Romney Needs a New CEO

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for an Intervention

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

Be serious and fight.

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

Right this ship.

*   *   *

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

But an intervention is needed.

The Age of the Would-Be Princips

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

A little grit, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

Two closing thoughts, on larger context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleven/9/11

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

“It appears to be over,” I said.

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

Everyone Will Watch the Debates

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Democrats’ Soft Extremism

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

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

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

His daughters have grown beautiful.

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

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

*   *   *

Was it a good convention?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

The Democrats Rally

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

The elements of last night’s success:

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

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

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

Highlights:

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

They ended the night with a prayer.

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

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

Waiting for Sinatra

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

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

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

Why Sinatra?  Because he actually is cool.