Bush on Immigration

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

There is nothing wrong with a former president of the United States, and former leader of a great party, coming forward to speak out on a pressing national question. In fact it’s part of a former president’s job to be serious in this way, and if he doesn’t do it every day but holds his fire for potentially key moments it can be helpful.

Nothing George W. Bush said yesterday in Dallas did any harm. He spoke earnestly and in broad support of immigration, and in so doing reminded everyone that there are many flavors of Republican, and many views within the party. His remarks were portrayed, as he surely knew they would be, as chiding of his party at a moment when it is low and probably needs more inspiring than rebuking.

Which reminds us of what went wrong last time.

In 2006, when he was president, Mr. Bush brought forward what he called comprehensive immigration reform, a huge bill that, in its sprawl, managed to be not fully coherent, deeply unaware of the moment, and thoroughly anxiety producing. When the president was opposed—Republicans on the ground felt under siege from what was essentially an open border, one Mr. Bush’s administration had failed to make progress in controlling—he was surprised. His White House then took an unfortunate tack and turned on the party. Opponents of Mr. Bush’s bill, to hear him and his supporters tell it, didn’t have a point, or points, and they weren’t quite worthy of persuasion or appeals to reason. They would instead be accused of moral failings, especially bigotry.

President Bush himself suggested opponents of his bill were unpatriotic: “They don’t want what’s right for America.” His ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez accused those opposing the bill of wanting “mass deportation,” and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill were “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffered from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

It was morally smug and snotty and did not generate support. Instead it solidified opposition, and further broke a party already fracturing from the wars and high spending.

A note to Republicans: Don’t let that happen again.

The coming immigration debate should be marked by reason and persuasion, not breast beating and manipulation. That’s how you bring Republicans along.

One of the biggest things often missing in politics? Tact. Simple tact.

This is one of many reasons it would be good to see more Republican women rise and speak for the party: because they still have more of it than the men.

The Drawn-Out Crisis: It’s the Obama Way

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The president’s inviting Mitt Romney for lunch is a small thing but a brilliant move. It makes Mr. Obama look big, gracious. It implies the weakened, battered former GOP nominee is the leader of the Republican Party—and if the other party has to have a leader, the weakened, battered one is the one you want.

Mr. Romney is not the leader of the party; he left no footprints in the sand. There is no such thing as Romneyism, no movement of which he’s the standard-bearer. Nor is he a Washington figure with followers. Party leaders already view him as a kind of accident, the best of a bad 2012 lot, a hiccup. The bottom-line attitude of Republican political pros: Look, this is a man who’s lived a good life and would have been a heck of a lot better than Obama, and I backed him. But to be a successful Republican president now requires a kind of political genius, and he didn’t have it and wasn’t going to develop it. His flaws as a candidate would have been his flaws as president. We dodged a bullet.

Republicans may be the stupid party, but they’re not the sentimental one. Democrats often like their losers. Republicans like winners, and they find reasons to be moved by them after they’ve won.

To the extent the GOP has an elected face, it is that of Speaker John Boehner. And he is precisely the man with whom Mr. Obama should be having friendly lunches. In fact, the meal with Mitt just may be a clever attempt to obscure the fact that the president isn’t really meeting with those with whom he’s supposed to be thrashing out the fiscal cliff.

At a news conference Thursday, Mr. Boehner looked frustrated. In fact, he looked exactly the way he looked at the end of the debt-ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011—like someone who wanted a deal, was willing to gamble to get it, and failed. There has been “no substantive progress” toward an agreement, he said. In a meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and in a Wednesday night phone call with the president, he saw no willingness to reform or cut entitlement spending. What about an increase in tax rates? “Revenues are on the table.”

In fact the Democratic position on entitlements seems to have hardened.

In a way Mr. Boehner’s press conference was the usual, but in a way it was sad, because it harkened back to the protracted, harum-scarum and unsatisfying fiscal negotiations of the recent past.

The election is over, a new era begins—and it looks just like the old one. A crisis is declared. Confusion, frustration, and a more embittered process follow. This is . . . the Obama Way. Nothing has changed, even after a yearlong campaign that must, at times, have looked to him like a near-death experience. He still doesn’t want to forestall jittery, gloom-laden headlines and make an early deal with the other guy. He wants to beat the other guy.

You watch and wonder: Why does it always have to be cliffs with this president? Why is it always a high-stakes battle? Why doesn’t he shrewdly re-enact Ronald Reagan, meeting, arguing and negotiating in good faith with Speaker Tip O’Neill, who respected very little of what the president stood for and yet, at the end of the day and with the country in mind, could shake hands and get it done? Why is there never a sense with Mr. Obama that he understands the other guys’ real position?

It’s not as if Mr. Boehner and the Republicans wouldn’t deal. They’ve been weakened and they know it. A year ago they hoped winning the Senate and the presidency would break the stasis. They won neither. Mr. Obama not only was re-elected, it wasn’t that close, it was a clean win. If the president was clear about anything throughout the campaign, it was that he wanted to raise taxes on those he calls the rich. So you might say that a majority of the American people just endorsed that move.

No one would know this better than Mr. Boehner, who has risen to where he is in part because he’s good at seeing the lay of the land and admitting what’s there.

The president would only benefit from showing he has the command and capability to meet, argue, press and come to agreement. It would be heartening to the country to see this, and would impress the world. And the Republicans would like to get it done.

In narrow, purely political terms, they need two things quickly. One is that it now looks to everyone—even to them!—like the entire domestic agenda of the Republican Party is tax-cutting, and any party’s agenda has to be bigger than that. The other is that when they try to protect people from higher tax rates they always look like Diamond Jim Brady enjoying the company of the wealthy and not noticing anybody else. Republicans need time to work through, within their party, their own larger economic stands.

So they’re weakened, they want this particular crisis to end, and they badly need to win entitlement reforms that would, in the end, buttress the president’s historical standing—and the president isn’t working with them every day and making a deal?

*   *   *

Here’s just one thing they should be discussing. Mr. Obama wants to raise tax rates on those earning $250,000 or more, as we know, on the assumption that they are “the rich.” But if you are a man with a wife and two kids making that salary and living in Westfield, N.J., in no way do you experience yourself to be rich, because you’re not. You pay federal payroll and income taxes, state income and sales taxes and local property taxes, and after the mortgage, food and commuting costs you don’t have much to spare.

Tighten the squeeze on that couple, and they’ll change how they live. They’ll stop sending the struggling son to a neighborhood tutor, they’ll stop going out to dinner once a week, they’ll cut off the baby sitter, fire the guy who once a month does yard work, and hold back on new clothes. Also the guy will peruse employment ads in Florida and Texas, potentially removing from blue-state New Jersey his heartening, taxpaying presence.

It really is worth a discussion, isn’t it? A closer look at the numbers? Shared thoughts on how Americans really live?

*   *   *

In an interview last year, shortly after the debt-ceiling debate, Mr. Boehner spoke of how much he’d wanted a deal. He wanted entitlement reforms, cuts in spending, was happy to increase revenues through tax reform. He thought our fiscal realities the great issue of his speakership, said he meant it when he told staffers if it resulted in the end of his speakership then so be it. He’d have walked out of Congress knowing “I did the right thing.”

That’s who Obama should be negotiating with—in good faith, and with his eye not on ideology but on the country.

Instead, it’s going to be a long four weeks. Scratch that, it’s going to be a long four years.

Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is not a great film, and people shouldn’t feel muscled, in the general approbation, into saying it is. But it’s a good one, which is always a surprise and delight these days, and it is good it’s being so widely appreciated. This is Hollywood taking history seriously, taking political history seriously, and even showing respect for politics itself. That should be encouraged.

The film has a dark palette. Spielberg got a little carried away with Victorian darkness, when even then they had a sun. The period detail, how people dressed and rooms looked, is exquisite, and must have cost a lot. The direction is somber, maybe heavy and slow. Sometimes when Spielberg is trying to show he’s serious it’s an awkward thing to witness. The screenplay seems like chunks of a longer and maybe better work that had to be edited down and jammed into a reasonable run- time. There is a lot of one-speech-after-another, one-bit-of-jammed-in-exposition-after-another. But the script meets the challenge of communicating, as theatrically as possible, complex political calculations that couldn’t be shown and had to be spoken.

It feels churlish to be critical because the film tries so hard to be big in the best sense, to be a contribution to our civic life and to our understanding of ourselves as a nation.

The acting, as you’ve heard, is powerful. Daniel Day-Lewis is pretty wonderful. What is most remarkable is the look—the thick, rough hair, the hollow cheeks and kindly, abstracted air. It’s clear Day-Lewis studied the Mathew Brady sittings from Lincoln’s last months, when he no longer cared to look stern and dignified and instead allowed himself to look like what he was, a person operating at a certain benign remove.

Much has been said of Lincoln’s voice in the film. It struck me as good, in line with historical descriptions and right for a man of Lincoln’s height and build. Actually the voice is not that different from Henry Fonda’s in John Ford’s 1939 classic, “Young Mr. Lincoln.” Day-Lewis uses a fuller, more mature version of that voice. Most movingly, Day-Lewis seems to have mastered Lincoln’s physical presence, how he held himself and moved. He was a strong man but not a straight-backed, formal one. In her memoir, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, describes Mr. Lincoln throwing himself on the couch, picking up books and reading aloud. He often slouched and slumped, like someone who even physically didn’t have to prove his power.

But Day-Lewis really got Lincoln’s walk, or at least the way it’s been reported and described in the histories. Lincoln didn’t walk with the usual spring, but with the whole foot coming down at once. He had an odd, awkward gait, part shuffle, part soft stomp. I’ve never seen a theory for why he moved like that, so here’s mine: Lincoln didn’t learn to walk on streets, roads or lanes, he learned to walk in the wilderness on paths cut through woods. He learned to walk over rough roots jutting out of the ground, over rocks, through greasy mud. Truly, nobody paved the way for him. He got in the habit of placing his foot down flat so he wouldn’t be tripped up or lose his balance, and the habit followed him through life. In the film, as he clomps out of the White House for the last time, on his way to Ford’s Theatre, an usher watches him leave, with his funny walk. The way he watches him, as if he’s seeing for the first time the true size of Lincoln’s singularity, is moving.

If everyone goes see this film with a young person (about 12 or over), the young will get a history lesson that will help them understand America better and appreciate it more, and the old will have been entertained and encouraged Hollywood on more helpful paths. That would be good.

Family, Friends, Health and Freedom

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The I’s Have It

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

Ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

Sorry. Kidding! He didn’t say that.

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

And mean it. And deal.

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

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

Might we see that?

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

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.