Peggy Noonan

It is good that Joe Biden is going to the Republican National Convention to hold high the flag of his party. People make fun of his gaffes, of his embarrassing verbal forays, but he’s no fool and he knows how to take it to the other guy. The speech he is working on, to be given in the heart of downtown, just across from the convention site, will be stirring and stentorian: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Tampa, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Tampon.'”

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I wish that were mine. It came in the mail from a Hollywood screenwriter, one of the gifted conservatives who quietly toil there.

This, amazingly enough, is how the campaign feels at the moment: both neck and neck and wide open. A week ago a longtime elected official, who’s been making the rounds in his swing state, told me he thought the national polls were correct and yet wrong. Americans aretelling pollsters they’ve already made up their minds, they know who they’re for. But, he said, he’s seeing a number of people who don’t feel fully satisfied with their decision, who aren’t certain they’ve made the right choice. They may change their minds. “Ten or 15%”, he guessed, “are still persuadable,” still open to argument.

If he is right, that’s big. It would be in line with the singular nature of this election year, and would explain what has been, so far, a fervor deficit.

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So, Tampa. No one can guess the highlights in advance, but some hopes:

That Gov. Chris Christie brings his Garden State brio, that he is bodacious, funny and pointed, and that people say, the next day, “Man, Obama—Christie really opened up a can of Jersey on him.”

That Sen. Rob Portman, whom many thought would, like Mr. Christie, have been a very solid vice presidential nominee, will get the best kind of revenge, which is constructive revenge. He is well placed to do for Mitt Romney what Ronald Reagan did for Barry Goldwater in 1964, which was make the case better than the nominee ever did.

It would be good to see Sen. Marco Rubio and talk about the meaning of things, the meaning of politics. He’s a young man in the big game. Why?

Paul Ryan will be exciting, somehow you know that in advance. But he should perhaps keep in the back of his mind something that hasn’t been mentioned much. People are saying—not as a criticism, not as a compliment, but musingly—two words: “He’s young.”

They’ve just had a bad experience with young, with President Obama. Mr. Ryan stands for big change in terms of programs, and people will be inclined to want some years in such a person. So he and his people should consider that 42 can be a plus or a minus, and think about how to enhance the former and lessen the latter.

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How will voters judge Mr. Romney’s speech? The answer comes in some questions:

Is it fresh? Is it true? Does it substantiate—add substance to—what we think we know of Mitt Romney? Does it deepen and broaden our understanding of him? Does it make us, as we listen, begin to see him as a possible president? Presidents are in our face 24 hours a day now. Is this someone we’d let in our living rooms for four years? Can he inspire?

Free advice is worth the price, and here goes:

If you want to lead America, you have to speak to the fix we’re in, and that means addressing spending. But economic probity has a friend called economic growth, and that is what people care so much about—jobs, opportunity, the competitive advantage conferred by good policies. Are we a vital nation able to grow, to take on our true size again?

Emphasis is everything. Emphasize dynamism.

Mr. Romney shouldn’t just repeat what he thinks but tell people why he thinks it, what life has taught him that formed his views.

He shouldn’t shy away from religion. Why should he? This is America. It was in the practice of his faith that Mr. Romney came, as a bishop of the Mormon church, to become involved in helping those with lives very different from his own. In an interview Thursday night on the Catholic network EWTN, he told anchor Raymond Arroyo that as a “small-p pastor” he learned a great deal about those who feel under siege, lonely, left out. What did he learn? How did his church help him learn it?

He must use humor, for three reasons. One is that wit breaks through and sharpens all points. Another is that it is natural to him. Before the voting in Iowa, he wryly told a friend that the caucuses were like the LaBrea Tar Pits: “No one comes out the way they went in.” On a conference call recently, he asked a question of his staff. No one answered. Mr. Romney waited. “Bueller? Bueller?” he said, in a perfect imitation of Ben Stein.

Third, President Obama can’t stand to be made fun of. His pride won’t allow it, hisamour propre cannot countenance a joke at his own expense. If Mr. Romney lands a few very funny lines about the president’s leadership, Mr. Obama will freak out. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?

A small point with practical significance. Convention crowds are revved up. They want to stomp and cheer. During Mr. Romney’s speech, they’ll go crazy applauding and yelling. This is fun in the hall but tedious for the viewer at home. At some point Mr. Romney should signal, by his demeanor and through his text, that everyone should calm down so he can talk to America. Applause line, cheers, applause line—that’s not political discourse, it’s a ticket to nowhere.

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Finally, the big broadcast networks plan to give the Republicans (and the Democrats) only one hour a night of TV coverage.

They used to give all night, long as it took, and treat the proceedings with respect. What they give now, to the people of a great democracy fighting for its economic life in an uncertain world, is . . . an hour a night? For a national political convention?

This is a scandal. Mock them for it. This isn’t Edward R. Murrow in charge of the news, it’s Gordon Gekko in charge of programming.

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Much is uncertain, no one knows what will happen this year, how it will turn out. But when I think of Mr. Romney’s speech I find myself thinking of Alan Shepard.

It’s May 5, 1961, in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and everyone’s fussing. This monitor’s blinking and that one’s beeping and Shepard is up there, at the top of a Redstone rocket, in a tiny little capsule called Friendship 7. Mission Control is hemming and hawing: Should we stay or should we go? Finally Shepard says: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

That’s what a good speech and a good convention right now can do. There’s a great race ahead. Make it come alive. Come on and light this candle.

Americans are not ideologues. They think ideology is something squished down on their heads from on high, something imposed on them by big thinkers who create systems we’re all supposed to conform to. Americans are more interested in philosophy, which bubbles up from human beings, from tradition and learned experience, and isn’t imposed.

Lately we are hearing a bit about ideology, but the work of a great political philosopher, Edmund Burke, is more pertinent. Burke respected reality, acknowledged human nature, and appreciated political context. In “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” he wrote, “Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”

That’s what Republicans and especially conservatives in this heady moment have to keep in mind: the circumstances.

Here are America’s as the election unfolds: We are in economic crisis. People are afraid. Unemployment is high. Half the people in the country receive some sort of monthly check from the government—Social Security, veterans benefits, educational aid, disability, welfare. Why this is and what it portends is debate for another day. What is important now is that a lot of people don’t feel they can afford to lose anything of what’s coming in.

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Normally, Republican candidates for national office get to be either stupid or evil. That’s how the media and Democrats tag them. But they won’t be able to tag Paul Ryan as either, because he’s too well known as smart and decent.

So they will attempt to tag him as an ideologue, and this may take on some force. He’s “extreme,” “radical,” his policy prescriptions are driven not by his knowledge of life as its lived but by abstractions, by something he read in a book or saw on a flow chart. And he wants to cut everything. He’s a mad-ideologue-bean counter.

Republicans know how meaningful this campaign became when Mr. Ryan was picked: He changed its subject matter just by showing up. And he is right in his central insight, which is his central political reason for being: America, to be strong again, must get its spending and revenues more closely aligned. It is irresponsible of the Democrats to ignore and punt and play with this great challenge.

But Republicans must understand, also, that the race probably just became more of an uphill battle, because Paul Ryan has been very specific about what must and can be done. Americans will give Romney-Ryan a fair hearing, but everything has to go right now, everyone has to bring their A game.

Republicans should keep this picture in mind. There’s a woman on a porch in eastern Ohio and she has a dog and likes guns and supports the NRA and sees herself as more or less conservative. She assumed she’d vote for Romney and not that big loser in the White House. But she’s hearing about Ryan and she’s hearing the word “cuts.” She knows spending is out of control and she’s worried about deficits and debt. But she’s on disability and her husband’s illness is being handled by Medicare, and she’s wondering: “Do these guys really understand my life? Do they know how it is for us?” She’s getting concerned, and not only for herself but her neighbors and friends. People are not just protective of themselves, they’re loyal to others.

Ryan is associated with the word cutting. Republicans will have to make people believe the word to associate with him is “saving,” that the Romney-Ryan ticket wants to save entitlement programs that aren’t sustainable, that will in time collapse unless we impose ruinous taxes or continue with ruinous deficits.

Republicans have just a few weeks to get across—on the stump, at the conventions—that they’re trying to save Medicare, not kill it, that they’re the lifeguard, not the shark.

Advice?

Go for broke on your fidelity to the safety net and your insistence on saving it. The other guy does nothing but talk, pose and let the crisis worsen.

Stick together. Romney and Ryan on the stump were dynamic and drew huge crowds. They look stronger, more substantive together. Now they’ve split up, which is standard: You can cover twice as much ground that way. But there’s nothing standard about this year. They should break precedent and campaign together. It’s Ryan with Romney, Romney with Ryan. They balance, enhance and moderate each other. One is long accused of being an opportunist, the other charged with being an idealist. Keep them together, it’s an interesting package.

The more you see of Paul Ryan, the more you understand and appreciate his thinking. Get him doing long interviews, not short ones—full hours on the Sunday shows, sit-downs with Bret Baier and Charlie Rose. This is high risk. He does high risk.

With all the PAC money floating around, we’ve entered the Golden Age of mudslinging. When Democrats run the spot where a young guy throws grandma in the wheelchair off the cliff—well, don’t wait for that ad.

Republicans should do their own spot, now—one that’s comic and sweet. Grandma in the wheelchair is speeding on a downward slope toward a cliff. She looks terrified. Suddenly a young guy who looks like Clark Kent—that is, like Paul Ryan—springs forward, puts his body between the wheelchair and the edge, and stops it. She looks up at him, smiles, touches his face with her hand. He smiles, turns the chair around and begins to push her back to safety. “Romney-Ryan. Trying to get things back on firm ground.”

Answer the “Does he understand my life?” question head on. How many of Mr. Ryan’s constituents are on some kind of benefits? They keep electing him by healthy margins. There must be a reason. Find them. “My name is Kate, I receive the Social Security I earned, and my husband receives the veteran’s benefits he earned. In these hard times we rely on them to live. We would never trust things to someone who didn’t have our interests at heart. We’ve trusted Paul 14 years. He never let us down. He won’t let America down.”

Republican ads have to be clever, funny or moving. A central fact of this political year is that everyone’s spending billions on ads, yet campaign consultants fear no one’s watching them anymore—there’s too many, they’re propaganda, people use them for bathroom breaks. That sound you hear after the Obama attack ad is not cheers, it’s toilets flushing.

Romney-Ryan should spend some money the old-fashioned way, not only on 60-second spots but on half-hour and full-hour live, voter-in-the-round question-and-answer sessions. And, of course, speeches. In 1976, Ronald Reagan was finished in the North Carolina primary until he borrowed the money to buy a half-hour of airtime the night before the voting. He ran a taped speech that turned everything around. Speeches are powerful! And Paul Ryan was once a speechwriter. For Jack Kemp, God bless him.

Mitt Romney just threw a long ball. Fine. The GOP will have to play an audacious, longball game.

An old cliché of politics has never been truer: “They don’t care what you know unless they know that you care.” Or, it’s the circumstances, stupid.

It’s been a week marked by mistakes, some new and some continuing.

The pro-Obama super PAC ad that essentially blames Mitt Romney for a woman’s death from cancer is over the line, and if it’s allowed to stand the personal attacks that have marked the presidential campaign will probably get worse. If the president rebukes the PAC and renounces the ad—and he should, and he’d look better doing it than not doing it—then we’ll all know there’s an ethical floor below which things can’t sink. The ad was a mistake for a number of reasons, one being that it makes the president look perfidious and weak: “Mudslinging is all we’ve got.” It also may finally injure his much vaunted likability ratings.

Conservative critics are correct that the Romney campaign’s pushback was weak. When someone suggests in the public arena that you are a killer you do have to respond with some force. Since media outlets have already pointed out the ad’s claim is false, no one would no one would think it out of bounds if Mr. Romney hit back with indignation and disgust.

Actually, that would be a public service. The ad’s cynicism contributes to a phenomenon that increases each year, and that is that we are becoming a nation that believes nothing. Not in nothing, but nothing we’re told by anyone in supposed authority.

Everyone knows what the word spin means; people use it in normal conversation. Everyone knows what going negative is; they talk about it on Real Housewives. Political technicians always think they’re magicians whose genius few apprehend, but Americans now always know where the magician hid the rabbit. And we shouldn’t be so proud of our skepticism, which has become our cynicism. Someday we’ll be told something true that we need to know and we won’t believe that, either.

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I suspect some conservative used the Romney campaign’s listless response as a stand-in for what they’d really like to say to Romney himself, which is, “Wake up, get mad, be human, we’re fighting for our country here!”

Romney is not over- managed by others—he isn’t surrounded by what George H.W. Bush called “gurus”—but he over-manages himself. He second guesses, doubts his own instincts. Up to a certain point that’s good: self possession is a necessary quality in a political leader. But people don’t choose a leader based solely on his ability to moderate himself. They’re more interested in his confidence in his own judgment, or an ease that signals the candidate has an earned respect for his own instincts.

Some of the unperturbed sunniness you see modern political figures attempting to enact may be traceable to Ronald Reagan, the happy warrior who set a template for how winners act. But the Reagan of the 1950s and 60s, was often indignant, even angry. When he allowed himself to get mad, or knew he should be mad and so decided to feign anger, it was a sight to behold. “I’m paying for this microphone,” he famously snapped to the moderator of the 1980 primary campaign debate in Nashua, N.H. He didn’t win that crucial state by being sunny.

A lot of politicians misunderstand this part of their art. A few months ago I talked with a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. I asked to hear the outlines of the candidate’s planned appeal to voters. The candidate leaned forward and said with some intensity, “I’m going to tell them I can get along with people. I can work with the other side.”

This was a great example of confusing the cart with the horse. Why would anyone vote for you, especially during a crisis, only because you play well with the other children? What are your issues, where do you stand, what will you do when you get to Washington? If you believe in something and mean to move it forward the people will give you a fair hearing, and if you make clear that you hope to make progress with the help of a knack for human relations, that’s good too.

But this cult of equability, this enforced, smiley, bland dispassion—Guys, we’re in a crisis, you’ve got to know how to fight, too.

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And you’ve got to fight on the issues.

Both candidates wasted some time this week calling each other names in a sort of cheesy, noneffective, goofy way. “Obamaloney.” “Romney Hood.” Actually goofy isn’t the right word because goofy is fun, and there’s no wit or slash in what they were doing.

Calling Romney’s economic plans Romney Hood was dim because everyone likes Robin Hood, so Romney Hood sounds kind of like a compliment. Now and then the foes of a candidate accidentally do him a good turn. The Soviets thought they were disparaging Margaret Thatcher when they called her the Iron Lady. She was cold, wouldn’t bend, couldn’t compromise. The British heard the epithet and thought: Exactly! And exactly what we need!

An admiring nickname meant as an insult was born. Romney should go with it, lay out how he’ll save taxpayers from the predators of the liberal left and call that Romney Hood.

But he and his supporters should drop the argument that if we don’t change our ways we’ll wind up like Europe. That’s a mistake because Americans like Europe, and in some complicated ways wouldn’t mind being a little more like it. In the past 40 years jumbo jets, reduced fares and rising affluence allowed a lot of Americans, especially the sort who vote, to go there. The great capitals of Europe are glamorous, elegant and old, the outlands are exquisite. What remains of the old Catholic European ethic that business isn’t everything, life is everything and it’s a sin not to enjoy it, still has a lure. Americans sometimes think of it as they eat their grim salads and drink from their plastic water bottles . . .

When Americans go to Europe they see everything but the taxes. The taxes are terrible. But that’s Europe’s business and they’ll have to figure it out. Yes what happens there has implications for us but still, they’re there and we’re here.

What Americans are worried about, take as a warning sign, and are heavily invested in is California—that mythic place where Sutter struck gold, where the movies were invented, where the geniuses of the Internet age planted their flag, built their campuses, changed our world.

We care about California. We read every day of the bankruptcies, the reduced city services, the businesses fleeing. California is going down. How amazing is it that this is happening in the middle of a presidential campaign and our candidates aren’t even talking about it?

Mitt Romney should speak about the states that work and the states that don’t, why they work and why they don’t, and how we have to take the ways that work and apply them nationally.

Barack Obama can’t talk about these things. You can’t question the blue-state model when your whole campaign promises more blue-state thinking.

But Romney can talk about it.

Both campaigns are afraid of being serious, of really grappling with the things Americans rightly fear. But there’s no safety in not being serious. It only leaves voters wondering if you’re even capable of seriousness. Letting them wonder that is a mistake.

From a friend watching the Olympics: “How about that Michael Phelps? But let’s remember he didn’t win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim.”The note was merry and ironic. And as the games progress, we’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing, because President Obama’s comment—”You didn’t build that”—is the political gift that keeps on giving.

They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.

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There was lots of chatter this week about the decision to have Bill Clinton speak in prime time on the penultimate night of the Democratic Convention. Is it a sign of panic? Would the president give Big Dawg such a prominent spot if he wasn’t nervous? Does it gall him to ask for help from the guy who said of his 2008 candidacy, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”?

But all this kind of misses the point.

The central fact of Bill Clinton is that he is really good at politics. And he has every reason to want to give a really good speech—to show he’s still got it like nobody else, to demonstrate he’s still the most beloved figure in the party, to do his wife proud. And of course to rub Mr. Obama’s nose in it.

The central fact of the Obama campaign is that they have not yet made a case for re-election. They haven’t come up with a reasoned argument in common words that can be repeated by normal people. Ask an Obama supporter to boil it all down and he’ll flail around and then say: “But Romney is awful” or “The Republicans are bad.”

The White House and the campaign have not be able to make a case for their guy. They’re just trying to make a case against the other guy.

But Mr. Clinton might actually be able to make the case, and he just may do it by making a case for the Democratic Party.

No one has talked about the Democratic Party in a long time. Democrats don’t talk about it because they feel they’re on the run, and have brand problems. The president doesn’t talk about it either, which is remarkable. You’d think he’d want to rally the troops. But he doesn’t seem to love his party all that much.

Mr. Clinton does, though, and that ol’ man, with his white hair and reading glasses, can bring you back. He can ring. He can walk you back to FDR and JFK and Bobby, he can remind you why the party exists, what it’s done, what it has always meant to do.

Because he’s doing a favor, and because he’s now a wise man of the party, he could be more or less candid about the Democrats’ recent struggles and acknowledge a few things that haven’t fully worked. And then he could be delightfully mean: He could say: “Much holds us together, not only the past but our dreams of the future. And now those low, shadowy operatives, those bundlers and billionaires with their big PAC money—those cold scoundrels are trying to steer us off course. But you can’t make progress by going backward, you can’t move forward by taking U-turns.”

It could be a barn-burner. Love him or hate him, it could wake things up. Like there’s an election going on. Which, by the way, there is.

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In Mitt Romney’s campaign—well, his supporters had high hopes for his overseas trip. It would show his size, show that he can move in the world, that he has the heft, weight and ease to be international. He didn’t do as badly as his critics say, but he probably didn’t do himself much good. When he shared his concern that London might have problems with the Olympics it seemed unguarded, which he’s always being urged to be, but it also came across as a sly little put-down of a new business by a guy who’d run an old business so well. It wouldn’t have been such a big story if the British press weren’t so hissy and pissy, but they are, and high-level visitors must operate with that in mind.

The trip to Israel, with the high-ticket fund-raiser and the casino magnate and the definitive speech that gave him no room to move as president, when presidents always need room to move this way and that, plus the unnecessary put-down of the Palestinians, which wasn’t needed to make his point—all of it seemed lacking in size, in heft. Panderish.

An old-fashioned thought: There’s something discomfiting in candidates for the American presidency going overseas during a crisis to campaign and fund-raise and make grand speeches. This was true in 2008, with Mr. Obama, and is true now. A Romney supporter might say, “But it’s summer, the campaign hasn’t even begun, it just broadens the picture.”

But the campaign has begun, the clock’s ticking.

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The oldest cliché in presidential politics is that no normal person cares about the election until after Labor Day, when the kids are back in school. It’s a cliché because it’s always been true. I’ve seen it. But I don’t think it’s true anymore, and in fact has been changing for some time.

The cliché is replaced by a new one: The screens are everywhere. There’s no place to hide from presidential candidates anymore. For a solid year they follow you from the TV monitor in the airport to the one in the taxi; you check your smartphone and they’re in the inbox telling you their plans and asking for money. You get home, turn on the TV, fire up the computer, and they’re there.

No one can hide anymore: politics will find you. And you wind up having an impression of a candidate sooner than you meant to, and it hardens into an opinion earlier than it used to. People don’t make the decision after Labor Day anymore.

They’re making their decisions now. They’ve been making them for months.

It’s showing in the polls. A NYT/CBS swing-state survey that came out this week reflects the dynamic: In the three states they polled, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, when respondents were asked who they were voting for, only 4% of them said they didn’t know. The number who said they might change their mind was in the low double digits.

In May through July, the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project did a big national poll of 10,000 likely voters, and only 5% of the properly weighted sample said they weren’t sure who they wanted to vote for.

Old-school thought says we’re waiting for the campaign to begin. But we’re in the campaign. We’re kind of getting close to the end.

So everything counts, everything is important, and when a week passes when you do yourself no good, you do yourself some bad.

It’s the way it is now.

At a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” the other day on Manhattan’s East 86th Street, three cops were posted outside, two in a cruiser and one on a motorcycle. An usher said they’d been coming by since the shooting in Aurora, Colo. She was relieved they were there; we now can add movie ushers to the list of those who hold hazardous jobs in America. But you wish Hollywood and not the taxpayer were paying for it.The people in the theater were jumpy, getting up and going out the exit, coming back. The movie itself is dark—murders, massacres, torture, weird sinister chanting, foreboding music. There’s some sort of revolt, and Gotham is taken over by a small army led by a monster. They shoot up the floor of the stock exchange. The homes of the wealthy are ransacked. The thinking or motivation of the monster-leader, Bane, is never made clear.

“No one cared who I was till I put on a mask,” he says, in one of the lines that seemed to prefigure the Aurora perpetrator.

Did “The Dark Knight Rises” cause the Aurora shootings? No, of course not. One movie doesn’t have that kind of power, and we don’t even know if the shooter had seen it. But a million violent movies have the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize, to make things worse, and that’s what we’ve been seeing the past quarter century or so, the million movies. Each ups the ante in terms of carnage. Remember Jack Nicholson’s Joker, from 1989? He was a garish, comic figure and he made people laugh. He was a little like Cyril Richard as Captain Hook in the old TV version of “Peter Pan.” You knew he wasn’t “real.” He was meant to amuse.

Compare that with Heath Ledger’s Joker in 2008’s “The Dark Knight.” That Joker was pure evil, howling and demonic, frightening to see and hear. If you know what darkness is, you couldn’t watch that Joker and not be afraid. He looked like the man who opens the door when you when you get off the elevator to enter Hell; he looked like the guy holding the red velvet rope. That character was so dark, and so powerful, he destabilized the gifted actor who played him. Ledger died of a drug overdose six months before the movie opened.

About 15 years ago, a TV interviewer noted my concern at the damage I thought was being done by the highly violent, highly sexualized nature of our culture, of our movies and TV and music. It will make us more brutish, I’d argued, and some will imitate what they see.

The interviewer was good-humored but skeptical: Hollywood makes a lot of comedies. Why don’t we see the country breaking out in laughter?

Violence is different, I said, because there are unstable people among us, and they are less defended against dark cultural messages. The borders of the minds of the unstable are more porous. They let the darkness in. You can go to a horror movie and be entertained or amused: “This is scary, I love getting scared, and I love it because I know it isn’t real.” But the unstable are not entertained by darkness. They let it in. They are inspired by it. Sometimes they start to live in the movie in their heads. “I am the Joker,” the shooter is reported to have told the Aurora police.

Carl Cannon, in a thoughtful, deeply researched series on RealClearPolitics, this week gave a measured, tempered look at our entertainment culture and its role in the Aurora shootings: “A hundred studies have demonstrated conclusively that viewing violence on the screen increases aggression in those who watch it, particularly children.” Ignoring the problem hasn’t made it go away. He quoted Jenny McCartney of London’s Daily Telegraph, after she had seen 2008’s “The Dark Knight”: “The greatest surprise of all—even for me, after eight years working as a film critic—has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.” The movie begins with a heist by men in sinister clown masks. “As each clown completes a task, another shoots him point blank in the head. The scene ends with a clown—the Joker—stuffing a bomb into a wounded bank employee’s mouth.”

What effect might a scene like that have on a man who is mentally or emotionally ill and beginning to have violent fantasies?

Mr. Cannon noted the different ways Hollywood executives have attempted to rationalize and defend what they produce. At first they claimed TV and movies had no impact on the actions of viewers. Then why, they were asked, have commercials, and why have characters who don’t smoke? Next filmmakers claimed violent movies not only don’t increase violence, they probably decrease it by letting audiences vicariously blow off steam. “Legions of social scientists lined up to test” the catharsis theory, says Mr. Cannon. They discovered the opposite: “Violent programming desensitized young people to violence, made them more likely to hit other children, and often engendered copy-cat behavior.”

Some of the sadness and frustration following Aurora has to do with the fact that no one thinks anyone can, or will, do anything to make our culture better. The film industry isn’t going to change, the genie is long out of the bottle. The genie has a cabana at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The movie market is increasingly international, and a major component is teenage boys and young men who want to see things explode, who want to see violence and sex. Political pressure has never worked. Politicians have been burned, and people who’ve started organizations have been spoofed and spurned as Puritans. When Tipper Gore came forward in 1985, as a responsible citizen protesting obscene rap lyrics, her senator husband felt he had to apologize to Democratic fund-raisers. If some dumb Republican congressman had a hearing to grill some filmmakers, it would look like the McCarthy hearings. There would be speeches about artistic freedom, and someone would have clever words about how Shakespeare, too, used violence. “Have you ever seen ‘Coriolanus?’”

The president won’t say anything—he too is Hollywood funded—and maybe that’s just as well, since he never seems sincere about anything anymore.

A particularly devilish injustice is that many of the wealthy men and women of the filmmaking industry go to great lengths to protect their own children from the products they make. They’re able to have responsible nannies and tutors and private coaches and private lessons. They keep the kids busy. They don’t want them watching that garbage.

Everyone else’s kids?

One thing about good parents these days is they always look tired. A lot have hard lives—two jobs, different shifts, helping with homework, cleaning the house. But they also have the exhausted look of hypervigilance.

Once parents could take a break at night, park the kids in front of the TV and let the culture baby-sit. Not anymore. Our culture, they know, is their foe. The culture brings sick into the room They have to guard against it, be hypervigilant: “Put that off!” “I don’t care if your friends are going, we’re not.”

It’s a wonder they don’t revolt.

Thoughts on three recent failures to communicate:

In the controversy surrounding the uniforms of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, the problem isn’t China. That the uniforms were made there is merely a deep embarrassment and a missed opportunity. Our textile and manufacturing companies deserved that work. You wonder how it could be that no one in the American Olympic Committee or in Ralph Lauren’s company asked, “By the way, we’re making the outfits in America, right?”

And—here’s part of the missed opportunity—on being told yes, someone might have thought: “Hey, we could do a nice commercial to run during the games, with American women and men making the uniforms, looking up from their sewing machines as the camera goes by and saying, ‘Good luck America.’ The last shot is of a seamstress at the end of the day on a floor in the New York Garment District. As she goes to turn off the lights, she walks by a mannequin wearing the full uniform, gives the shoulder a little pat and says, ‘Good luck, kid.’” As if we’re all in this together, and what we’re all in is actually bigger than the games.

Instead—sigh—China.

But that isn’t the biggest problem. That would be the uniforms themselves. They don’t really look all that American. Have you seen them? Do they say “America” to you? Berets with little stripes? Double breasted tuxedo-like jackets with white pants? Funny rounded collars on the shirts? Huge Polo logos? They look like some European bureaucrat’s idea of a secret militia, like Brussels’s idea of a chic new army. They’re like the international community Steven Spielberg lined up to put on the spaceship at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Americans wear baseball caps, trucker hats, cowboy hats, watch caps, Stetsons, golf caps, even Panama hats and fedoras. They wear jeans and suits and khakis and shorts and workout clothes. The Americans in the now-famous uniform picture look like something out of a Vogue spread where the models arrayed on the yacht look like perfect representatives of the new global elite.

Our athletes aren’t supposed to look like people who’d march under a flag with statues and harps and musical notes. Also, the women’s uniforms make them look like stewardesses from the 777 fleet on Singapore Airlines.

The failure of the uniforms is that they don’t communicate: “Here comes America.”

They communicate: “Chic global Martians coming your way.”

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The reason Mitt Romney isn’t releasing more tax returns can be reduced to three words: Bill Clinton’s underwear. When he first ran for president, Bill Clinton put out his tax returns. Lisa Schiffren, an enterprising young writer for The American Spectator, went through them and found that the Clintons, when they were in Little Rock, had gone to great lengths to limit their tax bills, to the point of itemizing each contribution to local charities, including Mr. Clinton’s old underwear. Hilarity ensued. This is the kind of thing everyone in national politics fears.

But the question remains. Mr. Romney has known at least since 2007 that he would be running for president. He never in that time made sure his taxes from that date would pass rigorous public examination? This is odd, especially since he’s supposed to be so methodical, tidy, organized and prudent. The political answer to the question “Should Romney reveal more tax returns?” is, “That depends on what’s in them.” But the nonpolitical answer is yes, he should.

The failure of communication here involves failing to arm proactively against the problem, and reacting flat-footedly when it arrived.

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The president stepped in it this week with his own failure to communicate.

Mr. Obama, at a campaign appearance at a fire house in Roanoke, Va.: “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” If you own a store or factory “somebody invested in roads and bridges,” somebody built the infrastructure that allows for commerce. Fair enough. We all built it, with public moneys for public benefit. But it makes as much sense to tell the wealthy businessman, “Feel guilty because the taxes of the poor built that highway,” as it does to tell a mother on public assistance, “Feel guilty because your hardworking neighbors built that road.”

How about nobody feel guilty.

The president seemed to me to be confusing a poor argument—he implied we owe our wealth and growth as a nation to government programs—with a good one, that nobody achieves success alone. This is true: Nobody proceeds unhelped through life, everyone who’s achieved something got some encouragement from a neighbor or a teacher or a coach.

But Mr. Obama makes this point mischievously. He aims his argument at his political opponents—Republicans, Romney supporters. Yet many of them—most, probably—are involved one way or another with churches, synagogues, civic groups and professional organizations whose sole purpose is to provide assistance and encouragement to those who are ignored and disadvantaged. Conservatism doesn’t mean “do it alone.” God made us as social animals and asks us to help each other.

Mr. Obama was trying to conflate a nice thought—we must help each other—with a partisan and ideological one, that government has and needs more of a role in creating personal success. He did not do it well because his approach was, as it often is, accusatory and vaguely manipulative. Which makes people lean away from him, not toward him.

It is odd he does not notice this, because communicating is his obsession. He made this clear again in his interview last week with Charlie Rose. “The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” he said. “But, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.”

I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?

When he says “a story” he means “the narrative,” but he can’t use that term because every hack in politics and every journalist they spin uses it and believes in it.

We’ve written of this before but it needs repeating. The American people will not listen to a narrative, they will not sit still for a story. They do not listen passively as seemingly eloquent people in Washington spin tales of their own derring-do.

The American people tell you the narrative. They look at the facts produced by your leadership, make a judgment and sum it up. The summation is spoken—the story told—at a million barbecues in a million back yards.

The narrative on the president right now is: He’s not a bad guy, but it hasn’t worked.

Some people will vote for him anyway, some won’t. But all, actually, know it hasn’t worked. That’s the narrative.

To get that wrong—that the American summation comes from the bottom up and not the top down—is a big mistake. It means you don’t know you’ve got to change some facts, as opposed to some words.