Eleven/9/11

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

It was a beautiful day, that’s what everyone remembers. So clear, so crisp, so bright. It sparkled as I walked my 14-year-old son out to go to the subway that would take him to his new high school, in Brooklyn. He was now a commuter: a walk to the 86th Street subway station and then the 4 or 5 train downtown near the towers and over the river. That was about 7:30 in the morning. It was beautiful at noon when I went to mass at St. Thomas More church on 89th Street. And between those two events, his departure and the mass, the world had changed, changed utterly. After mass, at the rise of 86th Street, the day was so clear you could see all the way downtown to the towering debris cloud.

But it was beautiful. That was one of the heartbreaking elements.

*   *   *

The things I will never forget. Looking up at a silent TV screen as I returned email at my computer. Seeing a long-distance shot of the World Trade Center with smoke coming out of the side. Putting up the sound. Hearing a food cart vendor with a heavy accent saying to a reporter on the scene: “That was no small plane, that was a big jet, a jumbo jet.” Knowing it was true. Hearing the TV chatter that a pilot might have accidentally hit the tower. Knowing it was not true. Grabbing the phone to call my son’s school to make sure he had arrived, that he’d gotten there safe, that he hadn’t tarried or gotten off downtown to walk around because it was a beautiful day. Busy signal. Again. Busy. Calling a friend whose husband often worked downtown. No, she said, he’s in London. Talking with her as we watched the screen together and then the second plane went in, right before our eyes, and there was no denying what it was. Calling school. Busy. And then the phones went down.

And then the buildings fell. That was the thing, they heaved up and groaned to the ground and brought a world with them. We could have taken it if the buildings didn’t fall. That’s why the day was so uniquely a New York trauma, for all that happened in Washington and Pennsylvania: The buildings went down and we saw it. My friends saw the jumpers, who fled the flames. To this day they don’t talk about it. My friend saw the faces of the passengers on the first plane, so low did they fly by his building. He saw their faces in the passenger windows. He never told anyone about that, including his wife, until two years ago.

Hearing that that 20,000 or 30,000 people might have been in the buildings. Hearing something about the firemen—a lot of them died, a lot of them tried to charge up the stairs to the fire. The man standing on line in Murphy’s Market after mass. He was covered in Pompeii ash. He had walked uptown. He was standing there in shock with a bottle of water and a banana. The bad boys who hung out near a local school and were said to sell drugs: They took their big boom box and put in on the steps so people walking by could sit down and hear what was happening. I sat down and listened and when I left I said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and they nodded because they knew: They’d been gentlemen.

And, funnily, such a blur of images so vivid that years later you think you actually saw them when you didn’t. A few days after the attack, I read of someone seeing a transit worker or policeman in a car downtown, parked and motionless, and he had on the radio and it was blaring “Heroes,” and he was crying. I remembered it a few years later and found the Peter Gabriel version. “I can remember / Standing by the wall . . . And we kissed as if nothing could fall . . . We can be heroes . . . just for one day.” It still makes me weep, and when I hear it I see the transit worker or cop again, even though I never saw him.

*   *   *

Worried sick about my son and no way to reach him. And then miraculously the dead phone rang, at 3 p.m. My 14-year-old on the line at the phone at the school that was working that moment, other students crowded behind him. I am fine, he said, but we still don’t know everything that happened, tell me what you know. “It was Arab terrorists,” I said. And he muffled the phone and I heard him announce to the kids, “It was terrorism, an Arab group.”

“It appears to be over,” I said.

“The attack is over, it appears to be all over,” he said. On it went as I filled him in and he filled them in. He told them the towers and the Pentagon were hit but not the State Department, that was a rumor. He was calm, collected, in the middle of history.

He told me he would not get home tonight, all the bridges closed and public transportation stopped, he’d stay over, with some Manhattanite students, at a teacher’s house, he’d be home some time tomorrow, he’ll be fine, don’t worry.

He made it home the next day about noon. And he told me what he’d seen. The subway from Brooklyn to the city curved up over the East River, and everyone on it always turned to look at sparkling, majestic downtown Manhattan. And this day they all turned and they saw the dead cloud, the lost empty buildings, and they all went Oh. A long soft sigh: Oooohhhhh.

There is an unwritten story in how brave our children were that day, and have been since, and what that day was to them. But those who were adolescents or early teenagers on 9/11: they never talk about it. They took it all in but they never talk about it.

*   *   *

As for me, I notice that in the early years after 9/11, when they did their replays of the event on the news, I always used to watch with some kind of pain that was being worked out while it was being re-experienced. But now I can’t watch. Because it causes some kind of pain that is not going to be worked out, and that has to do more with what followed that day than the day itself.

But I want to end with the beauty of that day, and a parallel. I have been reading Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” He notes that those who were there remembered the summer of 1914, the months just before the start of World War I, as the most beautiful of their lives. Bright, clear, stormless—no sign of the harrowing trenches just around the corner, of the 7,000 a day who would be wounded or killed on the Somme alone, among British troops alone. “All agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral.” For the great writers who would fight the war, it was carefree, innocent. Siegfried Sassoon “was busy fox hunting,” Robert Graves climbing mountains in Wales, Wilfred Owen tutoring French boys in English near Bordeaux. “For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost.”

Like that beautiful September day, like dawn on September 11, 2001.

*   *   *

So that was my 9/11. The boy who returned, the world that was ended, the pictures that will never leave your mind. Like this one: A few weeks later I was pouring coffee for construction workers at St Paul’s church downtown and a guy came in and introduced himself. He was a member of the Iron Workers Local 40. They were dismantling the bottom of the towers. He read my columns online, he said. He took his coffee and came back later and in his hand was a paper bag and in the bag were a heavy little heart and a heavy little cross, just cut from the north tower. “I want you to have these,” he said. As I write they are on my desk, in front of me, burnt and bent but there.

Everyone Will Watch the Debates

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Some preliminary thoughts on the coming presidential debates, the first of which is Oct. 3, in 3½ weeks:

1. People will be watching.  Convention viewership may have been down, but almost every voter who can, will watch at least some of the debates.  Three reasons.  First, nothing else has moved the needle, the race has been neck and neck for months.  Second, a lot of people will use the debates to test and double-test their preliminary judgments.  Is Romney really strong enough for this job?  Is Obama really who I want to stick with?  Third, it’s a contest, it’s combat.  Someone will cross the goal line, one of them will beat the other.  Someone will emerge the champ, or at least an undamaged contender.  Unlike a convention, a debate is something a candidate can win right before your eyes.

So:  everyone will watch.  What do they hope for?  They’d like to think by the end, “That guy is a president” and turn it off and go to bed, resolved.  They will also accept, “My guy didn’t screw up!  It was a tie, but he didn’t lose, I’ll watch the next one.”

2. Everyone says Obama has the advantage because he’s a wonderful debater.  It’s not true.  There’s no evidence he’s ever been a wonderful debater.  He won the election in 2008, so people think, retrospectively, that he was great at debate.  But he wasn’t, he just never lost an inch to John McCain and seemed steadier, less scattered.  But he never said anything interesting.  In all the 2008 Democratic primary season and then in his presidential debates with Mr. McCain, Obama never offered a memorable moment or said a memorable thing, with one exception.  That was when he said, in response to a facetious comment by Hillary Clinton, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”  And that was memorable, in retrospect, because he let his inner rhymes-with-witch come out.  What Mr. Obama tends to be is unruffled, steady and cool.  But this can also come across as passive, uninterested and unforthcoming.

3. The incumbent labors at a disadvantage in many respects.  The first is that he has a record to defend.  He’s not promising a better future, he’s saying he did a good enough job to merit re-election, which will usher in a better future.  Everyone knows the economic facts:  There’s a lot that needs defending.

Second, all modern presidents are disoriented to some degree by the presidency, and the biggest way they become disoriented is that for 3½ years everyone around them has bowed to them, murmured compliments, been awed by them.  No one ever pushes back hard, puts down, fiercely challenges or insults a president.  Everyone around a president comforts him:  “The problems you face with such steely grace—Sir, I don’t know how you do it.”  This happens not only because White Houses are heavily staffed by suckups, courtiers and frightened people, it’s because White House staffers – and the presidents they serve – now hold too great a historical consciousness of the presidency.  They’re too much in awe of it.  They’ve all read their Lincoln, their FDR.  This man is their Lincoln, their FDR.   He’ll be in the history books.  Anyway, they treat him with much too much reverance and deference.  (With Lincoln, people on the street used to walk right into the house and ask him for a job.  They thought he worked for them!  It helped keep his head screwed on right.  It helped him become: Lincoln.)

What does this mean in terms of debate?  A challenger who pushes back hard, who shows he is not awed, not that impressed, who never crosses the line into rudeness but holds the line on real, sharp disagreement and lack of reverence, can startle the incumbent, rattle his cage, gain an advantage.  Remember when John Kerry went hard after President Bush in the debates in 2004?  Mr. Bush wound up spluttering: “It is hard work, it is hard work!”  Mitt Romney should keep all this in mind.

Does the incumbent have an advantage?  Sure.  Everyone already knows him.  Everyone knows he’s been president the past 3½ years and the world didn’t blow up.  Everyone knows he has a baseline ability to be president because he’s been president.

4. Too much has been made of likability.  Mr. Romney should not be thinking about that.  America is in a crisis.  It needs to get out of it, shake it off, move forward.  Americans want leadership.  What Mitt Romney has to show is command, talent, resolve.  He has to move with firmness, strength.  Americans don’t really want someone they’d like to go out and have a beer with, they want someone who can help them afford a beer.  First things first.   Romney at this point should just forget likability—let’s just say he’s likable enough.  He needs people to see certainty, guts, ability and heft.  Americans are tired of trying to like these guys, they want to respect them.  They’d like to feel honest awe.

The Democrats’ Soft Extremism

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he’s thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There’s too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We’ve done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

There were many straw men. There were phrases like “the shadow of a shuttered steel mill,” which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you’ve heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.

It was stale and empty. He’s out of juice.

His daughters have grown beautiful.

As for Joe Biden, I love him and will hear nothing against him. He’s like Democrats the way they used to be, and by that I do not mean idiotic, I mean normal—manipulative only to a normal degree, roughly aware of the facts of normal life, alert to and even respecting of such normal things as religious faith. I wish he did not insist on referring to his wife as “Dr. Jill Biden.” I’m sure she has many doctorates, but so do half the unemployed in Manhattan.

John Kerry was on fire. It was the best speech of his career. He drew blood on foreign policy: “Talk about being for it before you were against it!” Obama will take that message, on Afghanistan, into debate.

*   *   *

Was it a good convention?

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn’t what you love if you’re American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don’t see all this the same way, and that’s fine—that’s what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge “No!” vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration’s own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn’t liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I’ve never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

“Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception,” Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim?

What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn’t strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don’t think the American people want that. Because, actually, they’re not extreme.

*   *   *

Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can’t reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.

Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut?

Here’s what I’m seeing the past 10 years. The baby boomers have been supporting their grown children and their aged parents. They are stressed, stretched and largely uncomplaining, because they know that as boomers—shallow, selfish—they’re the only generation not allowed to complain. And just as well, as complaints are the only area of national life where we have a surplus. But they are spiritually and financially holding the country together, and they’re coming to terms with the fact that it’s going to be that way for a good long time. They’re going to take a keen interest in where Medicaid goes.

Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.

*   *   *

So: was it a good convention? We’ll know by the polls, by the famous bounce, or lack of it. A guess? Dead-cat bounce. Just like the Republicans got.

Maybe Mr. Clinton made a bigger, more broadly positive impression than I suspect; maybe a sense the Democrats were extreme will take hold. People left both conventions talking about only one thing: the debates. They know they didn’t move the needle in Tampa and Charlotte. The people in charge of politics aren’t so good at politics anymore.

The Democrats Rally

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The Democrats killed. The first night of their convention was a great success. The question is: Killed in the room or killed also in the country? We’ll get a sense of that through polls and comments over the next few weeks.

The elements of last night’s success:

The crowd was happy, attentive, responsive and moved. And there were many thousands of them. All eyes were trained on the stage. The Republican convention site last week never looked so full, so crowded and full of human passion. The Democrats had animal density.

They stayed on schedule—they weren’t going to allow the audience’s engagement to dissipate.

The speakers were uniformly interesting, some absolutely first-rate and some—that would be you, Ted Strickland—sourly mean-spirited and ad hominem. But that was interesting too. It told you, again, how the Dems will spend the next eight weeks going at the Reps.

Highlights:

Julian Castro, smooth, handsome, bright, winning. “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?” was a great line because it cut to the bone of a certain kind of Republican cluelessness, and did it with humor. His conceding that Mitt Romney is not a bad man was clever—it made his subsequent sharp criticisms of Romney seem fair-minded, or at least lacking in animus. Castro and many other of the speakers were at great pains to get across a point that might be called We Are Spiritually Normal.

The Democratic Party is the party of abortion; it supports the widest possible interpretation of choice, and is heavily funded, literally, by the abortion industry. Abortion involves the killing of children. Sometimes Democrats speak of it, publicly, in such a way that it sounds like a small thing, a tooth extraction; sometimes they speak of it in a way that suggests it is a holy right, a high value, a good thing. Because of this, there’s a shadow of weirdness over their party, and it’s been there for at least a quarter century. When Kathleen Sibelius walked out to speak I did not think, “There’s the HHS Secretary,” I literally thought, “There’s abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sibelius, who decided to make the Catholic church bow to her need to spread abortion-inducing drugs.”

Julian Castro and other speakers were at pains to dispel the Shadow of Weirdness. Twice he spoke of his grandmother making the sign of the Cross as he went to school. (There were a lot of babies and children in the audience, and their parents held them tenderly, and I’m telling you, even those babies were watching that stage.) Anyway, Castro and others were at pains to communicate that they do not see themselves as cruelly outside the mainstream. He seemed like a very nice young man, and certainly gifted in terms of political communication.

Too smooth? Yes. But there’s a lot of too smooth on the other side, too. It’s the thing that marks the rising generation of political stars 30 to 50, they’re all too smooth. Remember when you were learning “Now I know my ABC’s . . .”? They learned it too, but on a teleprompter.

*   *   *

Michele Obama has turned into a great political performer, and her speech Tuesday night was remarkable and memorable. She is a strong woman. People have asked the past few years where the Barack Obama of 2008 went. I have wondered where the Michele Obama of 2008 went. She was so compelling and interesting on the trail that year, so proud and eager and, occasionally, awkward, which only underscored her good points. Then in the White House she often looked unhappy, resentful, going through the motions. Last night she was none of those things: ’08 Woman was back.

She was beautiful with an almost eloquent beauty, she was dazzling in that salmony, orangey dress, she spoke clearly and with complete confidence, and she enjoyed, it seemed, being the focus of all eyes. The first half of her speech was socially conservative and could have been given to great hurrahs at the Republican convention, although oddly enough from a Republican it would have sounded preachy. She sounded like a woman who respects standards, had good role models, came from a home that was full of love and discipline, and whose lack of the broadest or richest material comforts did not leave her bitter or misshapen, it left her committed. The second half of the speech was more political and partisan and might have been the point at which you started daydreaming. I continued listening because I am interested in how she thinks, and how she sees what is at issue. She did not seem at all apologetic as she spoke of her husband’s leadership. She seemed proud, and protective.

Near the end, as she spoke of her daughters, her eyes seemed to fill with tears.

In the camera cutaways many of the audience’s eyes were full of tears.

*   *   *

Rhetorically, a number of Democrats last night used the old ways, the old tricks: call and response, involving the crowd, making them yell “Yes!” and “No!,” bringing them into chants that energized the speaker and enhanced the effectiveness of the text. It was great stuff. Props to Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland: the “Forward, not back!” chant was the best of the night.

They ended the night with a prayer.

I remember when Republicans did better conventions than Democrats—better staging, better films, better speeches, more fun. So far, looking at both last week and last night, that’s being turned on its ear.

Does any of this matter? Will it affect the outcome? We’ll see. But if I’m a Democrat, I’m looking at last night and thinking, “That didn’t hurt. That didn’t hurt at all.”

Waiting for Sinatra

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

I was out of the room when I heard the phrase ‘savage disparities’ and knew it was Cory Booker, mayor of Newark.  He spoke in favor of the platform.  He had the kind of speech that you really agree with if you really agree with him.  He is an obviously bright man who respects the role of business and is considered by reformers to be on the right side of the school reform debate.  He has a gift for memorable phrases and seems highly literate in the quick if shallow way of modern persons.  A lot of people I like like him.  To me he always seems faintly fraudulent.

*   *   *

The headline, for me, at 6pm in the East:  this floor has been WHIPPED.  It has been instructed.  They have been told to look alert and they do.  They have been told to bring the babies and they did.  They’ve broken out into chants of “USA! USA!”, just like the Republicans.  This is a hotter floor than the Republicans had, it’s more varied racially and ethnically and also more colorful – more people dressed in red, white and blue, shoes to hat, more people in crazy donkey hats, more wearing dozens of buttons.  They look happy to be there, and a lot of them looked grateful, like it was their first convention.  The platform passed with a bellow of unanimous Ayes, not a peep for No.  The Democrats show greater affection for eachother on the podium as they walk on and off the stage, as if they’re members of a team and the team is big.  Man this is a well drilled group.

There are moments of cognitive dissonance.  For instance, the platform that passed so unanimously contains, as we all now know, no reference to God.  In ’08 they had a mention, which this year’s drafters most likely would have noticed and removed, for whatever reason or reasons.  It’s their platform, they have the right.  But when they opened the convention with a series of prayers the camera cut to a woman holding her hands together tightly, fingers straight up, not like people who usually pray usually hold their hands but like a 15th century saint on an old fashioned mass card.  She looked nutty, or like a person imitating something she thought might be appropriate, or attractive to clingers.

*   *   *

I wanted to say the other day that the music of all our political events now, including last week’s convention, is like some kind of semi-head-banging rock.  This of course is supposed to be cool, but to the young it would not be cool – it’s so 80’s and 90’s, and not in a good way – and to the old it is discordant, just another thing they have to put up with.  But this sort of Vulgar Male Rock is now the background music of our civic events, our speeches and rallies.

It speaks of…well, the general cultural vulgarity of the moment.  It reflects the tastes of political consultants, who are by nature uniformly ignorant, though clever.

If they had a brain in their heads they would play, at the next big rally in Ohio or Florida, nothing.  For just a minute or two.  Let people in the crowd hear the crowd.

And then, suddenly, Sinatra.  A Nelson Riddle arrangement.  “The best is yet to come, and babe won’t it be fine…”

Mellow.  Music you can think to.  Music you’re grateful to hear.

Why Sinatra?  Because he actually is cool.

The Last Convention?

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Some post-Tampa thoughts.

1. I think Charlotte is blending into Tampa and Tampa into Charlotte. The conventions were perversely scheduled—no time between them, no post-convention afterglow in which people could mull, consider, remember what was said, reflect upon a line, a gaffe, a revealing little stumble. The other day it was all Romney-speech-Romney-speech, soon it will be Clinton-speech-Clinton-speech and oh-yes-Obama-speech. I think normal Americans will experience it as One Week This Team Yells, the Next Week That Team Yells. And they will remember it as a yelling blur where nothing became clarified.

2. I never before came away from a convention thinking, “I have witnessed the end of the big four-day national convention,” but I did this time, and it added a layer of poignancy to everything because I wasn’t alone. There was a sense of an ending in Tampa. I left thinking: “No great party will ever tie up a great American city for a solid week again.” You know all the reasons conventions seem over—there’s no actual struggle on the floor, everything has already been decided, everything seems prefabricated, the speeches are timed and vetted within an inch of their life.
You’ve seen the evidence that conventions are over in the plummeting viewership, and the shrug-shouldered irony of the reporters and correspondents. Something poignant there too. The network and newspaper editors, producers and reporters who were sent to the convention are by and large at the top of their field, meaning they’re 40 and 50 and 60. They remember when conventions meant something—floor fights, gavels banging at 2 a.m., last-minute calls to the Michigan delegation to change the vote. “Ohio passes!” More or less spontaneous demonstrations. Drunken delegates—oh, how much more stilted America has become with its water swilling! In 1976, not all that long ago, no one really knew going in exactly who was going to be the Republican nominee, Ford or Reagan. And everyone misses that, the mystery and the struggle, and no one is satisfied with these three- or four-day re-enactments.

3. But members of a great political party have to meet every few years—they have to get to know each other, they have to meet their rising figures, and they have a right to show their stuff to America and the world. One wonders what the parties will do, how they’ll sort this out. Someone told me this week of a party elder’s comment as he reflected on Tampa. He said the convention cost about $100 million, and he could think of a lot of better ways to spend that money with an election coming. This will be an interesting story in the future, how it all evolves.

4. I am seeing the Romney speech as good enough, did no harm, rocked no boats, but I’m starting to see it as a bit of a missed opportunity, too. Romney did nothing to jar his support, to make those who think they’ll vote for him question their decision. But he didn’t do enough to make those leaning toward him make the jump. I think leaners wanted Romney to give them more reasons to vote for him. I ran into a lot of people the past few days who I could tell really wanted to say, “I gotta tell you, when Romney said that thing about such-and-such I started to really think I’ll vote for him.” But they never said it, not once. They talked about other people’s speeches. Marco Rubio made a big impression. Chris Christie is being put down a lot by members of both parties—selfish, shouldn’t have made it about him. When people like Christie, they call him burly, a big guy who looks like an American. When they don’t like him, they call him fat. The past few days they were using the f-word. And everyone of course had an opinion on Clint Eastwood.

5. A probably final thought on that. I liked his performance, for a number of reasons—it was wild, unscripted, surprising, fun. And not without meaning: He said some things in there. But what Eastwood’s appearance unleashed was even better. When Twitter blew up and the pushback began it made me laugh out loud. I liked the president’s tweet: “This chair is taken.” But the sheer joy and wit and sarcasm and pushback and defense that erupted was . . . well, it’s like what politics used to be like, full of fight and cleverness. Our politics now are superficial and grim. They used to be superficial and full of vim, and vigor too. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s kind of a sin not to enjoy life, and politics is part of life.

Republicans Join the Battle

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Tampa, Fla.

Two days in, I had no faith in this convention. The hurricane tore apart plans and affected everyone’s mood. Normal chaos became heightened anxiety. On the floor, the delegate seats had too much space between them, which removed the kind of animal density that speakers in big halls need. The weird, excessive security left the areas around the Forum and the Convention Center almost empty of people and traffic. It looked like the aftermath of a dirty bomb, when everyone had fled. A convention is supposed to be full of humans and hustle and bustle, and protesters, too, because this is America and protesters are part of the crazy zest of a great party convening.

America is always going over the top. We have gone over the top on security. Stop already. Life is risk. Be prudent, take precautions, but live.

Anyway, it took longer than usual for the gathering to find a rhythm. The first night’s addresses were fine but didn’t quite scour, as Abe Lincoln said of a speech that fell short. But the second night lifted everything up. Wednesday it became a real convention. All of a sudden there was joy, and fight.

*   *   *

It started with Mike Huckabee. He is a performer, he knows how to do this, and he made the audience listen. But he is also a policy person and a veteran campaigner who knows the base. He addressed the Mormon issue without ever saying “the Mormon issue,” and he hit hard on cultural issues. President Obama, he said, is the only “self-professed evangelical” in the race, yet “he tells people of faith that they have to bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. Friends . . . let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me.”

That was electric. Every speaker afterwards got to bounce off the energy Mr. Huckabee left in the room.

Condi Rice was a star. She took the role of accomplished and knowledgable public instructor, boiling down the conservative critique of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy. What are they upset about? That he’s not serious, that he doesn’t understand what America must be in the world. The great unanswered question now is where America stands. When the world doesn’t know, it becomes “a more chaotic and dangerous place.” Interestingly, she scored the president on international economic policy. We are “abandoning the playing field” on trade, “and it will come back to haunt us.”

In the media, her presence at the convention is seen as a comeback. But Ms. Rice is an iconic figure, and iconic figures don’t come back because they don’t leave. Her role at this convention was prominent. Good, she is an authentically inspiring figure.

New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez was a revelation. I’d never seen her speak. She came across as tough, funny, able, smart. She’s like the prosecutor in a show with a name like “CSI: Child Victims Unit”—the no-nonsense Latina who tells the detectives to make the call and get the perp. She did something Republicans love, telling the story of how she once went to lunch to hear some political guys out and realized at the end, to her shock, that she was a Republican. It was like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the 2004 convention. He told of being new in America. He saw Richard Nixon talking about free enterprise and asked a friend, “What party is he?” On being told, he said, “Then I am a Republican.” The only line in 2004 that brought down the house.

Anyway, watch this woman. She’s a star, too.

*   *   *

The most important speech Wednesday was Paul Ryan’s. America was meeting him. I won’t quote at length, since it’s all over the Internet and you already know the lines that scored—the college kid and the Obama poster, the elevator music. Great stuff.

But here’s what was important. Mr. Ryan started awkward, got his sea legs, settled down, and by the time he was finished he’d made Mr. Obama look tired and old. He made the administration sound over. He made it sound so yesterday.

The speech was solidly done—three acts, humor, and it all sounded true of him. It was serious, an indictment of the way things are and a declaration of hope.

A commentator of the left told me, afterward, that he thought it the most “ideological” convention speech he’d heard in decades, all that stuff about “central planners.” I said it seemed to me not like ideology but philosophy, that while central planner is a 20th-century phrase, what it conveys—that an elite professional governing class far away is more likely to wreak havoc than be constructive—is not only basic conservative thinking but straight out of the Federalist Papers. Mr. Ryan was not ideological. He was conservative.

And yet. He seemed very young up there. And the teleprompter forced him to shift his eyes from screen to screen and deliver the good line, plonkingly, to the center screen. The crowd loved him and conservatives love him, but he is going to have to work very hard to break through to America.

*   *   *

Night three was good in different ways. The Friends of Mitt who showed up to speak for him painted a better picture of his personal virtues than has ever been painted. The Romney family film was beautiful and touching. Clint Eastwood was funny, endearing—”Oprah was crying”—and carries his own kind of cultural authority. “It’s time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.” He was free-form, interesting—you didn’t quite know what was going to come next—strange and, in the end, kind of exhilarating. Talk about icons. The crowd yelling, “Make my day,” was one of the great convention moments, ever.

Mitt Romney’s speech? The success of the second night of the convention left people less nervous about the stakes. Nobody expected a great one. There was a broad feeling of, “Look, giving great speeches is not what Mitt does, he does other things.”

He had to achieve adequacy. He did.

It was a speech that seemed assembled by people who love pictures but not words. And that will limit a speech.

Coming down the aisle like a president at a State of the Union was meant to make you picture him as president. He began to speak at 10:36, a little late for some viewers in the East. It could not be accused of being an applause-line speech. He spoke compellingly of the centrality of faith in his life.

Mr. Romney always looks to me like a kindly, well-intentioned and intelligent man. That’s how he looked Thursday night. There are big policy differences between him and the president.

And so the battle is, on the Republican side, formally joined. Next week, the Democrats in Charlotte.

*   *   *

A very smart Republican, a veteran and unromantic surveyor of the political scene, told me we are about to find out whether this year is 1976 or 1980—if what we have just witnessed is a harbinger of change, or the change itself.

We’ll know in 9½ weeks. You’re bored with politics? Kid, right now is when it gets interesting.

Without Boundaries

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Something so poignant about the end of a convention, something touching in a way you can’t put your finger on.  Empty lobbies, empty cab lines, the long line at security at the airport, with people, especially cameramen, slackjawed with fatigue.  At Delta check-in a couple had two huge bags open on the floor, their personal contents spilling out as they tore through trying to remove items to make the airline weight limit.  What we saw in the bags:  wine bottles, magazines, newspapers from the convention, underwear, swag, swag swag.  The people on line made loud sighs.  A delegate with a wheely breezed by and said, “If you remove the newspapers you save, like, seven pounds.”  Everyone wanted to keep the history of where they were.

At security, in the magnetometer, the woman who told me to stand with my arms above my head said, when I got through, “You’re all tired.”  I said, “It’s true.”  She was sixty-ish, short reddish hair, hearty.  She said, “I know you.  You still writing?”

I said, “Still doing it after all these years,” and I touched her arm and we smiled.

“Well I watch you.  Doin’ good,” she said, encouragingly.

Now I’m in the Delta lounge, where an attractive and chicly dressed but loud young woman is holding conference calls.  Her tone is warm but…imperious.  She’s getting the people on the other end of the line to give her “the numbers.”  I wonder what I always wonder when I witness moments like this.  Should I tell her?

She doesn’t care that the dozen or so of us in the lounge all can hear her, that we all, in fact, are forced to listen to her.  And we don’t want to hear her conference call, nor witness how she manipulates the people on the other end of the conversation.  Should I tell her that, like so many in her generation, she has boundary problems?  She doesn’t understand that there is her and her body and her space, and then there is us and our bodies, and our space doesn’t really want to be invaded by her space.  I’m not sure I’m being clear, but people in their 20s and 30s now often don’t have a tidy sense of their space and your space, and how your space doesn’t wish to be violated by theirs. They think everyone wants to listen to them.  They think everyone is lucky to listen to them.  We might learn something.

She just vigorously snapped up her MacBook,  and strode away.  In a second I will make eye contact with the other people in the lounge and give them  the look we give.