Big Bird. Putting the merits and realities of overall PBS funding aside, Mr Romney here gave a small gift to the incumbent. Democrats will merrily exploit it. Big Birds will start showing up outside Romney rallies, holding up signs saying “Don’t Kill Me!” Think this through.

6. As things tighten up, they will probably get dirty. It is a matter of conviction in both parties that the other side is more ruthless and brutal in its use of underhanded tactics. Both campaigns have probably been sitting on potentially damaging opposition research. Why? Because they don’t want to win that way. Political operatives say they hate oppo because they hate to lower the tone of the national discourse. The truth is, oppo is bad for business. The press goes into full Lascivious Puritan mode, spreads the dirt and then tries to nail the provider. When everyone knows a strategist won dirty, he becomes controversial, future clients shy away, and the mortgage on the house in Umbria goes unpaid. But losing is even worse for business.

Chicago won’t go quietly. Be ready for trouble and able of rapid response.

The Big Mix

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Sometimes things you’ve long known break through again in a fresh and powerful way, and what you know becomes new again. “Man needs less to be instructed than reminded,” Dr. Johnson said, but it wasn’t really a reminder I got yesterday, it was a sort of revivifier.

I was at the big annual street fair in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Big turnout, beautiful day, many thousands of people clogging Third Avenue from the 60s through the 80s, what looked like more than a hundred booths. The people filling the avenue were an incredible mix—young and old, infants and grandmas, all colors and nationalities, families, kids in groups, all kinds of garb—young Arab women in headscarves and abayas, Italian kids from the old Bay Ridge, elderly Irish women who go to the local evangelical church, young Latinos, tall blond Nordic-looking girls in black suede leather boots, Filipino families. In the beauty shop on 76th Street where my mother popped in to get her hair done everyone spoke Chinese, including a 5- or 6-year-old Asian girl so proud of her new bangs. One booth looked like a gold souk and sold Arab dress. Another sold Catholic saints’ cards, crucifixes and Rosary beads. At the Obama 2012 booth, some members of “Brooklyn Democrats for Change” teased me, gave me an Obama button, and posed for pictures. (No Romney booth, alas.) At another, evangelicals offered a free New Testament, and when I said I already had one, they asked if they could pray for a specific intention. I said yes, my back’s bothering me, and a white-haired woman put her hands on my neck and back, said a prayer and asked for a healing in Jesus Christ’s name. A Mexican woman across the way had a headset on and was telling everyone how to make the best salad ever with her Super-Hyper-Veg-O-Matic. She had a big crowd. Young Asian kids with iPhones were tweeting what they were seeing as they walked behind their grandparents. Two teenage Arab girls were sitting on storage boxes and laughing, and as I walked by I saw they were breezing through pictures on an iPhone and posting them on Facebook.

I’m walking along with my niece and her baby and fiancé, Dominic, and suddenly in some new way it hits me. “The entire political future of America is on this street,” I said.

Everyone different, everyone getting along, everyone feeling free to be who they are but everyone also—you could just kind of see it—feeling free to be different from who they are, too. Everyone selling their wares, not just material ones but spiritual ones. There was a really loud kind of rap group, and I asked who it was because I didn’t get its composition—young black and Hispanic men, a middle-aged white woman. Singers from a local church, I was told. The Knights of Columbus were giving out flyers: Come to the October dinner dance. The Gateway City Church was inviting you to an “Overcomers Meeting . . . a fellowship of men and women who are dealing with alcohol, drugs, nicotine, depression and anxiety, fears, anger, gambling, lust, family problems. . . . All are welcome regardless of religious and spiritual beliefs and persuasions.” An Albanian sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was there, too.

Later at a Mexican restaurant, Dominic asked what I meant about the political future being right there on the street. I said we’d walked through the big mix, the big jumble, and if we get it right it will be the big blend. You see the people and the booths and who’s doing business and who’s walking together, and you know what is important to them. Family is important, so is faith, variety is a given, it’s baked in the cake. They want peacefulness, education for their kids, they want to rise, they don’t want crime. They don’t want a dangerous culture, one they have to protect their kids from. They’re like every other immigrant that’s ever been, they don’t want to have government bother them, overregulate them or squish them down, they want everyone to get help if they need it, they want to get good jobs and be free to be who they are and also become who they want to be.

That’s all.

And they are politically up for grabs.

They are not Democrats and Republicans, they are citizens. And who wins them, wins the future. They haven’t inhaled a political persuasion, they’re getting a sense of both parties, they’re meeting them.

And the first thing you do is you don’t slice and dice them: we are one nation, one country, one people. That way the big mix becomes the big blend, as it always has.

And something else: Everything I saw—the good humor, the engagement, the acceptance—kind of suggested we’re getting it righter than we know.

*   *   *

Only as I write do I realize I saw all this just a few miles from Williamsburg, where a little girl named Betty Smith lived at the turn of the last century. She went on to write a great classic, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” about the new immigrants of her day, the Irish and Italians and Germans and Slavs who became: the American people.

2012 Debates: This Is It, Mitt

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

“Governor, the success or failure of your entire presidential campaign will come down to what happens between the hours of 9 and 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. We’re at a hinge point in history. It’s not too much to say the future of the American republic depends on how you do in that hour and a half.”

“Um, specifically, what do you want me to do?”

“Be relaxed!”
That’s what’s coming from some of Mitt Romney’s supporters right now—Wednesday night is critical, the last chance, so don’t forget it’s nothing, a walk in the park. He doesn’t strike me as easily given to freak-outs, but if he is, this would be the moment.

Let’s take a different approach.

It is true that the debate has the potential to alter the dynamic of the election. A good or great one, followed up by an improved, more serious campaign, could make everything new again. A bad one would do damage indeed.

But there will be three debates, and it’s possible the truly high-stakes one will be the last, on Oct. 22.

And there are some institutional and personal elements surrounding the Wednesday debate that may well work in Mr. Romney’s favor.

From a canny journalist with a counterintuitive head: “The media will be rooting for Romney.” Two reasons. First, they don’t want the story to end. They’re in show biz: A boring end means lower ratings. Careers are involved! Second, the mainstream media is suddenly realizing that more than half the country (and some of their colleagues) think they are at least operationally in the tank for the president, or the Democrats in general. It is hurting the media’s standing. A midcourse correction is in order, and Wednesday will offer an opportunity: I think it’s fair to say Gov. Romney more than held his own this evening, and a consensus seems to be forming that the president underperformed.

Mr. Romney walks in as the underdog, behind in the polls. He’s not the president, the other guy is. He’s not world-famous, the other guy is. The president is known for smooth presentation and verbal fluidity, Mr. Romney more recently for awkwardisms and gaffes.

It’s good to be the underdog. “Politics is exceeding expectations.”

As the Republican candidate, Mr. Romney is used to being battered about. He can take a shot. But once you’re president, you’re never battered about. The mystique of the Oval Office is too great. People tell you what you want to hear. Everyone’s too easy on you.

President Obama hasn’t been challenged in public in a long time. He hasn’t been challenged in private in a long time. So if Mr. Romney treats him with respect but not deference, if he really engages, challenges, questions and pushes, he just might knock the president off his stride.

There was something Mr. Romney did in the primary debates. When his competitors were answering questions, he didn’t stand at the podium looking distracted. He’d turn and smile at them sweetly and encouragingly, as if he were thinking, “You’re the cutest little shrimp.” No one has looked at Mr. Obama like that since 2003. It’s possible he wouldn’t like it.

Everyone is waiting for the “Are you better off now . . .” question, but that’s a little complicated. No one knew Reagan was going to uncork it in 1980, and so it had a chance to be devastating. This year, everyone knows it’s coming. So maybe it won’t come. Mr. Obama surely will have memorized a response. Or maybe he will bring it up first. “I’d actually like to talk about whether some people are better off now. It’s a complicated question, but teachers and firefighters who’ve kept their jobs because of what we did might say they’re better off . . .”

*   *   *

Mr. Romney should be wondering Which Obama he’ll meet.

More-in-Sorrow-Than-in-Anger Obama? He patiently explains, until your eyes cross, the real facts of the economy and the beginning of recovery, the competing and even contradictory forces that determine outcomes. He speaks in soft, rounded phrases.

Faux-Humble Obama? I’ve made some mistakes, I’ll admit it. I didn’t always do so well explaining exactly what I was doing, in terms of policy, and all the reasons why. I haven’t been perfect, but I wasn’t wrong to help people get through the height of the crisis. I’ve learned a lot, but I didn’t need to be told to save the U.S. auto industry.

Perturbable Obama? This is a proud man. He doesn’t like to be questioned too closely, as he showed when he was pressed on Univision last week.

Rope-a-Dope Obama? As he showed on “60 Minutes,” he can make it up as he goes along when he feels he needs to. If you endlessly correct his numbers, it could leave you sputtering digits, slinging factoids, losing the larger point.

Cool McCool? This Obama is tall, friendly, shows up on “The View” and has a smile so big it wrinkles his nose. But he can refer to himself as “eye candy,” and reminds you of the old McCain commercial: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.”

Maybe Mr. Romney will meet all five.

*   *   *

Mitt Romney still sounds, at this late date in the campaign, as if he’s talking to Republicans. But they don’t have to be persuaded, they think Mr. Obama is a disaster and want him out. He should be talking to independents, centrists, suburban women, those who might be won over. A lot of them would be grateful to be impressed.

In that area, an idea. In 1980, a lot of people thought incumbent Jimmy Carter wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t personal, he just didn’t have the right answers for the problems at hand. But people had real doubts about Ronald Reagan—he was too shoot-from-the-hip, he’d start World War III. These were understandable reservations! He had to prove he was a pair of safe hands.

People think Mr. Romney’s rich, doesn’t understand regular people’s lives. They’re not sure he can turn things around. He has to prove he’s a pair of safe hands.

One way to get at that: People hate it that Washington doesn’t work anymore, that it’s incapable of solving problems, that it can’t even pass a budget. There is widespread knowledge that Mr. Obama, whatever his virtues, doesn’t work well with others—he can’t negotiate, can’t bend them to his will, doesn’t really listen, can’t work it out, can’t win them over. It’s all stasis now. And will be if he is re-elected. The complaint that he is at once convinced, detached and uninterested is heard not only in Washington and among Republicans, but among foreign leaders.

Maybe Mr. Romney can note that he once ran a great state, that he faced a legislature dominated by the other party, that he worked with them, heard them, negotiated with them, and that together they produced a great deal. Even a health-care bill that didn’t tear the state apart, didn’t cause widespread bitterness, didn’t inspire broad public resentment. It was, in these respects, the opposite of ObamaCare. Mr. Romney learned much from the experience about what works locally and can work nationally. It’s actually not a story to avoid, it is a story worth telling.

Romney Needs a New CEO

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

“Nothing is written.” That was T.E. Lawrence to the Arab tribesmen in Robert Bolt’s screenplay, a masterpiece, of “Lawrence of Arabia.” You write no one off. Nothing is inevitable. Life is news—”What happened today?” And news is surprise—”You’re kidding!”

But you have to look at the landscape and see the shape of the land. You have to see it clearly to move on it well.

So here’s one tough, cool-eyed report on what is happening in the presidential race. It’s from veteran Republican pollster, now corporate strategist, Steve Lombardo of Edelman public relations in Washington. Mr. Lombardo worked in the 2008 Romney campaign. He’s not affiliated with any candidate. This is what he wrote Thursday morning, and what he sees is pretty much what I see.

“The pendulum has swung toward Obama.” Mitt Romney has “a damaged political persona.” He is running behind in key states like Ohio and Virginia and, to a lesser extent, Florida. The president is reversing the decline that began with his “You didn’t build that” comment. For three weeks he’s been on a roll. The wind’s at his back.

How did we get here? What can turn it around?

1. Mr. Romney came out of the primaries “a damaged and flawed candidate.” Voters began to see him as elitist, rich, out of touch. “Here the Democrats’ early advertising was crucial.” Newt Gingrich hurt too, with his attacks on Bain.

2. The Democrats defined Mr. Romney “before he had a chance to define himself.” His campaign failed in “not doing a substantial positive media buy to explain who Mitt Romney is and what kind of president he might be.”

3. “Perceptions of the economy are improving.” Unemployment is high, but the stock market has improved, bringing 401(k)s with it.

4. Obama’s approval ratings are up five to six points since last year. He is now at roughly 49% approval, comparable to where President Bush was in 2004.

5. “The president had a strong convention and Romney a weak one.” The RNC failed “to relaunch a rebranded Romney and create momentum.”

6. Team Romney has been “reactive,” partly because of the need for damage control, but it also failed to force the Obama campaign to react to its proposals and initiatives.

7. The “47%” comment didn’t help, but Mr. Romney’s Libya statement was a critical moment. Team Romney did not know “the most basic political tenet of a foreign crisis: when there is an international incident in which America is attacked, voters in this country will (at least in the short term) rally around the flag and the President. Always. It is stunning that Team Romney failed to recognize this.”

But, says Mr. Lombardo, nothing is over, much remains fluid. The president and his campaign know it. “Among likely voters nationally only two-three points separate the two candidates.” The debates are critical. “If Romney clearly wins the first debate” Oct. 3, “he has a good chance of reversing the trajectory of the last three weeks.”

Why? “Because support for Obama remains lukewarm.” That’s why “he is not running away with this thing even after Romney’s myriad stumbles.”

Finally, “the economy is still weak and the jobs report on October 5th will be pivotal. A strong one may ensure an Obama victory. On the other hand, a poor one on the heels of a Romney debate win could re-align this race.”

*   *   *

It is true that a good debate, especially a good first one, can invigorate a candidate and lead to increased confidence, which can prompt good decisions and sensible statements. There is more than a month between the first debate and the voting: That’s enough time for a healthy spiral to begin.

But: The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant “rolling calamity.”

A lot of people weighed in, in I suppose expected ways: “Glad you said this,” “Mad you said this.” But, some surprises. No one that I know of defended the campaign or argued “you’re missing some of its quiet excellence.” Instead there was broad agreement with the gist of the critique—from some in the midlevel of the campaign itself, from outside backers and from various party activists and officials. There was a perhaps pessimistic assumption that no one in Boston would be open to advice. A veteran of a previous Romney campaign who supports the governor and admires him—”This is a good man”—said the candidate’s problem isn’t overconfidence, it’s a tin ear. That’s hard to change, the veteran said, because tin-earness keeps you from detecting and remedying tin-earness.

There were wistful notes from the Republicans who’d helped run previous campaigns, most of whom could be characterized as serious, moderate conservatives, all of whom want to see Mr. Romney win because they believe, honestly, that the president has harmed the country financially and in terms of its position in the world. They’re certain it will only get worse in the next four years, but they’re in despair at the Romney campaign. Some, unbidden, brought up the name James A. Baker III, who ran Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1984 (megalandslide—those were the days) and George H.W. Bush’s in 1988 (landslide.)

What they talked about, without using this phrase, is the Baker Way.

This was a man who could run a campaign. Twice in my life I’ve seen men so respected within their organizations that people couldn’t call them by their first names. That would be Mr. Paley, the buccaneer and visionary who invented CBS, and Mr. Baker, who ran things that are by nature chaotic and messy—campaigns and White Houses—with wisdom, focus, efficiency, determination and discipline. And he did it while being attacked every day from left, right and center—and that was in the Reagan White House, never mind outside, which was a constant war zone.

Mr. Baker’s central insight: The candidate can’t run the show. He can’t be the CEO of the campaign and be the candidate. The candidate is out there every day standing for things, fighting for a hearing, trying to get the American people to listen, agree and follow. That’s where his energies go. On top of that, if he’s serious, he has to put in place a guiding philosophy that somehow everyone on the plane picks up and internalizes. The candidate cannot oversee strategy, statements, speechwriting, ads. He shouldn’t be debating what statistic to put on slide four of the PowerPoint presentation. He has to learn to trust others—many others.

Mr. Baker broke up power centers while at the same time establishing clear lines of authority—and responsibility. When you screwed up, he let you know in one quick hurry. But most of all he had judgment. He delegated, and only the gifted were welcome: Bob Teeter, Dick Darman, Roger Ailes, Marlin Fitzwater. He didn’t like hacks, he didn’t get their point, and he knew one when he saw one.

A campaign is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: victory.

Mitt Romney needs to get his head screwed on right in this area. Maybe advice could come from someone in politics who awes him. If that isn’t Jim Baker then Mitt Romney’s not awe-able, which is a different kind of problem.

Time for an Intervention

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

*   *   *

And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

*   *   *

The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.

Republicans are going to have to right this thing. They have to stabilize it.

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?

Also, Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!

*   *   *

When big, serious, thoughtful things must be said then big, serious, thoughtful speeches must be given. Mr. Romney is not good at press conferences. Maybe because he doesn’t give enough, and so hasn’t grown used to them, and confident.

He should stick to speeches, and they have to be big—where America is now, what we must do, how we can do it. He needs to address the Mideast too, because it isn’t going to go away as an issue and is adding a new layer of unease to the entire election. Luckily, Romney has access to some of the best writers and thinkers in the business. I say it that way because to write is to think, and Romney needs fresh writing andfresh thinking.

Romney needs to get serious here.Or, he can keep typing out his stray thoughts with Stuart Stevens, who’s sold himself as a kind of mad genius. I get the mad part.

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys—make it look like there’s an election going on. Because there is.

Be serious and fight.

If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning.

*   *   *

Romney always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”

Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?

Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:

Right this ship.

*   *   *

So, these are some ideas. Others will have more, and they’ll be better.

But an intervention is needed.

The Age of the Would-Be Princips

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

No American leader’s public statements were up to the task or equal to the moment this week. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama were appropriately full of high praise and sentiment for the four U.S. diplomats gruesomely murdered in Libya. The four can’t be praised enough: They put themselves in harm’s way for their country.

But both Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Obama’s remarks, after the tributes, were marked by the kind of gauzy platitudes that, coming one after another, make a statement seem off point and odd. Both shied away from central issues. Violence is “senseless,” yes, and we believe in religious tolerance, true. But at the center there was a void, and the void was meaning. What does this mean? What do we do? What can be done? What should be done?

You know what American politicians have gotten too good at? Talking about loss. Eulogizing the irreplaceable.

A little grit, please.

Mitt Romney came under fire from many, including me, for speaking too soon and in a way that was immediately critical of the administration.

Guys, timing. Dignity. Restraint. Tragedy. Painful headlines, brutal pictures. Long view. Bigness. Think it through, take some days, and then come forth with a cool, detailed, deeply pertinent critique that will actually help people think about what happened.

Granted, the U.S. Embassy statement from Cairo was embarrassing, a verbal cringe. It was marred by the baby talk that disfigures our public discourse. We are so sorry if you’re hurting, we’re really sad someone’s hurt your feelings. Maybe we should just give in and reduce our formal communiqués to something more easily tweetable, like emoticons: “America on your feelings and your need to assuage them by murdering our ambassador :-(”

And look, all this did have that special sound of the Obama administration, did it not?

However. The statement was written by a person or persons who no doubt feared they’d be under siege and in fact soon were, and over some idiot’s video. You have to give some room to people in circumstances so frightening and bizarre.

Mr. Romney’s appearance Wednesday morning seemed to me a metaphor for what is not yet right about his campaign. The setting—the deep blue curtains, the American flags, the dignified podium, the handsome straight-backed candidate—was perfect, presidential. The Romney campaign cares a lot about the picture, just as the White House does: Everyone in politics is too visual. But the thoughts, content, meaning—these are given secondary attention, when in fact they are everything. Get that right and all else will follow.

Republican candidates for president labor under a disadvantage, and we all know what it is. Mainstream media is stacked toward Democrats and against Republicans, toward liberalism and against conservatism. That means Republicans who win have to break through the prism with the force of their thoughts, their words, their philosophy. This is hard. The picture is part of it. But the rest is the heart of it.

What is needed from Mr. Romney now, or soon, is a serious statement about America’s role and purpose in the world. If such a statement contained an intellectually serious critique of the president’s grand strategy, or lack of it, all the better. As far as I can tell, that strategy largely consists of spurts of emotion and calculation from his closest aides, and is not a strategy but an inbox.

Mr. Romney might also contemplate this, because it will soon be on the American mind: Our embassies under siege in the Mideast gives us a sense of what a war with Iran would look like. It would be bloody. Not neat, not surgical, but bloody.

The world is very hot right now. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to lower the temperature.

As for Mr. Obama, he didn’t help himself with his snotty comment on “60 Minutes” that Mr. Romney has a habit of shooting first and aiming later. He could have been classy and refused to take a shot. But he’s not really classy that way.

*   *   *

Two closing thoughts, on larger context.

Whatever the exact impact of the anti-Muhammad hate film that went viral, we have entered an age of would-be Princips.

Gavrilo Princip of course was the assassin who killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. He was 20, largely friendless and small in stature. He pulled the trigger that killed the archduke which led to the ultimatums that brought the war that misshaped the 20th century. From his act sprang nine million dead, Lenin at the Finland Station, the fall of Russia, the rise of communism, World War II, the Cold War . . .

Maybe all those things would have happened anyway, one way or another. We’ll never know. All we know is how it did begin, with one young man and a gun.

Now in the age of technology, with everything disseminated everywhere instantly, it isn’t one man with a gun but one man with a camera, or a laptop, or a phone.

To be a Princip is to feel power, whatever the cost to others. It is to need to get your point out there, whatever the price others pay. A Princip has a high sense of authority—he is in possession of urgent truths—and no sense of responsibility.

The maker of the videotape that contributed to the rioting in Egypt is a would-be Princip, as is the American pastor, Terry Jones, who burned the Quran.

We are going to have to think about antidotes to and answers for the new Principism. Because it’s not going to go away.

This week I quoted Paul Fussell’s masterwork, “The Great War and Modern Memory.” He spoke of what came to be, in Europe, the enduring symbolic meaning of the summer of 1914, the last summer before the war. It was the best in years, sunny and stormless, and later, in the trenches, the great writers of World War I, Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, would remember it as a demarcation point between innocence and horror. This is comparable to the poignantly beautiful Sept. 11, 2001, a day so clear you could see for miles, a day everyone in New York remembers as a demarcation point between one world and another.

Like many historians and writers on that war, but with greater style, Fussell noted how everyone was expecting something different. No one was expecting what happened. In July 1914, the big desk in the British cabinet room had been strewn with maps on which were marked battle lines for the coming war. It was to be in Ulster, where everyone had long known an Irish civil war was about to break out: “Enter Sir Edward Grey, ashen faced, in his hand the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia.”

Those in American politics have long had their desks strewn with economic reports and unemployment data, because everyone knew the election is about one thing, the economy. There were stories, just before 9/11/12, about how foreign policy had disappeared as an issue. And now this will be, to some serious degree, a foreign policy election. History is a trickster, it never loses its power to take us aback. We know this in the abstract. It’s somehow always startling in the particular.