Peggy Noonan

The 2012 presidential election is unusual. It is a crisis election like 1932 or 1980, with the American people knowing we’re at a turning point and knowing that who we pick now really matters. But crisis elections tend to bring drama—a broad sense of excitement and passion. We’re not seeing that this year. We’re not seeing passionate proclamations from supporters of one candidate or the other that their guy is just right for the moment, their guy is the answer. I’m speaking of the excitement of deep belief: “FDR will save the day.” “Reagan will turn it around.”

President Obama’s supporters don’t talk like that, or think it. Neither do most of Mitt Romney’s. It’s all so subdued.

What is behind the general lack of passion? A theory in two parts:

First, people know that what America needs right now is the leadership of a kind of political genius. Second, they know neither of the candidates is a political genius.

That’s why it seems so flat when you talk to voters or political professionals.

It’s as if the key job opened up just when the company might go under. A new CEO would make all the difference. But none of the applicants leave the members of the board saying, “This guy is the answer to our prayers.” In the end, they’ll make a decision, and it will be a prudent, tentative one: “This one seems a bit better than that one.”

Why do people think we need a kind of political genius? Because they know exactly how deep our problems are and exactly how divided our nation is. We need a president who knows and understands politics because he knows and understands people and can galvanize them. When he speaks, you listen, in part because you believe he’ll give it to you straight, in part because his views seems commonsensical, in part because something in his optimism pings right into your latent hopefulness, and in part because he’s direct and doesn’t hide his meaning in obfuscation, abstraction, clichés and dead words.

Think of what we face domestically—only domestically.

Every voter in the country knows we have to get a hold of spending and begin to turn it around. At the same time—really, the same time—we have to get a hold of the tax system and remake it so that at the very least we can remove the sense of agitated grievance that marks our daily economic life, and at most we can encourage growth. If you really try to do these things, you will make a lot of people unhappy. It will take a political talent of the highest order to hold people together during the process, to allow them the luxury of feeling trust in your judgment.

The next president will have to wrangle with Congress, and when lawmakers balk, he’ll have to go over their heads and tell the American people the plan, the reasons it will work, and why it’s fair and good. He’ll have to get them to tell their congressmen, by phone calls and mail and by collaring them in the neighborhood and at the town hall, to back the president. When this happens to enough of them—well, as Reagan used to say, when they feel the heat, they see the light. The members go to the speaker, and suddenly the speaker is knocking back a drink with the president, and in the end a deal gets made. Things get pushed inch by inch toward progress, and suddenly there’s a sense things can work again. That encourages an air of unity and of national purpose, which itself gives a boost to public morale.

Anyway, the next president will have to do that sort of thing, and it will take deep political gifts. We have not seen that genius in Mr. Obama. Whether you will vote for him or not, you know you haven’t seen it. He seems to view politics as his weary duty, something he had to do on his way to greatness.

When he goes over the heads of Congress to the people, it’s like he threw a dead fish over the transom—it lands with a “Thwap!” and makes a mess, and people run away. As for Mr. Romney it is a commonplace in punditry to implore him to speak clearly of where he’ll go and how and why we should follow.

Both candidates seem largely impenetrable—it’s hard to know them, figure them. With Mr. Romney, you have a sense of what he’s been, what jobs he’s held, and his general approach. But do you have a solid sense of who he’d be and what he’d do as president? Probably not. Even he may not know. As for Mr. Obama, the more facts you know, the more you don’t understand him, the more you can’t quite grok him.

Neither has a flair for politics, and neither seems to love it. Both come from minority parts of the American experience, and both often seem to be translating as they speak, from their own natural inner language to their vision of how “normal Americans” think.

What does all this suggest? That voters this year will tend to be practical in their choice and modest in their expectations. Which isn’t all bad. But joy would be more fun.

We must end with some burly, optimistic thoughts or we’ll hurl ourselves over a transom and go “Thawp!” 1. There’s still time—more than 100 days—for each candidate to go deeper, get franker, and light some kind of flame. 2. The acceptance speeches are huge opportunities to do that. 3. The debates, if they do not sink into formalized torpor or anchor-led superficialities, could be not only decisive but revealing of greater depths. 4. Mr. Romney’s vice presidential choice will matter.

About which a note. Speaking the other day to a gathering of businesspeople from across the country, I mentioned the subdued nature of the election and my thoughts as to its reasons. I was surprised to get no push-back afterward, even from political enthusiasts, only agreement.

But the news: When conversation turned to the vice presidential nominee, I said we all know the names of those being considered, spoke of a few, and then said Condoleezza Rice might be a brilliant choice.

Here spontaneous applause burst forth.

Consider: A public figure of obvious and nameable accomplishment whose attainments can’t be taken away from her. Washington experience—she wouldn’t be learning on the job. Never run for office but no political novice. An academic, but not ethereal or abstract. A woman in a year when Republicans aren’t supposed to choose a woman because of what is now called the 2008 experience—so the choice would have a certain boldness. A black woman in a campaign that always threatens to take on a painful racial overlay. A foreign-policy professional acquainted with everyone who’s reigned or been rising the past 20 years.

I should add here the look on the faces of the people who were applauding. They looked surprised by their own passion. Actually they looked relieved, like a campaign was going on and big things might happen and maybe it could get kind of . . . exciting.

There’s something Haley Barbour reminded me of called the Gate Rule. The former Mississippi governor said it’s the first thing you should think of when you think about immigration. People are either lined up at the gate trying to get out of a country, or lined up trying to get in.

It says something about the health of a nation when they’re lined up to get in, as they are, still, with America. It says, of course, that compared with a lot of the rest of the world, America’s economy isn’t in such bad shape. But it says more than that. People don’t want to come to a place when they know they’ll be treated badly. They don’t want to call your home their home unless they know you’ll make room for them in more than economic ways.

And so this July 4, a small tribute to American friendliness, openness, and lack of—what to call it? The old hatreds. They dissipate here. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants could be at each other’s throats for centuries, but the minute they moved here, they were in the Kiwanis Club together. The Mideast is a cauldron, but when its residents move here, they wind up on the same PTA committee. It sounds sentimental, but this is part of the magic of America, and the world still knows it even if we, in our arguments, especially about immigration, forget.

So, three stories of American friendliness, openness and lack of the old hatreds.

There was a teenager who came here with his parents and younger brother. They arrived New York and got an apartment on 181st Street and Broadway. He spoke little English but went right into public school. The family needed money, so when he was 16, he transferred to night school and got a day job at a shaving-brush factory. He wore big, heavy rubber gloves and squeezed bleaching acid out of the bristles. Soon he went part time to City College, and then he entered the U.S. Army.

This is a classic immigrant story. It could be about anyone. But the teenager went on to become an American secretary of state, and his name is Henry Kissinger. Here is another part of the story that is classic: how Americans treated him. The workers at the factory were older than he, mostly Italian-American, some second-generation. They wanted to help make him part of things, so they started taking him to baseball games. “It was the summer of 1939. . . . I didn’t know anything about baseball,” he remembered this week. Now here he was in the roaring stands at Yankee Stadium.

About the people in the bleachers, he said, “the most striking thing was the enormous friendliness, the bantering.” In Hitler’s Germany, “I saw crowds, I’d go to the other side of the street.” Here, no sense of looming threat. “That I would say was a very American part of my experience.”

He was “enchanted” by the game—”the subtlety, the little nuances—you can watch what the strategy is and how they judge what the opponent is likely to do by the way the fielders position themselves. . . . It is a game that combines leisure with highly dramatic moments!”

And there was the man called Joe DiMaggio. The factory workers would sort of say, “If you take a look at Joe DiMaggio,” you will learn something about this country. DiMaggio was “infinitely graceful” as a fielder, “he would sort of lope towards the ball . . . nothing dramatic, he didn’t tumble, he didn’t strut, and he made it look effortless.” He didn’t “stand there wagging his bat. . . . He would just stand there with his bat raised. . . . He was all concentration.”

Years later they met, and Mr. Kissinger, faced with his boyhood idol, that symbol of those early years, was awed. It was like being a kid and meeting a movie star: “I didn’t know exactly what to say to him.” They became friends. “He had a fierce kind of integrity.”

So Henry Kissinger learned some things about Americans, and America, thanks to a bunch of Italian guys in a brush factory downtown. They were good to him. They were welcoming. Probably when they or their people were new here, someone was good to them.

That is American friendliness. Here is American openness—meaning if you are open to it, it will be open to you. Mary Dorian was an uneducated Irish farm girl with no family to speak of and no prospects She came to America on her own, around 1920. She wrote to the one girl she knew, a distant cousin in Brooklyn, to ask that she meet her at the ship. She landed at Ellis Island, went to the agreed-upon spot, and the cousin wasn’t there. She had forgotten. Mary, my grandmother, spent her first night in America alone on a park bench in lower Manhattan.

She went on to find Brooklyn and settle in. She joined an Irish club and a step-dancing club. They didn’t have anything like that back home. We make a mistake when we worry that sometimes immigrants come here and burrow more into their old nationality than their new one. It’s not a rejection of America, just a way of not being lonely, of still being connected to something. She met her husband in an Irish club, and she got a job hanging up coats in a restaurant. Then she became a bathroom attendant at Abraham & Strauss on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. When she died in 1960, a lot of black people came to the funeral. This, in a Brooklyn broken up into separate ethnic enclaves, was surprising, but it wouldn’t have been to her. They were her coworkers from A&S, all the girls who worked in the ladies room, and their families. They loved her.

When she died, Mary Dorian had a job, a family and friends. She had come here with none of those things. She trusted America, and it came through.

As for the old hatreds:

There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen. He was travelling with his younger brother—they too were fleeing the Nazis—and a steward. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan’s west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching the bustle of disembarking, and then the boy saw something. “Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters,” he remembered this week.

He was startled. Something with Hebrew letters—that was impossible back home. He asked his father, “Is that allowed?”

And his father said, “It is here.”

It is here.

The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with the freedom he was given here.

Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don’t. Maybe we just have to remember who we are—open, friendly, welcoming and free.

Happy Fourth of July to this tender little country, to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

It is a big victory for the White House.

ObamaCare, including the insurance mandate, was upheld. What would have been a political disaster for President Obama has been averted. He has not been humiliated, and the centerpiece of his efforts the past 3½ years has not been rebuked by the Supreme Court.

The ruling strikes me as very bad for the atmosphere of freedom in our country, the sense of freeness and lazy, sloppy liberty we’ve long maintained with some hiccups along the way. Those hiccups seem to come more and more now, and closer and closer together. From the dissent of Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito: “If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power or, in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.’ ” They were quoting Federalist No. 33. The language is dramatic, but the thought applies.

A great practical question, an informed friend reminds me, will not be answered for years: How much will an average family’s health-insurance premium rise if ObamaCare isn’t repealed or significantly revised? His guess is 40%.

In any case, brace yourself for the admiring profiles of Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week’s wisdom: right-wing nut in black robe. This week’s wisdom: rigorous mind, independent nature, unswayed by partisan considerations, he’s grown in the role since being appointed by George W. Bush.

To the presidential politics of it: For the first time in months, the president looks like he’s on the Uppalator, not the Downalator.

This may mark a turning point for the president’s listless, directionless campaign. Certainly it will buoy the spirits of the White House. “There’s nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result,” said Churchill. Members of the president’s campaign and White House will stop feeling like what they usually feel like, Team of Losers. The snake-bit White House has for once found a serum.

There will be a downside: The president is left carrying the burden defending a bill nobody likes. It certainly has the worst public reputation of any new government program of my lifetime. The Republicans can say, “It may be constitutional, but it’s still a bad law, and we’ll get rid of it.” In fact the speaker of the House said it within hours of the decision.

If the court had knocked the mandate down, the president might, in the end, have been given a fiery argument to rouse his base: “A divided court, dominated by conservatives, has thwarted progress, but we will persevere, and we will do everything we can to achieve universal coverage for all Americans. Now we know, once again, just how crucial it is who serves on that court, and who appoints them. Do we want more radical right-wing judges?” Instead, the base may feel they got what they wanted and they can relax.

For the Republicans, a national issue has been revived: Tear it down, repeal it. “But we’ll need a new president and Senate to get rid of ObamaCare. Send Republicans to Washington this November. Send in the cavalry!” This will rouse the Republican base.

As will this: The court decision was clarifying in that it held the penalties associated with ObamaCare are, in fact, taxes. (Chief Justice Roberts agreed with the dissenters that it was not a permissible exercise of the Commerce Clause.) South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others, picked up on this right away. The president didn’t tell the truth when he said his program contained no taxes on the middle class, and every Democrat on the Hill should be asked to take a stand and back those taxes or not.

The president, in his statement Thursday afternoon, was all sweet reason and moderation. His voice was full and firm; he looked like a man trying not to show happiness and relief. His media people must have decided that if he showed joy it would make him look small, as if it were about him and not the country. He said the politics surrounding the program don’t matter, that the program itself is a matter of trying to make life better for all Americans. “The highest court in the land has now spoken. We will continue to implement this law.”

Twice, and with an unusual tone of modesty, he said all sides should work together “to improve on it where we can.” What we cannot do is “refight the political battles of two years ago, or go back to the way things were.” It is “time for us to move forward—to implement and, where necessary, improve on this law.” Cleverly, he suggested those Republicans who continue to oppose ObamaCare are wasting the country’s time at a crucial moment. We must focus “on the most urgent challenge of our time: putting people back to work, paying down our debt, and building an economy where people can have confidence.”

He stressed what he said were the program’s benefits. Those already insured will find their coverage “more secure and more affordable,” insurance companies will provide “free preventive care like checkups and mammograms,” “seniors” and “young adults” will receive benefits, those with pre-existing conditions will no longer be denied coverage. Also, the insurance companies “won’t be able to charge you more just because you’re a woman.”

It was a targeted base-greaser.

He said the debate has been “divisive,” but “I didn’t do this because it was good politics,” he did it because it was right. This was sly, positioning ObamaCare not as legacy-making overreach whose unabating unpopularity took the White House by surprise, but as a sacrifice, a commendable expenditure of personal popularity in order to achieve a public good.

He urged America to go forward.

It was pretty good stuff, meaning shrewdly put, politically astute, and delivered with the august halls of the White House sparkling in the background.

The president had a good day, the first in a long time, in months.

Is it too late for him to change his image to modest and moderate man of the center who’s only trying to do what’s best for America? Because that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s in a perfect position now to tell the leftwardmost parts of his base that he’s given them plenty and suffered for it, it’s time they got in line. Is it too late for independents to give him a second or third look? He’s going for that, too.

The race is not remade, that would be saying too much. But there’s a new dynamic now: Mr. Obama got a break.

Republican backers of Mitt Romney have been feeling pretty confident, and understandably. Their challenge now is to make the most of the moment. They will have the help of their base, which is, at the moment, angry as hornets, loaded for bear, and fully awake.

You know what Republicans on the ground think when they look at Mitt Romney?

“Please don’t blow it.” They think President Obama can’t win but Mr. Romney can still lose. So they’re feeling burly but anxious, hopeful yet spooked.

They see Mr. Obama as surrounded by bad indicators—bad polls, bad economic numbers, scandals. They see a grubbiness in the administration now, a vacuity. When the White House sends out spokesmen to make the case for him on the Sunday morning shows, it’s campaign operatives, like David Plouffe and David Axelrod. They more or less spin how he’ll win. Where are the heavyweights, the cabinet secretaries, the great men and women of the Democratic Party? Hiding? Unable to make the case? Not trusted to make the case? Or are the political guys the only heavyweights in the administration?

Mr. Romney is looking good, as are his crowds. Then the camera shows people in the stands behind him as he speaks, they no longer look as if they walked in off the street or put a bet on a horse and are straining to see if it breaks from the pack. Now they look like people watching their horse take the lead, with no one coming up the outside.

The Romney strategy the past eight weeks has been, in a small way, shrewd: have the candidate out there talking in a candidate-like manner, but don’t let him say anything so interesting that it will take the cameras off Mr. Obama. The president is lurching from gaffe to mess, from bad news to worse. Don’t get in his way as he harms himself.

It’s working, but won’t for long. People want meaning, a higher and declared purpose.

An odd fact: Republicans more than others, amazingly, have internalized and hold to the idea that this president has some secret magical powers he’s just waiting to unleash. Those powers normally go by the name “eloquence.” But the eloquence was always exaggerated, and to the extent it existed, there’s no sign it’s about to kick in. Do you remember any phrase or sentence the president has said in a speech or statement the past 3½ years? One? Anything, in all that talking, that entered your head and stayed there? You do not. He is interesting, his words are not. Republicans obsess on his eloquence because it allows them to pretend they lost in 2008 because the American people were gulled by pretty words. The truth is he won because he seemed the furthest thing possible from the Republicans who’d presided over two unwon wars and the great recession.

The president’s rhetorical powers are not a factor in the campaign. Mr. Romney is not more boring than Mr. Obama. That’s not a compliment, precisely, but is true.

Actually, it’s amazing that during an existential crisis—a crisis that is economic, cultural and political, and that bears on our role and purpose in the world—both candidates for our highest office have felt free to be so . . . well, insubstantial. Neither Mr. Romney nor Mr. Obama has caught hold of the overall meaning of his candidacy, Mr. Romney because so far he’s chosen not to, and Mr. Obama because he’s tried and failed.

With just more than 130 days to go, Mr. Romney has to start pulling from his brain and soul a coherent and graspable sense of the meaning of his run. “I will be president for this reason and this. I will move for this and this. The philosophy that impels me consists of these things.” Only when he does this will he show that he actually does have a larger purpose, and only then will people really turn toward him. He has to tell Americans why they can believe him, why a nation saturated with politics, chronically disappointed by its leaders, and tired of promises can, actually, put some faith in him.

They want to know how America can come back. Because they’re pretty sure, down deep, that America has another comeback in her.

Mr. Romney has a tendency to litter his speeches with applause lines. They come one after another. It’s old-fashioned, and it’s based on the idea that that’s all TV wants, five seconds of a line and two seconds of applause. But applause-line speeches aren’t suited to the technological moment, when people can click on a link and listen to a whole speech if they have time. If all it is is applause lines, they’ll turn away. More important, applause-line speeches are not right for a time of crisis, because they do not allow for the development of a thought, a point of view, an insight. Those things take quiet building. Sometimes they take paragraphs, sometimes pages. They take time. But people like to listen if you’re saying something interesting.

Campaign professionals like applause lines in part because they think that’s all a campaign speech is, a vehicle for a picture of people clapping. They see the world in pictures on a screen; they are largely postliterate. They don’t care about meaning, they care about impression. But in the end, the impression is bad: distracted candidate barking lines, robotic audience clapping.

As for the president, his big campaign speech last week in Cleveland not only was roundly panned but was deeply revealing. In it—all 54 minutes of it—he attempted to make the case for his economic stewardship and his re-election.

What he revealed is that he doesn’t know the case for his own re-election.

Politicians give 54-minute speeches when they don’t know what they’re trying to say but are sure the next sentence will tell them. So they keep talking. They keep saying sentences in the hope that meaning will finally emerge from one of them.

A 54-minute speech is not a sign of Fidel-like confidence, or a love for speaking. A 54-minute speech is a sign of desperation.

It was a speech about everything—renewable energy, tax credits, Abraham Lincoln, tax loopholes, deficit imbalances, infrastructure, research and development incentives. But a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. I listened once and read it twice: It wasn’t a case for re-election, it was a wordage dump.

The president has wrestled for the past six months with themes. He’s jumped from one to another.

They are:

It’s not so bad—this indicator is up, and that one.

OK, it’s bad, but it could have been worse—my actions kept us from tanking.

It’s bad, but it’s Bush’s fault.

It’s bad, but it’s the congressional Republicans’ fault.

I have made it less bad, and I need more time to make it even less badder.

Rich people have fancy cars and car elevators, I stand for jalopies and street parking.

None of it has worked.

What does it say of a crisis presidency at a dramatic moment that a president can’t make the case for his own re-election, can’t find his own meaning?

It says the other guy can win—if he has meaning. And isn’t just a handsome stranger who says, “I’m not the last guy, I’m not the guy you don’t like.”

That won’t do this year.

What is happening with all these breaches of our national security? Why are intelligence professionals talking so much—divulging secret and sensitive information for all the world to see, and for our adversaries to contemplate?

In the past few months we have read that the U.S. penetrated Al Qaeda in Yemen and foiled a terror plot; that the Stuxnet cyberworm, which caused chaos in the Iranian nuclear program, was a joint Israeli-American operation; and that President Obama personally approves every name on an expanding “kill list” of those targeted and removed from life by unmanned drones. According to the New York Times, Mr. Obama pores over “suspects’ biographies” in “what one official calls ‘the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.”

From David Sanger’s new book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” we learn that Stuxnet was “the most sophisticated, complex cyberatack the United States had ever launched.” Its secret name was “Olympic Games.” America and Israel developed the “malicious software” together, the U.S. at Fort Meade, Md., where it keeps “computer warriors,” Israel at a military intelligence agency it “barely acknowledges exists.”

The Pentagon has built a replica of Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant. The National Security Agency “routinely taps the ISI’s cell phones”—that’s the Pakistani intelligence agency. A “secret” U.S. program helps Pakistan protect its nuclear facilities; it involves fences and electronic padlocks. Still, insurgents bent on creating a dirty bomb, if they have a friend inside, can slip out “a few grams of nuclear material at a time” and outwit security systems targeted at major theft. In any case, there’s a stockpile of highly enriched uranium sitting “near an aging research reactor in Pakistan.” It could be used for several dirty bombs.

It’s a good thing our enemies can’t read. Wait, they can! They can download all this onto their iPads at a café in Islamabad.

It’s all out there now. Mr. Sanger’s sources are, apparently, high administration officials, whose diarrhetic volubility marks a real breakthrough in the history of indiscretion.

What are they thinking? That in the age of Wikileaks the White House itself should be one big Wikileak?

More from the Sanger book: During the search for Osama bin Laden, American intelligence experts had a brilliant idea. Bin Laden liked to make videotapes to rouse his troops and threaten the West. Why not flood part of Pakistan with new digital cameras, each with a “unique signature” that would allow its signals to be tracked? The signal could function as a beacon for a drone. Agents got the new cameras into the distribution chain of Peshawar shops. The plan didn’t catch Osama, because he wasn’t in that area. But “traceable digital cameras are still relied on by the CIA . . . and remain highly classified.”

Well, they were.

There was a Pakistani doctor named Shakil Afridi who was sympathetic to America. He became involved in a scheme to try and get the DNA of Osama’s family. He “and a team of nurses” were hired by the U.S. to administer hepatitis B vaccinations throughout Abbottabad. The vaccinations were real. Dr. Afridi got inside Osama’s compound but never got to vaccinate any bin Ladens.

In the days after bin Laden was killed, the doctor was picked up by Pakistani agents and accused of cooperating with the Americans. He was likely tortured. He’s in prison now, convicted of conspiring against the state.

No word yet on the nurses, but stand by.

Mr. Sanger writes that President Obama “will go down in history as the man who dramatically expanded” the use of drones. They are cheaper than boots on the ground, more efficient. But some of those who operate the unmanned bombers are getting upset. They track victims for days. They watch them play with their children. “It freaks you out,” a former drone operator told Mr. Sanger. “You feel less like a pilot than a sniper.”

During the Arab Spring, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was insistent that Mr. Obama needed to stick with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, even, Mr. Sanger reports, “if he started shooting protestors in the streets.”

King Abdullah must be glad he called. Maybe he’ll call less in the future.

All of this constitutes part of what California Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls an “avalanche of leaks.” After she read the Stuxnet story in the Times, she was quoted as saying “my heart stopped” as she considered possible repercussions.

Why is this happening? In part because at our highest level in politics, government and journalism, Americans continue to act as if we are talking only to ourselves. There is something narcissistic in this: Only our dialogue counts, no one else is listening, and what can they do about it if they are? There is something childish in it: Knowing secrets is cool, and telling them is cooler. But we are talking to the world. Should it know how, when and with whose assistance we gather intelligence? Should it know our methods? Will this make us safer?

Liberally quoted in the Sanger book, and in Dan Kaidman’s “Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency,” is the White House national security adviser, Thomas Donilon. When I was a child, there was a doll called Chatty Cathy. You pulled a string in her back, and she babbled inanely. Tom Donilon appears to be the Chatty Cathy of the American intelligence community.

It is good Congress has become involved. They wonder if the leaks have been directed, encouraged or authorized, and by whom. One way to get at that is the classic legal question: Who benefits?

That is not a mystery. In all these stories, it is the president and his campaign that benefit. The common theme in the leaks is how strong and steely Mr. Obama is. He’s tough but fair, bold yet judicious, surprisingly willing to do what needs to be done. He hears everyone out, asks piercing questions, doesn’t flinch.

He is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer.

And he is up for re-election and fighting the constant perception that he’s weak, a one-man apology tour whose foreign policy is unclear, unsure, and lacking in strategic depth.

There’s something in the leaks that is a hallmark of the Obama White House. They always misunderstand the country they seek to spin, and they always think less of it than it deserves. Why do the president’s appointees think the picture of him with a kill list in his hand makes him look good? He sits and personally decides who to kill?

Americans don’t think of their presidents like that. And they don’t want to.

National security doesn’t exist to help presidents win elections. It’s not a plaything or a tool to advance one’s prospects.

After the killing of bin Laden, members of the administration, in a spirit of triumphalism, began giving briefings and interviews in which they said too much. One of the adults in the administration, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reportedly went to Mr. Donilon’s office. “I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,” he said. What? asked Mr. Donilon.

“Shut the [blank] up,” Mr. Gates said.

Still excellent advice, and at this point more urgently needed.

What happened in Wisconsin signals a shift in political mood and assumption. Public employee unions were beaten back and defeated in a state with a long progressive tradition. The unions and their allies put everything they had into “one of their most aggressive grass-roots campaigns ever,” as the Washington Post’s Paul Whoriskey and Dan Balz reported in a day-after piece. Fifty thousand volunteers made phone calls and knocked on 1.4 million doors to get out the vote against Gov. Scott Walker. Mr. Walker’s supporters, less deeply organized on the ground, had a considerable advantage in money.

But organization and money aren’t the headline. The shift in mood and assumption is. The vote was a blow to the power and prestige not only of the unions but of the blue-state budgetary model, which for two generations has been: Public-employee unions with their manpower, money and clout, get what they want. If you move against them, you will be crushed.

Mr. Walker was not crushed. He was buoyed, winning by a solid seven points in a high-turnout race.

Governors and local leaders will now have help in controlling budgets. Down the road there will be fewer contracts in which you work for, say, 23 years for a city, then retire with full salary and free health care for the rest of your life—paid for by taxpayers who cannot afford such plans for themselves, and who sometimes have no pension at all. The big meaning of Wisconsin is that a public injustice is in the process of being righted because a public mood is changing.

Political professionals now lay down lines even before a story happens. They used to wait to do the honest, desperate, last-minute spin of yesteryear. Now it’s strategized in advance, which makes things tidier but less raggedly fun. The line laid down by the Democrats weeks before the vote was that it’s all about money: The Walker forces outspent the unions so they won, end of story.

Money is important, as all but children know. But the line wasn’t very flattering to Wisconsin’s voters, implying that they were automatons drooling in front of the TV waiting to be told who to back. It was also demonstrably incorrect. Most voters, according to surveys, had made up their minds well before the heavy spending of the closing weeks.

Mr. Walker didn’t win because of his charm—he’s not charming. It wasn’t because he is compelling on the campaign trail—he’s not, especially. Even his victory speech on that epic night was, except for its opening sentence—”First of all, I want to thank God for his abundant grace,” which, amazingly enough, seemed to be wholly sincere—meandering, unable to name and put forward what had really happened.

But on the big question—getting control of the budget by taking actions resisted by public unions—he was essentially right, and he won.

By the way, the single most interesting number in the whole race was 28,785. That is how many dues-paying members of the American Federation of State, County and Municiple Employees were left in Wisconsin after Mr. Walker allowed them to choose whether union dues would be taken from their paychecks each week. Before that, Afscme had 62,218 dues-paying members in Wisconsin. There is a degree to which public union involvement is, simply, coerced.

People wonder about the implications for the presidential election. They’ll wonder for five months, and then they’ll know.

President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.

There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration.

It became apparent some weeks ago when the president talked on the stump—where else?—about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth is actually lower than that of previous presidents. This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency. People sneered: The president was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture!

But you know, why would he go out there waving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That’s more alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.

For more than a month, his people have been laying down the line that America was just about to enter full economic recovery when the European meltdown stopped it. (I guess the slowdown in China didn’t poll well.) You’ll be hearing more of this—we almost had it, and then Spain, or Italy, messed everything up. What’s bothersome is not that it’s just a line, but that the White House sees its central economic contribution now as the making up of lines.

Any president will, in a presidential election year, be political. But there is a startling sense with Mr. Obama that that’s all he is now, that he and his people are all politics, all the time, undeviatingly, on every issue. He isn’t even trying to lead, he’s just trying to win.

Most ominously, there are the national-security leaks that are becoming a national scandal—the “avalanche of leaks,” according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that are somehow and for some reason coming out of the administration. A terrorist “kill list,” reports of U.S. spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen, stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how America got it, and U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet computer virus, used against Iranian nuclear facilities. These leaks, say the California Democrat, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”

This isn’t the usual—this is something different. A special counsel may be appointed.

And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president.

But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be.

It just all increasingly looks like a house of cards. Bill Clinton—that ol’ hound dog, that gifted pol who truly loves politics, who always loved figuring out exactly where the people were and then going to exactly that spot and claiming it—Bill Clinton is showing all the signs of someone who is, let us say, essentially unimpressed by the incumbent. He defended Mitt Romney as a businessman—”a sterling record”—said he doesn’t like personal attacks in politics, then fulsomely supported the president, and then said that the Bush tax cuts should be extended.

His friends say he can’t help himself, that he’s getting old and a little more compulsively loquacious. Maybe. But maybe Bubba’s looking at the president and seeing what far more than half of Washington sees: a man who is limited, who thinks himself clever, and who doesn’t know that clever right now won’t cut it.

Because Bill Clinton loves politics, he hates losers. Maybe he just can’t resist sticking it to them a little, when he gets a chance.

And so it begins. We have a Republican nominee in Mitt Romney and a Democratic nominee in Barack Obama.

It is a marathon, not a sprint, but the pace is quickening. In five months we will have chosen a new president or doubled down on the current one.

Superficially both men have some things in common. Starting from the outside, they are both handsome, tall and fit. They care how they look, and how they look has had something to do with how well they’ve done. Both are academically accomplished, with three Harvard degrees between them. Each has spent much of his adult life a step apart from America’s big, messy, varied center, one as a political star and the other a star of business. Neither has ever been a loser, which is unfortunate: Losertude is a great teacher, an orienter in life; it tells you not everything you touch will turn out well. This is important information for a president. Both are highly verbal in the sense of being—well, verbal, of speaking words with great fluidity. When you ask them a question, a stream of words flows. In a way they remind me of what a court reporter once said about the testimony of William F. Buckley: “High syllabic content!”

They are different people with different personalities, temperaments and characters. The most consequential difference for the election’s purposes is that one has fully absorbed the general assumptions, attitudes and sympathies of the political left, and the other the general attitudes, assumptions and sympathies of the political right. That’s what should—should—make the next five months interesting, and the outcome important.

Some facts right now:

Republicans are starting to think they can win, and Democrats are starting to think they could lose. This didn’t use to be true.

There is much talk of the president’s brilliantly targeted high-tech campaign. By November we will know how much difference a brilliantly targeted, high-tech campaign makes. Is it a revolution in political outreach, or a geeky mirage?

Neither candidate has struck on a theme, though both seem to think they have. At the moment both candidates are generally understood as biographies: “I’m the successful businessman,” “I’m the breakthrough president.” This accounts for a certain frustration among voters: “I don’t want a biography, I want a plan.”

Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have risen to the top of the American political system in an intensely political era. And yet neither loves politics or appears to have a particularly oversized gift for it. This is a central and amazing fact of the national election.

Mr. Obama has become actively bad at politics. Here is an example of how bad. Anyone good at politics does not pick a fight with the Catholic Church during a presidential year. Really, you just don’t. Because there’s about 75 million Catholics in America, and the half of them who go to church will get mad. The other half won’t like it either.

If you’re good at politics, you quietly allow the church what it needs to survive, which actually is no more or less than what’s long been provided by the U.S. Constitution.

If you’re good at politics but ideologically mean, you string the church along throughout the election year, offering “temporary full waivers” or some such idiotic phrase—politicians love to make up idiotic phrases—on conscience, and then revoke all protections in 2013, after you’ve been re-elected, and have the fight then.

Only if you are really, really not good at politics do you alienate the bishops of a great faith in an election year.

A smaller example. If you’re good at politics, you don’t humiliate a friend and ally who popped off about your campaign strategy. You don’t send Cory Booker on a rhetorical perp walk and make him recant. You quietly accept his criticism, humbly note your disagreement, hold a grudge, and keep walking.

A more important example, and then we’ll move on. The president opened his campaign with a full-fledged assault on his opponent. This is a bad sign in an incumbent! An incumbent should begin his campaign with a full-fledged assertion of the excellence of his administration—the progress that has been made, the trouble that has been avoided, the promise that endures. You’ve got to be able to name these things. Then, once you’ve established the larger meaning of your administration—with wit and humor, and in a tone that assumes fair minded Americans will see it your way—you turn, in late summer, to a happy, spirited assault on the poor, confused, benighted and yet ultimately dangerous man running against you.

The president’s campaign is making him look small and scared.

Mr. Romney, too, has had his bad moments. Donald Trump this week is an example. Mr. Trump brings with him the freak-show aspects of the primaries. Mr. Romney has to kick away from that, start a new chapter, begin an appeal to the sane center. Does he think keeping Trump close gains him some kind of right-wing street cred? My goodness, who does he think lives on that street?

More important, when you’re good at politics you know what you have to do, if not immediately then soon. Mr. Romney has to give us a plan. He has to tell us his priorities. To lead is to prioritize, to choose: “We will take this path, at this speed, toward this end.” He hasn’t done this yet. He told me last week of some immediate intentions—repeal ObamaCare, and move boldly to unleash America’s energy resources—he called them “newly discovered and extraordinary.”

Fine. But afterward I realized these issues are immediately and personally associated with President Obama. They are not associated with the president I suspect Mr. Romney really has on his mind, George W. Bush.

Mr. Romney should be talking about the big things, taxing and spending, and offering a plan on both, a hierarchal declaration of needs. But taxes and spending are issues that are associated with Mr. Bush, and not happily. That, I suspect, is a reason Mr. Romney avoids addressing them at length or in a way that’s easily understood. He doesn’t want the Obama campaign to accuse him of being “just more Bush,” of peddling the same medicine that helped make us sick. That was Ronald Reagan’s 1984 charge against Walter Mondale, that all he offered was the empty, warmed-over liberalism of the past.

The Romney camp doesn’t want to be accused of warmed-over Bushism. So they shy away from clarity on central issues. But you can’t avoid central issues. If you try, your candidacy and message will robbed of vividness, made a blur.

Mr. Romney should face what didn’t work the past 12 years. Republicans took some wrong turns, and they know it. Centrists and independents know it, too. Candor here, delivered in a spirit of honesty, without animus, would seem not like a repudiation but a refreshment. And this would be deeply undercutting of Mr. Obama, who needs this race to be a fight between two parties, not a fight between a past that didn’t work and a future that can.

The Bush family will understand. They respect politics, and its practitioners.

It’s been a good week for Mitt Romney. The polls are up, he’s just off a two-day swing through Connecticut and New York, where he hauled in big donors and hard money, and he swept the GOP primaries in Kentucky and Arkansas. On Tuesday Texas will put him over the top and make him, formally and officially, the Republican nominee for president.

Not everything worked—his big education speech Wednesday was wan and pallid—but he’s having a moment. In a telephone interview, he reflected on the campaign, tracing his candidacy’s upward momentum to an increased sense among voters that the country is on the wrong path and, perhaps, a growing sense that he’s proved himself: “I can tell you that we went through those 37 or 38 contests and won the must-win states, and in some cases we started off 10 points behind. And we hustled, worked hard, and convinced the voters.” This produced “the kind of track record that people say, ‘You know, I think if Mitt can keep that up, in November we’re going to see a new president.’”

Candidates on a campaign van look out the window and see America go by. They meet with people, talk. I asked Mr. Romney the difference between the America he saw in 2008 and the one he sees now. “A much higher degree of anxiety today. People much less confident in the security of their job, less confident in the prospects for their children.” Four years ago, the economic downturn hadn’t occurred. “In my primary, the central issue was Iraq.” Now it is the economy.

Before rallies and town meetings, he always tries to have private, off-the-record meetings with voters. “I sit down with five or six couples or individuals and just go around the table, and I ask them to tell me about their life. And the stories I hear suggest a degree of anxiety which is not reflected in the statistics.” He is struck, he said, by the number of people who are employed but in legitimate fear of being let go. He is struck by the number of people who’ve made investments for their retirement—real estate, 401(k)s—and seen them go down.

He keeps a campaign journal on his iPad: “Now this is going to make my iPad a subject of potential theft!” He used to speak his entries, but now he types them on an attached keyboard. “I’ve kept up pretty well, actually.” He writes every two or three days, so that 10 years from now he can “remember what it was like,” but also to capture “the feelings—the ups the downs, the people I meet and the sense I have about what’s going to happen. It’s kind of fun to go back and read, as Ann and I do from time to time.”

Does he love politics—the joy of it, the fight of it? “What I love are the political rallies and town meetings. I love the interchange with individuals that are probing and pushing.”

But the game of politics? “I like competition, and I think the game is like a sport for old guys. I mean, you know, I can’t compete in competitive sports very well, but I can compete in politics, and there’s the—what was the old ABC ‘Wide World of Sports’ slogan? ‘The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.’ The only difference is victory is still a thrill, but I don’t feel agony in loss.”

Do you wake up in a good mood, or do you have to work your way into it? “Depends on the day.” He laughs. “Depends on the issue. The only time I’m unhappy is if I’ve done something that hurt the prospects for the success of our effort.”

When was the last time you woke up unhappy? He says he doesn’t recall. Then: “Sometimes you’re disappointed, but it’s mostly disappointment with myself that causes me to be most concerned. This for me is not my life, meaning I don’t have to win an election to feel good about myself.” He’s achieved success in business “beyond my wildest dreams.” He’s “hoping to make a contribution and go to Washington and go home when it’s over. . . . Who I am has long ago been determined by my relationship with the people I love, and with my success in my professional career.”

All great political families have myths, stories they tell themselves about how history happened. The great story about Mr. Romney’s father, George, is that one word—”brainwashed”—did in his presidential candidacy in 1968. People have hypothesized that Mitt is careful with words and statements, that he edits his thoughts too severely, because of the power of that myth.

“I don’t think my father’s comment figures into my thinking at all,” he says. It’s his own mistakes “that make me want to kick myself in the seat of my pants,” that “cause me to try and be a little more careful in what I say. . . . I’ve had a couple of those during the campaign, which have haunted me a little bit, but I’m sure before this is over will haunt me a lot.”

Asked for an example, he mentions “I like to be able to fire people.” He meant, he says, those, such as health-insurance companies, that provide inadequate services. “I have to think not only about what I say in a full sentence but what I say in a phrase.” In the current media environment, “you will be taken out of context, you’ll be clipped, and you’ll be battered with things you said.” He says it is interesting that “the media always says, ‘Gosh, we just want you to be spontaneous,’ but at the same time if you say anything in the wrong order, you’re gonna be sorry!”

What about historic parallelism—the people who say, “This election is 1980 all over again,” or, “No, it’s 1996”? What year is it?

“It’s 2012.” He laughs. History sometimes repeats “its lessons,” but “history does not repeat itself identically. This is a different time than any other time before it.”

“I think there have been inflection points in American history where the course of the nation has changed, where culture, industry, even military strategy have changed.” The Civil War was one such time, the turn of the last century another.

He believes we are in one now: “I think America is going to decide whether we will put ourself on a path toward Europe—whether we will become another nation dominated by government, where citizens are dependent on government for the things they want in life, where opportunity is sacrificed, where military strength is depleted to pay for government promises, where unemployment is chronically high and wage growth chronically low. That, in my view, is the course the president has put us upon.” If Barack Obama is re-elected, “it will be very difficult to get off that path. If I’m elected, I will usher in a period of economic vitality,” that will leave the world “surprised.”

Not only the world: “America is going to see a vitality we had not expected.”

Let’s wade into an argument, and on what may well be the losing side.

The most recent polls suggest Dick Lugar, the senior U.S. senator from Indiana, first elected in 1976, is on track to lose his primary on Tuesday. I hope he doesn’t for a number of reasons but one big one: the Senate needs grown-ups. The entire American government needs grown-ups, from Capitol Hill to the White House to the executive agencies. This is no time to lose one.

What Washington needs is sober and responsible adults. We are as a nation in a moment of real peril, facing challenges that are going to become existential—maybe already are—if we don’t do something about them. We won’t be able to ignore them—an unsound tax system, increasing and highly ideological regulation, an entitlement system whose demands will crush our children—for long. So right now, and more than ever, we need mature folk involved in our governance, people for whom not everything is new. People who know how to do things, who began studying a complicated issue 25 years ago and have kept up, who know it backward and forward. People who know the ways of the chamber backward and forward, and who know how to talk across the aisle. There is value in experience, in accomplishment and expertise. There is value in the ability to take the long view, and do your best with modesty and with an eye toward all the big jumbly categories of America, which are not limited to “rightist” and “leftist.”

Mr. Lugar, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime leader on controlling nuclear proliferation, is a sober and genial fellow. He is a conservative, always has been. He is experiencing a challenge from the right. He’s been under fire, for instance, for voting for the confirmation of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. As a matter of form, policy and tradition he did the right thing. He also helped shepherd through the nomination of John Roberts as chief Justice. He did the right thing there, too. He firmly backed President Bush on Iraq until he came to have doubts about administration policy and execution, and when he’d thought it through he took to the floor of the senate to explain his thinking, and his break.

He is independent. That’s good, a plus: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment,” as Edmund Burke observed. Mr. Lugar has won the respect of Senate Democrats. That’s good, too. In the future, it may turn out at some moment to be crucial.

The general position of respect he holds in Washington is not new. I remember, in 1988, working for George H.W. Bush, who had just won his party’s nomination for the presidency. The Bush entourage was on Air Force Two, en route to Indiana, to celebrate the nominee for vice president, Dan Quayle. Mr. Quayle was a nice man and a capable politician, but he was young. He sat, in the vice president’s office on the plane, with Indiana’s other senator, Dick Lugar, grey even then. I remember looking from one to another and thinking, “Why him?” Why Quayle and not Lugar, so known and respected? I was not the only person thinking that, on the plane or in the press.

Mr. Lugar’s challenger, state treasurer Richard Mourdock, has mounted a tough and determined campaign. He is drawing the endorsements of what is, increasingly, the conservative establishment: FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform. Sarah Palin supports him, as does Michele Bachmann.

Mr. Lugar seems to have only one bigfoot, Gov. Mitch Daniels, a man of sound, unshowy judgement whose presence in the presidential primaries would have left them less freaky and more satisfying.

If Mr. Lugar loses, the press will say the tea party did him in, that it’s all part of an “ideological purge,” it was the extremists versus the GOP establishment and the extremists won. This will be a partial misreading of the situation, but it will be repeated enough to damage the Republican brand, such as it is. In any case, if Mr. Lugar loses the enemies of the GOP will rejoice, because while it’s assumed that he would sail through a general election, Mr. Mourdock might struggle.

As for “the tea party,” it is good to remember it has blended into the Republican Party, as more or less its rightward edge, and in the blending saved the party. Republicans would have been nowhere if what’s called the tea party had gone third-party.

If Mr. Lugar loses on Tuesday it will likely be due to two things. The first is a number: 35. That’s how many years he’s been in the Senate, how many years he’s lived and worked primarily in the environs of Washington, not Indiana, where apparently he no longer has a home. That was a mistake. Thirty-five is a big number. Nonideological people might look at it and think, “It’s time for a change.”

The other reason is a fact. What fuels conservative frustration is not only legislation like ObamaCare and scandals like Solyndra, but a growing sense that for 40 years, members of the party have sent Republicans to Washington and Washington—its spending, its regulating, its demands—keeps getting worse, not better. How could this be? It’s not just that Democrats have their Democratic ways, it’s that the Republicans they’ve sent haven’t waged a good enough fight. Everything bad there happened while they were there. So—tear it all down, remove everyone and start over.

This is a hard argument to counter because there is some truth in it. No matter who you send, Washington keeps growing. But Mr. Lugar remains as what he is, exceptional, and in his case there are many factors. He’s fought many fights to keep bad policy from being imposed. (Unfortunately, there’s never a memorial to the bad bill that didn’t happen.) He’s waded into serious policy issues, such as disarmament, that get little credit but are crucial. And in a practical sense, conservatives might note that the senior senator from Indiana has just had the scare of his political life. He’s never been primaried before. It is likely that he will return to Washington, if he’s allowed to return, newly alive to certain conservative needs and concerns. There, he will be able to take what might be called a refreshed sense of where people are, combine it with a veteran’s knowledge of how to move things forward, and help make the kind of progress conservatives long for.

Does all this reflect a bias toward stability, toward those who know how to lead and compromise and find agreement, at a time when Washington seems increasingly immature, feckless, unaware of urgency?

Yes, I do declare that bias. In Washington now very few have their eye on the big picture. Mr. Lugar does, and should not be lost.

Mark Peters of this paper wrote a smart piece this week noting that the primary is an open one, and the race may come down to the independent vote.

They should save the old guy. He has value.

There is every reason to be deeply skeptical of President Obama’s prospects in November.

Republicans feel an understandable anxiety about Mr. Obama’s coming campaign: It will be all slice and dice, divide and conquer, break the country into little pieces and pick up as many as you can. He’ll try to pick up college students one day and solidify environmentalist support the next, he’ll valorize this group and demonize the other. He means to gather in and hold onto all the pieces he needs, and turn them into a jagged, jangly coalition that will win it for him in November and not begin making individual demands until December.

But it still matters that the president doesn’t have a coherent agenda, or a political philosophy that is really clear to people. To the extent he has a philosophy it, tends to pop up furtively in stray comments and then go away. This is to a unique degree a presidency of inference, its overall meaning never vividly declared. In some eras, that may be a plus. In this one?

Republicans are worried about the power of incumbency, and it is a real power. Presidents command the airwaves, as they used to say. If they want to make something the focus of national discussion, they usually can, at least for a while. And this president is always out there, talking. But—and forgive me, because what I’m about to say is rude—has anyone noticed how boring he is? Plonking platitude after plonking platitude. To see Mr. Obama on the stump is to see a man at the podium who’s constantly dribbling away the punch line. He looks pleasant but lacks joy; he’s cool but lacks vigor. A lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago, little is anchored to the moment. As he makes his points he often seems distracted, as if he’s holding a private conversation in his head, noticing crowd size, for instance, and wishing the front row would start fainting again, like they used to.

I listen to him closely and find myself daydreaming: This is the best-tailored president since JFK. His suits, shirts and ties are beautifully cut from fine material. This is an elegant man. But I shouldn’t be thinking about that, I should be thinking about what a powerful case he’s making for his leadership. I’m not because he’s not.

It is still so surprising that a person who seems bored by politicking has risen to the highest political office in the land. Politics is a fleshly profession, it’s all hugging, kissing, arm twisting, shaking hands. It involves contact. When you see politicians on C-Span, in the well of the House or the Senate after a vote, they’re always touching each other’s arms and shoulders. They touch each other more than actors! Bill Clinton was fleshly, and LBJ. How odd to have a Democratic president who doesn’t seem to like humans all that much.

He’s raised a lot of money, or so we keep reading. He has a sophisticated, wired, brilliant computer operation—they know how to mine Internet data and get the addresses of people who’ve never been reached by a campaign before, and how to approach them in a friendly and personal way. This is thought to be a secret weapon. I’m not so sure. All they can approach their new friends with is arguments that have already been made, the same attacks and assertions. If you have fabulous new ways to reach everyone in the world but you have little to say, does that really help you?

A while back I talked to a young man who was developing a wonderful thing for a website, a kind of constant live TV show with anyone anywhere able to join in and share opinions live, on the screen. You’re on your iPad in the train station, you log on and start talking. He was so excited at the technology, which seemed impressive. But I thought: Why do you think people will say anything interesting or important?

This is the problem of the world now: Big mic, no message. If you have nothing to say, does it matter that you have endless venues in which to say it?

The old Washington gossip was that the Obama campaign was too confident, now it is that they are nervous. The second seems true if you go by their inability, months after it was clear Mitt Romney would be running against them, to find and fix on a clear line of attack. Months ago he was the out-of-touch corporate raider. Then he was a flip-flopping weasel. They momentarily shifted to right-wing extremist. This week he seems to be a Bushite billionaire.

Will all this work? When you look at Romney you see a wealthy businessman, a Mormon of inherently moderate instinct, a person who is conservative in his personal sphere but who lives and hopes to rise in a world he well knows is not quite so tidy. He doesn’t seem extreme.

It’s interesting that the Obama campaign isn’t using what incumbent presidents always sooner or later use, either straight out or subliminally. And that is “You know me. I’ve been president for almost four years, you don’t know that other guy. In a high-stakes world do you really want someone new?”

You know why they’re not using “You know me”? Because we know him, and it’s not a plus.

Here’s one reason why.

There is a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama’s White House. It was seen again this week in Supreme Court arguments over the administration’s challenge to Arizona’s attempted crackdown on illegal immigration. As Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News wrote, the court seemed to be disagreeing with the administration’s understanding of federal power: “Solicitor General Donald Verrilli . . . met resistance across ideological lines. . . . Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is ‘not selling very well.’ “ This follows last month’s embarrassing showing over the constitutionality of parts of ObamaCare.

All of this looks so bush league, so scattered. Add it to the General Services Administration, to Solyndra, to the other scandals, and you get a growing sense that no one’s in charge, that the administration is paying attention to politics but not day-to-day governance. The two most public cabinet members are Eric Holder at Justice and Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security. He is overseeing the administration’s Supreme Court cases. She is in charge of being unmoved by the daily stories of Transportation Security Administration incompetence and even cruelty at our airports. Those incidents and stories continue, but if you go to the Homeland Security website, there is no mention of them. It’s as if they don’t even exist.

[DINGBATS]

Maybe the 2012 election is simpler than we think.

It will be about Mr. Obama.

Did you like the past four years? Good, you can get four more.

Do the president and his people strike you as competent? If so, you can renew his contract, and he will renew theirs.

If you don’t want to rehire him, you will look at the other guy. Does he strike you as credible, a possible president? Then you can hire him.

Republicans should cheer up.