One Week Later–III

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Thoughts from an unnamed U.S. senator:

“We’re sitting here in shambles. We need a strategy and a game plan. The strategy starts with: The conservative movement must be able to speak to Americans where we’re not scaring them. Hispanics should be a natural Republican constituency, women too, and youth. But without leadership and strategy it won’t work.”

“Right now it’s still pointing fingers—the polls were wrong, etc. There’s plenty of blame to spread around, but it won’t help.” A “circular firing squad” is counterproductive.

What will help is privately defining what didn’t work and isn’t working, and incorporating what you’ve learned. “The Romney campaign was dumb. It was political malpractice that they didn’t early on go on offense on Bain. I never saw a list of how many companies they helped and created and made competitive.” That list, the senator said, should have been well known to the voters. And Romney’s personal qualities should have been communicated to counter the Democratic onslaught on his character. “This is a good man who got painted as a bad one.”

As a former and likely future candidate, the senator is sensitive about the amount of blame going to unsatisfactory candidates. “There’s something in that,” but if you want to aim at a larger and more recurring problem, “this professional political and campaign class is the real culprit. They’re just there to get a cut of the billions spent. Candidates come and go [to them]. That’s why they love self-funders”—wealthy candidates. “You don’t even have to get ‘em to the fundraisers! We have a real problem with this whole political campaign class. They just have to be purged.”

Will they be? Probably not, the senator says. They’ll diffuse responsibility. “They’re all pointing fingers at some of the other people who deserve some of the blame.” Anyway, “who do we have who would take their place?”

The senator told a story of a “solid” U.S. Senate hopeful in the 2012 GOP primaries. The candidate seemed “perfect for the state.” He began to hire staff, including a strategist with the right experience and deep statewide knowledge. A rival national political operative with a grudge against the strategist immediately inundated the hopeful with “30 calls and emails” from potential backers telling him he’d kill his own chances with that strategist. The hopeful got scared off and hired someone else. His candidacy began to wobble, and the end result was the election of an unpopular incumbent.

The senator is thinking about the most effective ways to communicate the Republican message. There’s a lesson in Wisconsin’s governor and his battle with government unions. “Scott Walker had the right policy but he didn’t try to jam it through—he persuaded, he educated, he reached out. We have to stop alienating people, we have to inform and persuade and win the argument.”

The senator believes the “war on women” trope succeeded to some degree in 2012 not because it was inherently powerful but because it wasn’t answered. Candidates tried to shy away from it. Directness would have been more effective. “We gotta be clear, we gotta look them in the eye, the young women who are concerned, and say, ‘Look, we are not against anyone buying contraceptives!’”

The big question: “Are we still a center-right country, or have we gone over some tipping point? But that question can’t be answered at this time, because we’ve been so hapless at communicating conservative values and principles.” The Republican Party in 2012 was so bad at making clear what it stands for, it actually can’t be sure that the voters rejected what it stands for.

The party must define its goals. “Don’t pop immediately into policy prescriptions.” As the senator sees it, priority No. 1 should be, “How do we first not alienate?” Priority 2: “How do we expand our coalition” with a particular eye to women, Hispanics, and the young.

“The big things first, the policy things follow from that.”

Does the senator sound like a moderate Republican, a RINO? In fact, it is someone who has enjoyed significant Tea Party support.

*   *   *

Thoughts from another unnamed U.S. senator:

“The Democrats really have beat us on the tactics of winning elections, how to slice and dice and message and get out the vote. They beat us there badly.” The Democrats also had better internal polling.

“Part of the Democratic narrative was the war on women, and some Republican candidates contributed to that, and it killed us with young women, particularly single women. That helped them peel off a lot of the electorate.”

The disastrous 2012 GOP Senate outcome had roots in the immediate past and comes down in part to candidate selection. In 2008, at the end of the Bush administration, and in 2009-10, during the rise of the Tea Party, Washington Republican leaders were anathematized by the base as “the establishment.” It became impossible for that establishment “to start clearing primaries.” Party professionals in D.C. were seen by the base as part of the problem, so they lost what authority they had.

The Democrats don’t have this problem: “[Chuck] Schumer can pick candidates and clear the way. But the [Republican] D.C. establishment can’t do it anymore without a complete backlash” from Republicans on the ground.

“We had to wait for the party primaries and then support the nominee.” This left the party with subpar candidates like Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana.

“Washington doesn’t have the juice anymore to help steer forward a good nominee.” A lot of local Republicans “would rather [nominate] a lightning rod who isn’t electable than someone who’s electable.”

The senator doesn’t know how this is going to get turned around, but is certain it must be.

There’s comfort in the new stars of the party who are women, including Sen.-elect Deb Fischer, who beat former Sen. Bob Kerrey in Nebraska, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, elected in 2010. “They’re gonna be big.”

One Week Later–II

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Last Tuesday was a promising loss. It should prompt a reckoning that would have come in 2016 anyway—an acknowledgment that the nation’s demographics are changing, its culture is changing, the Republican base is staying in place or shrinking, not growing. The GOP was going to face trouble at some point, why not face it now?

The loss was also a two-part shock to the system—a shock to the Republican political establishment and to the Republican base. Good things can happen after a shock. Old ways can be shattered, new ones emerge.

The establishment will have to start doing politics differently. For one thing, the GOP operative class’s assumption for 30 years now has been every election is about turning out the base. That’s over. Every election now will be about expanding and broadening the base. That means persuasion—friendly persuasion, arguments, interesting approaches—will have to take the place of the standard old approach, which is get the base excited about its issues, whatever they are, and get them to the polls.

The national party apparatus has grown too top-down in the way it does politics. It raises money up here, from the very wealthy, from Super PACs. It creates ads up here and drops them down there. The ads are created by people who haven’t lived a normal American life in two or three decades, or longer. Republican presidential campaigns now look like the famous picture of George W. Bush staring out the window of Air Force One at Katrina below. But campaigns can’t be done at 30,000 feet anymore. The Obama campaign just showed they’re won from the bottom up as well as the top down: not just with ads but with on-the-ground organization, real get-out-the-vote efforts, personal outreach and engagement.

The disaster called ORCA—the Romney campaign’s failed get-out-the-vote app—was top down. Boston conceived it, arranged it, kept it under wraps. Local volunteers tried desperately to work with it, and then gave up. The general attitude behind ORCA seemed top down—you tell us who’s voted, we’ll find out who hasn’t, you call them and tell ‘em we need ‘em. But what does that have to do with what motivates human beings? Isn’t Election Day a little late to tell people you need them?

The base in turn will have to yield up candidates who can be elected. They won’t be able to say anymore, “We like him and that’s enough.” Because it isn’t enough. They’ll have to say, “We like him but our knowledge of the state suggests they will not. We better consider someone we like just a little less but whose election by the entire state is just a little more likely.” Or else the Republican base will continue to lose, and if they do that they’ll be endangering the country they honestly, passionately love.

That would be strange, to do that.

Bottom line the Republican political establishment is going to have to become more human. The base is going to have to become more professional.

Their great, shared subject is: how to make the Grand Old Party grand again.

One Week Later–I

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

In the past week, long talks with distressed Republicans. They will be blue until after Thanksgiving I suppose, or Christmas. The past few days various sayings, quotes and phrases returned again and again, unprompted, to my mind. “You can’t cry in your beer.” An old Irish saying which means, of course, that you can’t just be sad. “Don’t mourn, organize.” Joe Hill, leader of the Wobblies. Again, don’t indulge your feelings, try to understand what happened and realize what you have, which is where you’re starting.

In connection with that, the conversation between two Democrats. The first to her close friend, a longtime activist: “Congratulations, you worked so hard, you won, now you don’t have to worry!” The activist was startled: “Do you realize Romney got almost 59 million votes?” That’s a lot of people, he said. It is. Bad campaign, poor national candidate, could never quite reach seriousness and make the conservative argument, and yet: 59 million votes. That ain’t nothin’.

“Although I too have tried to be a philosopher, happiness kept breaking through.” That was from Michael Oakeshott. Don’t get grim and grumble, we’re all lucky to be alive, and if you are a Republican who happens to find meaning in struggle then good, you’ve got a big struggle on your hands. “When circumstances change, I change. What do you do, Sir?” This is attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that clever man. Sometimes you have to see the reality around you and make changes to accommodate it. “Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.” That was the great Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, moralist, longtime foil of Disraeli. As Republicans look at their party, its meaning, and what needs to be changed, they must keep Gladstone in mind.

Finally, and I’m not quite sure why, the name of a book I never read, a novel, kept going through my mind. “How to Make an American Quilt.” You take what pieces of cloth are nearby and at hand, you cut them into squares. They’re all different sizes, fabrics, colors. You stitch them together and at the end you’ve got something beautiful and useful, an American art form made of different and disparate pieces woven into a whole.

As I write I remember a small but perhaps meaningful historical fact. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Karol Woytilwa, who would become Pope John Paul II, all had mothers who took in sewing. When they were young, all three future statesmen saw their mothers stitching together things that had come apart or never been joined. All three children went on to make history by joining together things that had been ripped apart, such as the East and the West.

Lots of women took in sewing in those days, of course. But to see your mother engaged in something so constructive, every day, bringing things together and making them new again—what children see stays in their minds. Anyway, it’s quilt-making time for the GOP.

‘People Are Afraid of Change’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney’s assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled nor reflected a Republican resurgence. Mr Romney’s air of peaceful dynamism was the product of a false optimism that, in the closing days, buoyed some conservatives and swept some Republicans. While GOP voters were proud to assert their support with lawn signs, Democratic professionals were quietly organizing, data mining and turning out the vote. Their effort was a bit of a masterpiece; it will likely change national politics forever. Mr. Obama was perhaps not joyless but dogged, determined, and tired.

Apart from those points, everything in my blog post of Nov. 5 stands.

So what does it all mean?

It’s hard to improve on the day-after summation of the longtime conservative activist Heather Higgins, of Independent Women’s Voice: “A majority of the American people believe that the one good point about Republicans is they won’t raise taxes. However they also believe Republicans caused the economic mess in the first place and might do it again, cannot be trusted to care about cutting spending in a way that is remotely concerned about who it hurts, and are retrograde to the point of caricature on everything else.” She notes that in exit polls Republicans won the “Who shares your values?” question but lost on the more immediately important “Who cares about people like you?” “So it makes sense that many . . . are comfortable with the Republicans providing a fiscal brake in the House, while having the Democrats ‘who care’ own the Senate and the Presidency. And that is what we got.”

Ms. Higgins wasn’t happy with it but accurately reported it

It is and has been a proud Republican assumption—a given, a faith—that we are a center-right country and, barring extraordinary circumstances, will tend to return to our natural equilibrium. That didn’t happen this time, for reasons technical, demographic and I think attitudinal: The Democrats stayed hungry and keenly alive to the facts on the ground. The Republicans worked hard but were less clear-eyed in their survey of the field. America has changed and is changing, culturally, ethnically—we all know this. Republican candidates and professionals will have to put aside their pride, lose their assumptions, and in the future work harder, better, go broader and deeper.

We are a center-right country, but the Republican Party over the next few years will have to ponder again what center-right means. It has been noted elsewhere that the Romney campaign’s economic policies more or less reflected the concerns of its donor base. Are those the immediate concerns of the middle and working classes? Apparently the middle class didn’t think so. The working class? In a day-after piece, Washington Post reporters Scott Wilson and Philip Rucker wrote: “As part of his role, [Paul] Ryan had wanted to talk about poverty, traveling to inner cities and giving speeches that laid out the Republican vision for individual empowerment. But Romney advisers refused his request to do so, until mid-October, when he gave a speech on civil society in Cleveland. As one adviser put it, ‘The issues that we really test well on and win on are not the war on poverty.’“

That is the authentic sound of the Republican political operative class at work: in charge, supremely confident, essentially clueless.

It matters when you show people you care. It matters when you’re there. It matters when you ask.

The outcome was not only a re-election but on some level and to some degree a rejection.

Some voted for Mr. Obama because he’s a Democrat and they’re Democrats, some because he is of the left and they are of the left. But some voters were saying: “See the guy we don’t like that much, the one presiding over an economy we know is bad and spending policies we know are damaging? The one who pushed through the health-care law we don’t like, and who can’t handle Washington that well? Well, we like that guy better than you.”

That’s why this election is a worse psychic blow for Republicans than 2008, when a confluence of forces—the crash, dragged-out wars, his uniqueness as a political figure—came together to make Barack Obama inevitable.

But he was not inevitable after the past four years. This election was in part a rejection of Republicanism as it is perceived by a sizeable swath of the voting public.

Yes, Mitt Romney was a limited candidate from a limited field. Yes, his campaign was poor. It’s also true that the president was the first in modern history to win a second term while not improving on his first outing. He won in 2008 by 9.5 million votes. He won Tuesday night, at last count, by less than three million.

Still.

Many things would have propelled Mr. Obama to victory, but one would be a simple bias toward stability, toward what already is. People are anxious, not as hopeful as they were. Two memories. One was a late-summer focus group of mothers who shop at Wal-Mart. One asked, paraphrasing, “If we pick Romney, does that mean we have to start over again?” Meaning, we’ve had all this drama since 2008, will that mean we’re back at the beginning of the crash and have to dig out all over again? The other is a young working mother in Brooklyn, a member of an evangelical church, who told me 10 days ago her friends had just started going for Mr. Obama. Why? “People are afraid of change right now.”

When America is in a terrible economic moment and the political opposition can’t convince people that change might be improvement, then something’s not working.

*   *   *

A big rethink is in order. The Republican Party has just been given four years to do it. They should get going. Now. For clarity they could start with essential, even existential, questions. Why does the party exist? What is its purpose? What is possible for it in the new America? How can it prosper politically while leading responsibly?

From there, the practical challenges. Some of these are referred to as “the woman problem” or “the Hispanic problem”—they presumably don’t like the GOP. But maybe they think the GOP doesn’t like them. What might be the reasons?

Those who say no change is needed, who suggest the American people just have to get with the program, are kidding themselves and talking in an echo chamber. What will they do if the same party comes forward in 2016 to the same result?

The great challenge for the Republican Party now is how to change its ways without changing its principles. Its principles are right and have long endured because they’re right. But do all the party’s problems come down to inadequate marketing, faulty messaging, poor candidates? Might some of it be policies, stands, attitudes?

That will be a subject here in the future. For now, in politics as in life, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. You have to respect reality. Which is where conservatism actually starts, seeing what is real.

Monday Morning

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

Obama and the storm, it was like a wave that lifted him and then moved on, leaving him where he’d been. Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina. The exact dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is over. One word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone knew it would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until now, just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.

But to the election. Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. He said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and spreading: They really want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election has taken on a new importance to them.

There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.

And there is Obama, out there seeming tired and wan, showing up through sheer self discipline. A few weeks ago I saw the president and the governor at the Al Smith dinner, and both were beautiful specimens in their white ties and tails, and both worked the dais. But sitting there listening to the jokes and speeches, the archbishop of New York sitting between them, Obama looked like a young challenger—flinty, not so comfortable. He was distracted, and his smiles seemed forced. He looked like a man who’d just seen some bad internal polling. Romney? Expansive, hilarious, self-spoofing, with a few jokes of finely calibrated meanness that were just perfect for the crowd. He looked like a president. He looked like someone who’d just seen good internals.

Of all people, Obama would know if he is in trouble. When it comes to national presidential races, he is a finely tuned political instrument: He read the field perfectly in 2008. He would know if he’s losing now, and it would explain his joylessness on the stump. He is out there doing what he has to to fight the fight. But he’s still trying to fire up the base when he ought to be wooing the center and speaking their calm centrist talk. His crowds haven’t been big. His people have struggled to fill various venues. This must hurt the president after the trememdous, stupendous crowds of ’08. “Voting’s the best revenge”—revenge against who, and for what? This is not a man who feels himself on the verge of a grand victory. His campaign doesn’t seem president-sized. It is small and sad and lost, driven by formidable will and zero joy.

I suspect both Romney and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part of why Romney looks so peaceful and Obama so roiled.

Romney ends most rallies with his story of the Colorado scout troop that in 1986 had an American flag put in the space shuttle Challenger, saw the Challenger blow up as they watched on TV, and then found, through the persistence of their scoutmaster, that the flag had survived the explosion. It was returned to them by NASA officials. When Romney, afterward, was shown the flag, he touched it, and an electric jolt went up his arm. It’s a nice story. He doesn’t make its meaning fully clear. But maybe he means it as a metaphor for America: It can go through a terrible time, a catastrophe, as it has economically the past five years, and still emerge whole, intact, enduring.

Maybe that’s what the coming Romney moment is about: independents, conservatives, Republicans, even some Democrats, thinking: We can turn it around, we can work together, we can right this thing, and he can help.

How Far Obama Has Fallen

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

So where are we? A softly catastrophic storm left us, in the Northeast, shocked at the depth and breadth of its power to destroy. Everyone who could be was hunkered down Monday waiting it out, and at first we hoped it might not be as bad as we’d been warned, because we’d all seen higher wind and harder rain. But the waters rose and wouldn’t stop, breaching dunes, overwhelming barriers, filling the tunnels and subways like a bathtub, as somebody said on TV. It was—is—a true crisis. So far, our political leaders have done pretty well. But the hard part will be from here on in—getting things up and operating again without the original adrenaline rush.

New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg, was sterling—a solid, unruffled giver of information whose news conferences were blessedly free of theatrics save for his gifted sign-language interpreter, who wowed a city and left the young evacuees in my apartment furiously signing “Where’s the coffee?” and “I think the baby needs to be changed.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was his usual compelling self, similarly informative. This is a man who knows a levy from a berm. He is one tough red-state player on a blue-state field. If Mitt Romney loses, will Mr. Christie garner Republican criticism for his hearty embrace of president Obama just days before the election? Yes, he will. Will it hurt him in Jersey? Not a bit. Will it help Jersey? Yes. They are cold and wet and running out of food in the house. Keep your friends close and your president closer.

The “I” of the storm was New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. He was equally competent and effortful but took the mildly hectoring tone of a kind of leftism that is now old. It involves phrases like “As I’ve long said.” I think this is the worst and I was appalled and when I was at HUD I handled storms and I learned a great deal and I saw we were prepared and I am relieved and I will work hard and I need you to know global warming is what I told you it was.

The winning politicians of the future will not be all about I. People don’t like it. They don’t want to have to wade past the ego to the info.

*   *   *

Which gets us to Tuesday. No one knows what will happen. Maybe that means it will be close, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe a surprise is in store. But the fact that Barack Obama is fighting for his political life is still one of the great political stories of the modern era.

Look at where he started, placing his hand on the Bible Abe Lincoln was sworn in on in 1861. It was Jan. 20, 2009. The new president was 47 and in the kind of position politicians can only dream of—a historic figure walking in, the first African-American president, broadly backed by the American people. He won by 9.5 million votes. Two days after his inauguration, Gallup had him at 68% approval, only 12% disapproval. He had a Democratic Senate, and for a time a cloture-proof 60 members. He had a Democratic House (256-178) with a colorful, energetic speaker. The mainstream media were excited about him, supportive of him.

His political foes were demoralized, their party fractured.

He faced big problems—an economic crash,two wars—but those crises gave him broad latitude. All of his stars were perfectly aligned. He could do anything.

And then it all changed. At a certain point he lost the room.

Books will be written about what happened, but early on the president made two terrible legislative decisions. The stimulus bill was a political disaster, and it wasn’t the cost, it was the content. We were in crisis, losing jobs. People would have accepted high spending if it looked promising. But the stimulus was the same old same old, pure pork aimed at reliable constituencies. It would course through the economy with little effect. And it would not receive a single Republican vote in the House (three in the Senate), which was bad for Washington, bad for our politics. It was a catastrophic victory. It did say there was a new boss in town. But it also said the new boss was out of his league.

Then health care, a mistake beginning to end. The president’s 14-month-long preoccupation with ObamaCare signaled that he did not share the urgency of people’s most immediate concerns—jobs, the economy, all the coming fiscal cliffs. The famous 2,000-page bill added to their misery by adding to their fear.

Voters would have had to trust the president a lot to believe his program wouldn’t raise their premiums, wouldn’t limit their autonomy, wouldn’t make a shaky system worse.

But they didn’t trust him that much, because they’d just met him. They didn’t really know him.

You have to build the kind of trust it takes to do something so all-encompassing.

And so began the resistance, the Tea Party movement and the town-hall protests, full of alarmed independents and older Democrats. Both revived Republicans and, temporarily at least, reunited conservatives.

Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect?

Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had “a gift,” as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn’t really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And—oddly—he didn’t seem to notice.

It is one thing to think you’re Lebron. It’s another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you’re Lebron.

And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren’t America-sized. They didn’t get the country so well.

It is a mystery why the president didn’t second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working.

He doesn’t do chastened. He didn’t do what Bill Clinton learned to do, after he took a drubbing in 1994: change course and prosper.

Mr. Obama may yet emerge victorious. There are, obviously, many factors in every race. Maybe, as one for instance, the seriousness of the storm has sharpened people’s anxieties—there are no local crises anymore, a local disaster is a national disaster—so that anxiety will leave some people leaning toward the status quo, toward the known.

Or maybe, conversely, they’ll think he failed to slow the oceans’ rise.

We’ll know soon.

Whatever happens, Mr. Obama will not own the room again as once he did. If he wins, we will see a different presidency—even more stasis, and political struggle—but not a different president.

When Americans Saw the Real Obama

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it’s all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn’t a mystery at all.

If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there’s a bloody and prolonged recount, it too will be because of Denver.

Nothing echoes out like that debate. It was the moment that allowed Mr. Romney to break through, that allowed dismay with the incumbent to coalesce, that allowed voters to consider the alternative. What the debate did to the president is what the Yankees’ 0-4 series against the Tigers did at least momentarily, to the team’s relationship with their city. “Dear Yankees, We don’t date losers. Signed, New Yorkers” read the Post’s headline.

America doesn’t date losers either.

Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn’t do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt. Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune.

What he couldn’t do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn’t afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.

But that’s what he did.

And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors—they weren’t there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn’t have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it’s never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.

*   *   *


A great and assumed question, the one that’s still floating out there, is what exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it?

Was it the catastrophic execution of an arguably sound strategy? Perhaps the idea was to show the president was so unimpressed by his challenger that he could coolly keep him at bay by not engaging. Maybe Mr. Obama’s handlers advised: “The American people aren’t impressed by this flip-flopping, outsourcing plutocrat, and you will deepen your bond with the American people, Mr. President, by expressing in your bearing, through your manner and language, how unimpressed you are, too.” So he sat back and let Mr. Romney come forward. Mr. But Romney was poised, knowledgable, presidential. It was a mistake to let that come forward!

Peggy Noonan’s Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Was it the catastrophic execution of a truly bad strategy? Maybe they assumed the election was already pretty much in the bag, don’t sweat it, just be your glitteringly brilliant self and let Duncan the Wonder Horse go out there and turn people off. But nothing was in the bag. The sheer number of people who watched—a historic 70 million—suggests a lot of voters were still making up their minds.

Maybe the president himself didn’t think he could possibly be beaten because he’s so beloved. Presidents are always given good news, to keep their spirits up. The poll numbers he’d been seeing, the get-out-the-vote reports, the extraordinary Internet effort to connect with every lonely person in America, which is a lot of persons—maybe everything he was hearing left him thinking his position was impregnable.

But maybe these questions are all off. Maybe what happened isn’t a mystery at all.

That, anyway, is the view expressed this week by a member of the U.S. Senate who served there with Mr Obama and has met with him in the White House. People back home, he said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn’t a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that’s the real Obama.

*   *   *


Which gets us to Bob Woodward’s, “The Price of Politics,” published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president’s key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn’t know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he’d been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he’d would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened. In time Republicans came to think he doesn’t really listen, doesn’t really hear. So did some Democrats. Business leaders and mighty CEOs felt patronized: After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like “window dressing.” One spoke of Obama’s surface polish and essential remoteness. In negotiation he did not cajole, seduce, muscle or win sympathy. He instructed. He claimed deep understanding of his adversaries and their motives but was often incorrect. He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner, was a “country club Republican.” He was often patronizing, which in the old and accomplished is irritating but in the young and inexperienced is infuriating. “Boehner said he hated going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures,” Mr. Woodward writes.

Mr. Obama’s was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for Republicans trying to negotiate with Republicans. Through it all he was confident—”Eric, don’t call my bluff”—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day.

They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized.

Mr. Woodward’s portrait of the president is not precisely new—it has been drawn in other ways in other accounts, and has been a staple of DC gossip for three years now—but it is vivid and believable. And there’s probably a direct line between that portrait and the Obama seen in the first debate. Maybe that’s what made it so indelible, and such an arc-changer.

People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen.

They didn’t see some odd version of the president. They saw the president.

And they didn’t liked what they saw, and that would linger.

Nobody’s Sleeping

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

BOCA RATON, Fla.—Nobody’s sleeping. That’s the real political headline now. Nobody working in the campaigns is sleeping. I talk to the press people, I talk to the surrogates, I talk to people running the campaigns and this is what the conversation is: “Are you getting any sleep?” “No.” I ask, “Do you have three different smartphones on the pillow next to you and even if you get to sleep at 2 o’clock, all night the smartphones are going beep and bop and boop and you hear them and the pillow vibrates and you look?” They laugh and say yes. One top campaign staffer told me he can get to sleep, but when he sleeps he dreams about work and when the alarm goes off he thinks: “I have to go to work but I’ve been to work all night!” How does this leave them feeling? How are their minds working? At “Face the Nation” this morning I said to Kevin Madden of the Romney campaign, “The election is in 16 days. How are you going to feel in 17 days?” He pulled from his pocket a smartphone and tapped an app. He showed me a running scroll count: The election is in 15 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes. Not that he’s counting.

The biggest thing you hear in a campaign now: “Do you have any Ambien?”

Nobody’s sleeping. Not journalists, either.

Are you sleeping?

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.