Peggy Noonan

People in politics talk about the right track/wrong track numbers as an indicator of public mood. This week Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we’re on the right track as a nation. That’s a historic low. Political professionals tend, understandably, to think it’s all about the economy—unemployment, foreclosures, we’re going in the wrong direction. I’ve long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it’s also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Now I’d go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He’s pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They’re too busy taping it on their smartphones. That’s how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: “flash robs.”

That’s just the young, you say. Juvenile delinquency is as old as history.

Let’s turn to adults.

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She’s the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore.

There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers.

The reason the story is news, and actually upsetting, is not that a government agency wasted money. That is not news. The reason it’s news is that the people involved thought what they were doing was funny, and appropriate. In the past, bureaucratic misuse of taxpayer money was quiet. You needed investigators to find it, trace it, expose it. Now it’s a big public joke. They held an awards show. They sang songs about the perks of a government job: “Brand new computer and underground parking and a corner office. . . . Love to the taxpayer. . . . I’ll never be under OIG investigation.” At the show, the singer was made Commissioner for a Day. “The hotel would like to talk to you about paying for the party that was held in the commissioner’s suite last night” the emcee said. It got a big laugh.

On the “red carpet” leading into the event, GSA chief Jeffrey Neely said: “I am wearing an Armani.” One worker said, “I have a talent for drinking Margarita. . . . It all began with the introduction of performance measures.” That got a big laugh too.

All the workers looked affluent, satisfied. Only a generation ago, earnest, tidy government bureaucrats were spoofed as drudges and drones. Not anymore. Now they’re way cool. Immature, selfish and vain, but way cool.

Their leaders didn’t even pretend to have a sense of mission and responsibility. They reminded me of the story a year ago of the dizzy captain of a U.S. Navy ship who made off-color videos and played them for his crew. He wasn’t interested in the burdens of leadership—the need to be the adult, the uncool one, the one who maintains standards. No one at GSA seemed interested in playing the part of the grown-up, either.

Why? Why did they think this is OK? They seemed mildly decadent. Or proudly decadent. In contrast to you, low, toiling taxpayer that you are, poor drudges and drones.

There is the Secret Service scandal. That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes.

What’s terrible about this story is that for anyone who’s ever seen the Secret Service up close it’s impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best. That has been their reputation because that has been their reality. They have always been tough, disciplined and mature. They are men, and they have the most extraordinary job: take the bullet.

Remember when Reagan was shot? That was Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who stood there like a stone wall, and took one right in the gut. Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the car, and Mr. Parr was one steely-eyed agent. Reagan coughed up a little blood, and Mr. Parr immediately saw its color was a little too dark. He barked the order to change direction and get to the hospital, not the White House, and saved Reagan’s life. From Robert Caro’s “Passage of Power,” on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, Nov. 22, 1963: “there was a sharp, cracking sound,” and Youngblood, “whirling in his seat,” grabbed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and threw him to the floor of the car, “shielding his body with his own.”

In any presidential party, the Secret Service guys are the ones who are mature, who you can count on, who’ll keep their heads. They have judgment, they’re by the book unless they have to rewrite it on a second’s notice. And they wore suits, like adults.

This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles.

Special thanks to the person who invented casual Friday. Now it’s casual everyday in America. But when you lower standards people don’t decide to give you more, they give you less.

In New York the past week a big story has been about 16 public school teachers who can’t be fired even though they’ve acted unprofessionally. What does “unprofessionally” mean in New York? Sex with students, stalking students, and, in one case, a standing behind a kid, simulating sex, and saying, “I’ll show you what gay is.”

The kids in the flash mobs: These are their teachers.

Finally, as this column goes to press, the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times’s decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers. The soldier who brought the pictures to the Times told their veteran war correspondent, David Zucchino, that he was, in Zucchino’s words, “very concerned about what he said was a breakdown in . . . discipline and professionalism” among the troops.

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don’t they? And again, these are only from the past week.

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this.

So what have we learned? The GOP presidential contest of 2012 is over. Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. What do we know now that we didn’t know in 2011, when the campaign began? Or what do we know that we already knew, but now we’ve been reminded?

We learned that primogeniture is still a force in the GOP. The next king is the firstborn son of the current king. In political terms, the guy who came in second in the last presidential cycle stands most likely to be crowned and anointed in the current one. Republicans, for all their drama, still tend toward the orderly and still credit experience.

Running for president is serious business. You need money, fund-raising networks, organization, a campaign. You have to get on the ballot in Virginia, you have to field full slates. Mitt Romney learned all this in 2008. He was the only non-newbie in 2012.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann did not fully comprehend what goes into the process. Newt Gingrich didn’t care.

We learned the system is newly open to vanity productions—Messrs. Cain and Gingrich, Donald Trump. We learned Super PACs allow freelancers, and freelancers feel no loyalty to the party brand. They’ll say anything, the larger impact isn’t their problem. They are there to sell books, to further their personal project. We will see more of this, on both sides. It will not leave the process ennobled.

We learned that proportional representation is a bad idea when you’re up against a sitting president. It drags the system out, robs state victories of meaning, makes everything more common and dreary, and leaves serious candidates open to ceaseless attacks from all quarters. Mr. Romney’s negatives are up, not down, as the contest ends.

The Republican Party is a conservative party. All its front-runners held conservative views on taxing, spending, regulation, the power of the state. There is no national GOP market for liberal or liberalish Republicans. There is little market for national candidates who don’t adopt the tropes, simulate the resentments, or feel some of the anguish of the base. Mr. Gingrich worked the resentments—at one point he made fun of Mr. Romney for using the word “resolute” because it’s fancy and not plain like all us regular folk. (At other times he bragged of authoring 24 books. He was hard to keep up with.) Rick Santorum captured some of the anguish, both culturally and economically. Jon Huntsman was hobbled because he didn’t seem to identify on any level with Republicans on the ground, or particularly like them. Voters don’t take to you when they know you don’t take to them. Sarcastic tweets about global warming were not the beginning of his campaign, but the end.

Affection matters.

We learned that rescue fantasies were fantasies. Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush stayed out. The people who said, “Don’t look for salvation from the sidelines,” were correct. Newton’s third law of political physics: People running for president tend to run for president, people not running tend not to run. Believe them when they tell you for the third time that they won’t.

Evangelicals are an ever-dominant part of the base, but they don’t march in lockstep. Like all huge blocs they encompass all levels of affluence, education, attainment and aspiration. But one thing was clear this year: The old evangelical reserve, or animosity, toward Catholics is dead. It was the Mormon who carried the Catholic vote. The Catholic Mr. Santorum drew evangelical Protestants. America is great in part because it’s always scrambling its categories and changing its clichés.

We learned Mitt Romney is not a greatly improved candidate from four years ago. He has endurance and discipline: He wants this thing. The reason why is still not fully clear. His political instincts and sense of subject matter are not much better than they were in 2008. The awkwardness continues. A major if largely unspoken Republican criticism of Mr. Romney is exactly like a major if largely unspoken Democratic criticism of President Obama: He’ll meet with you, he’s polite and appropriate, but he gives no sign afterward that he heard you, that he absorbed or pondered what you said. Nor is his campaign greatly improved. It gets the job done but it is stolid, unimaginative, small-bore. There’s a managerial tightness. People are afraid to make decisions, and pass the buck upward. A major surrogate calls the campaign “the Romney labyrinth.”

Mr. Romney has a woman problem? “Romney was saved by women, and they buried Newt,” notes former George H.W. Bush aide Lloyd Green, who studies voting tables. After Mr. Gingrich won his blowout in South Carolina, women went for Mr. Romney in Florida by 24 points. He won men by only five. In Ohio, women voted 40% for Romney to 37% for Mr. Santorum, who won men by one point. In Michigan, Romney won women again. “Personal probity matters in the GOP,” said Green. “Newt and Herman Cain are Exhibits 1 and 2.”

What is the biggest gift Romney has been given this year by the Democratic party? Hilary Rosen’s ill thought, ill-spoken, snotty remark that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.”

Ann Romney raised five children with a husband who sometimes traveled. A mother of five will be suffering from exhaustion, not laziness, and certainly not a lack of engagement in the realities and stresses of life. Where do the Democrats get these spokesmen who are so unsympathetic, so narrow in their vision and understanding of women’s lives? What are they launching, a war on women?

Finally, in foreign affairs the Republican candidates staked out dangerous ground. They want to show they’re strong on defense. Fine, we should have a strong defense, the best in the world. But that is different from having an aggressive foreign policy stance, and every one of the GOP candidates, with the exceptions of Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, was aggressive. This is how their debates sounded: We should bomb Iran Thursday. No, stupid, we should bomb Iran on Wednesday. How could you be so foolish? You know we do all our bombings on Monday. You’re wrong, we send in the destroyers and arm the insurgents on Monday.

There was no room for discretion, prudence, nuance, to use unjustly maligned terms. There was no room for an expressed bias toward not-fighting. But grown-ups really do have a bias toward not-fighting.

They are allowing the GOP to be painted as the war party. They are ceding all nonwar ground to the president, who can come forward as the sober, constrained, nonbellicose contender. Do they want that? Are they under the impression America is hungry for another war? Really? After the past 11 years?

The GOP used to be derided by Democrats as the John Wayne party: it loved shoot-’em-ups. Actually, John Wayne didn’t ride into town itching for a fight, and he didn’t ride in shooting off his mouth, either. He was laconic, observant. He rode in hoping for peace, but if something broke out he was ready. He had a gun, it was loaded, and he knew how to use it if he had to.

But he didn’t want to have to. Which was part of his character’s power. The GOP should go back to being John Wayne.

These are things we know after President Obama’s speech Tuesday, in Washington, to a luncheon sponsored by the Associated Press:

The coming election fully occupies his mind. It is his subject matter now, and will be that of his administration. Everything they do between now and November will reflect this preoccupation.

He knows exactly what issues he’s running on and wants everyone else to know. He is not reserving fire, not launching small forays early in the battle. The strategy will be heavy and ceaseless bombardment. The speech announced his campaign’s central theme: The Republican Party is a radical and reactionary force arrayed in defense of one group, the rich and satisfied, while the president and his party struggle to protect the yearning middle class and preserve the American future.

This will be his campaign, minus only the wedge issues—the “war on women,” etc.—that will be newly deployed in the fall.

We know what criticisms and avenues of attack have pierced him. At the top of the speech he lauded, at some length and in a new way, local Catholic churches and social service agencies. That suggests internal polling shows he’s been damaged by the birth-control mandate. The bulk of the speech was devoted to painting Washington Republicans as extreme, outside the mainstream. This suggests his campaign believes the president has been damaged by charges that his leadership has been not center-left, but left. This is oratorical jujitsu: launch your attack from where you are weak and hit your foe where he is strong. Mr. Obama said he does not back “class warfare,” does not want to “redistribute wealth,” and does not support “class envy.” It’s been a while since an American president felt he had to make such assertions.

The speech was an unusual and unleavened assault on the Republican Party. As such it was gutsy, no doubt sincere and arguably a little mad. The other party in a two-party center-right nation is anathema? There was no good-natured pledging to work together or find common ground, no argument that progress is possible. The GOP “will brook no compromise,” it is “peddling” destructive economic nostrums, it has “a radical vision” and wants to “let businesses pollute more,” “gut education,” and lay off firemen and cops. He said he is not speaking only of groups or factions within the GOP: “This is now the party’s governing platform.” Its leaders lack “humility.” Their claims to concern about the deficit are “laughable.”

The speech was not aimed at healing, ameliorating differences, or joining together. The president was not even trying to appear to be pursing unity. He must think that is not possible for him now, as a stance.

There was a dissonance at the speech’s core. It was aimed at the center—he seemed to be arguing that to the extent he has not succeeded as president, it is because he was moderate, high-minded and took the long view—but lacked a centrist tone and spirit.

It was obviously not written for applause, which always comes as a relief now in our political leaders. Without applause they can develop a thought, which is why they like applause. In any case, he couldn’t ask a roomful of journalists to embarrass themselves by publicly cheering him. But I suspect the numbers-filled nature of the speech had another purpose: It was meant as a reference document, a fact sheet editors can keep on file to refer to in future coverage. “Jacksonville, Oct. 10—GOP nominee Mitt Romney today charged that the U.S. government has grown under President Obama by 25%. The president has previously responded that in fact the size of government went down during his tenure.”

An odd thing about this White House is that they don’t know who their friends are. Or perhaps they know but feel their friends never give them enough fealty and loyalty. Either way, that was a room full of friends. And yet the president rapped their knuckles for insufficient support. In the Q-and-A he offered criticism that “bears on your reporting”: “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.” An “equivalence is presented” that is unfortunate. It “reinforces . . . cynicism.” But the current debate is not “one of those situations where there’s an equivalence.” Journalists are failing to “put the current debate in some historical context.”

That “context,” as he sees it, is that Democrats are doing the right thing, Republicans the wrong thing, Democrats are serious, Republicans are “not serious.”

It was a remarkable moment. I’m surprised the press isn’t complaining and giving little speeches about reporting the facts without fear or favor.

I guess what’s most interesting is that it’s all us-versus-them. Normally at this point, early in an election year, an incumbent president operates within a rounded, nonthreatening blur. He’s sort of in a benign cloud, and then pokes his way out of it with strong, edged statements as the year progresses. Mr. Obama isn’t doing this. He wants it all stark and sharply defined early on. Is this good politics? It is unusual politics. Past presidents in crises have been sunny embracers.

The other day an experienced and accomplished Democratic lawyer spoke, with dismay, of the president’s earlier remarks on the ObamaCare litigation. Mr. Obama had said: “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” He referred to the court as “an unelected group of people” that might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

It was vaguely menacing, and it garnered broad criticism. In the press it was characterized as a “brushback”—when a pitcher throws the ball close to a batter’s head to rattle him, to remind him he can be hurt.

The lawyer had studied under Archibald Cox. Cox, who served as John F. Kennedy’s Solicitor General, liked to tell his students of the time in 1962 when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Engel v. Vitale, a landmark ruling against school prayer.

The president feared a firestorm. The American people would not like it. He asked Cox for advice on what to say. Cox immediately prepared a long memo on the facts of the case, the history and the legal merits. Kennedy read it and threw it away. Dry data wouldn’t help.

Kennedy thought. What was the role of a president at such a time?

And this is what he said: We’re all going to have to pray more in our homes.

The decision, he said, was a reminder to every American family “that we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity,” and in this way “we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of our children.”

He accepted the court’s decision, didn’t rile the populace, and preserved respect for the court while using its controversial ruling to put forward a good idea.

It was beautiful.

One misses that special grace.

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault.

The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. He wasted time that was precious—the debt clock is still ticking!—by following an imaginary bunny that disappeared down a rabbit hole.

The high court’s hearings gave off an overall air not of political misfeasance but malfeasance.

All these things have hardened lines of opposition, and left opponents with an aversion that will not go away.

I am not saying that the president has a terrible relationship with the American people. I’m only saying he’s made his relationship with those who oppose him worse.

In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the ‘Is America over?’ part.

And so the relationship the president wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they’ve read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them, which is why they were so surprised by the town hall uprisings of August 2009 and the 2010 midterm elections.

If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, and saw a headline saying “Obama Loses,” do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness, pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad. It’s hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, “If only Obama were president!” Including Mr. Obama, who is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but who doesn’t seem to like his job that much. As a former president he’d be quiet, detached, aloof. He’d make speeches and write a memoir laced with a certain high-toned bitterness. It was the Republicans’ fault. They didn’t want to work with him.

He will likely not see even then that an American president has to make the other side work with him. You think Tip O’Neill liked Ronald Reagan? You think he wanted to give him the gift of compromise? He was a mean, tough partisan who went to work every day to defeat Ronald Reagan. But forced by facts and numbers to deal, he dealt. So did Reagan.

An American president has to make cooperation happen.

But we’ve strayed from the point. Mr. Obama has a largely nonexistent relationship with many, and a worsening relationship with some.

Really, he cannot win the coming election. But the Republicans, still, can lose it. At this point in the column we usually sigh.

Let’s be grouchy. The White House is ripe to be taken, and Republicans seem stalled, weirdly becalmed. Their great primary struggle has imparted no feeling of dynamism, of forward motion, of a clash that yields clarity. When you think of the debates the past six months, you see a line of seals barking, Ahrk ahrk!

Mitt Romney is most frustrating. He always keeps you from celebrating him. Every time you want to—he sweeps Illinois, he gives a good acceptance speech—he gives you reasons not to. He should take to hiding out after victory.

He wins Jeb Bush’s endorsement, he’s flying high, and he immediately follows it with a full-body pander to George W. Bush and the first Wall Street bailout, which Republicans on the ground, many Democrats and independents, too, view with increasing distaste. Then his press guy does Etch A Sketch.

That last comment was unfortunate in two ways. One is that it reminded a lot of people—well, me—of how then-Sen. Barack Obama, in 2008, was widely viewed as a blank slate, an empty canvas on which people painted their hopes and yearnings. He knew it; he admitted it was part of his mystique. So he was a kind of Etch A Sketch too, only he let the voters turn the knobs. The other is that it illustrated with a disheartening vividness the essential Romney problem, which has never gone away after all this time: that he’s making it up as he goes along, that he’ll be one thing today and another tomorrow.

Actually, the vibration he’s lately giving off is worse than that. He acts like a guy who can be captured. The world is full of mischief, full of groups, tongs clubs and cabals, and this one says you have to back a certain fiscal plan, that one an environmental approach, and this one says you’ve got to go to war. And they are almost never thinking of America Overall, they are always thinking of their issue, their thing, and telling themselves—and you—that doing it their way will be better for America, overall. And if they think you have a soft, chewy center, every day of your presidency will be a bloody struggle to capture the Mitt.

Presidents have to have a sophisticated sense of others’ agendas, and know the implications of those agendas. They have to be able to imagine overall impact.

Does Mr. Romney have such sophistication? Another way of asking is to note a small but telling aspect of his public speaking style. There is something strangely uninflected there. He says very different things in the same tone. “Pass the mustard!” “This means war!” “Flowers are pretty!” “Don’t tread on me!” It’s all the same tone, the same level of import and engagement. Which it would be if you’re sort of . . . well, if you see issues as entities to deploy as opposed to think about and weigh.

Are we too grouchy? Mr. Romney will, after all, be the Republican nominee. That at least became clear this week. How about a little possibly helpful advice?

Hmmm. Some short term advice to all the candidates:

Get cable TV out of your head. All the campaigns are obsessed with and driven crazy by what the cable universe is saying. Ignore it. What you are having is a conversation with America. You are not having a conversation with MSNBC. You are not negotiating a relationship with the anchors of Fox News.

Their constant clamor gives you a distorted sense of reality. Their critiques leave you too high or low. You know who let cable in his head? President Obama, in the first years of his presidency. It’s in Jodi Kantor’s book. Do you need more proof of how cable can leave you confused, lost and ineffective?

Stop talking about political process. Every reporter in America wants to reveal the shallowness of your concerns. Why do you help them? Why do you answer their dreary, droning questions about what demographic you appeal to most, what part of the country you’ll do best in, how much money you’re raising, how you’ll win over Hispanics? They ask you these questions because they want you to be what they are: people for whom politics is all about manipulation. You are running for president. You’re supposed to talk about things that matter and address big questions.

Every Republican candidate has been answering these questions for a year now. Stop it. Learn to say, “I have a well-paid idiot who answers some of those questions for me. Would you like to discuss welfare policy?” After the first 10 times it will work.

For Mr. Romney in particular:

Suit up and get serious. Now that everyone knows you’ll be the nominee, get off the goofball express. Cheesy grits, jeans, singing, being compulsively pleasant, calling your opponents lightweights—enough.

Use the next few months to get back to basics. Why do you want to be president again? Is the answer, “Because I’m a great fellow and it’s the top job”? Dig down deep for a better reason!

Here’s something Americans intuit about motivations in presidential politics. When a candidate is on a mission to rescue the country, they can tell. When it’s about the nation and not him, they can tell. When he has a general philosophy of government and politics, they will listen, and give a fair hearing.

But when a candidate says, not blatantly but between the lines, “I want to be president because I’m an extraordinary and superior human and want you to see me that way too,” well, that sort of subliminally gives a lot of people the creeps. They will see you as ego-driven, not purpose-driven. They may elect you anyway, but this year especially they won’t.

Mr. Romney seems stuck in “I am extraordinary.” But Mr. Obama does, too. He’s proof that it’s not enough.

It is not fatal that Mr. Romney has been tagged as Etch A Sketchy. Almost all of 2012 will come down to plans and policy, to which path seems likely to get us out of the muck. The American people are in a postheroic presidential period. They just want to hire somebody to come in and fix some essential problems.

Mr. Romney should feel optimistic.

If the issue is our national economic life, the GOP will very likely win. If the subset of that issue is freedom and personal liberty, the GOP will win with meaning. The Obama campaign knows this. That’s why they’ll do anything to throw Republicans off those subjects. Two weeks ago it was contraception, next week it will be another social question. They used to scorn Republicans for using wedge issues, but now their entire strategy is a tribute to the political hacks they hated. And if any Republicans were sad that contraception actually came up as the subject of public debate, they were not as sad as Democratic strategists, who were hoping to save it for September.

If the economy significantly rebounds between now and November, will that leave Mr. Romney without an issue? No. First of all, magic is not about to occur. But more important, if unemployment plummeted to 6%, the American people would think, “Nothing personal, but this didn’t happen because of Obama, it happened in spite of him.”

No one thinks he’s got a good hand on the economy. No one, not even his supporters.

There is a war against women. It is something comparatively new in our national life, and we have to start noticing it.

It is not a “Republican war on women.” It has nothing to do with White House attempts to paint conservative efforts to protect religious liberty as a war against women’s rights to contraceptives. That is a mischievous fiction, and the president’s polls this week suggest it isn’t working. Good.

But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass.

Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They’ve all experienced it.

Here are some of the words that have been hurled the past few years at public figures who are female: “slut,” “whore,” “prostitute,” “bimbo.” You know the other, coarser words that have been used. But the point is, these are not private insults. They are said in public. This is something new in American political life, that women can be spoken of this way.

Eleanor Roosevelt was probably the most controversial first lady ever, but no one ever felt they could speak of her in these terms in public. Dorothy Thompson may have been the most controversial commentator of the 20th century, but no one felt free to take to the airwaves, to go on the radio, and oppose her in such a low and vulgar way.

But you don’t have to go back 60 and 70 years to see how much things have changed. Twenty years ago the discourse was higher.

*   *   *

All this has devolved into a political argument about who’s worse, the right or the left. I don’t think that’s the most important question, but since it’s on the table the answer is the left. We all know about Bill Maher, David Letterman, Ed Schultz. A liberal radio host a while back accused the Republican lieutenant governor of Wisconsin of performing “fellatio on all the talk show hosts in Milwaukee.”

Two nonconservative columnists recently nailed it. Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post wrote that what Rush Limbaugh said two weeks ago—Sandra Fluke was a “slut” and a “prostitute” who owed the public videotapes of her having sex—was bad indeed, but “Some of the more blatantly sexist attacks I have personally felt have come from the left.”

Prize pig is left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi who becomes emotional and can’t control himself when writing about women. Here he is on a conservative media figure: “When I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text . . . with [male genitals] in her mouth.” Democrat Kirsten Powers, in brave pieces in the Daily Beast, called out “the army of swine on the left.” Keith Olbermann, who still exists, attacked her for defending Mr. Limbaugh, which she hadn’t done. He took to Twitter. One of his followers called her “just another brainless plastic doll Fox puts on camera to appease the horned up 60-year old white dudes at home.” Ms. Powers wryly notes, “Don’t forget: liberals are the feminists, it’s the GOP who hates women.”

Why would the left be worse? Let me be harsh. Some left-wing men think they can talk like this because they’re on the correct side on social issues such as abortion. Their attitude: “I backed you on the abortions you want so much, I opposed a ban on partial birth. Hell, I’ll let you kill kids at any point until they’re 15, I’m cool. And that means I can call women in public life t – – – s, right? Because, you know, I think of them that way.”

On the right it can be bad too, in different ways. Some conservatives resent or have doubts about the implications of equality but know they can’t say it—no one wants to be caught doing that. For years they’ve felt bullied by the feminazis, by the language police. So they attack women in public life with a particular surliness, and claim it as proof of how liberated they are. “Hey, you wanted to be equal, I’ll show you equal: this is how we play in the leagues, baby.”

But to see this only through a left-right prism is to miss the problem. The problem is the coarsening of discourse in public life.

*   *   *

Let me put forward one possible theory for why this is happening. Just one, because there would be many.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Year of the Woman, declared by someone in 1992 to mark and encourage the entrance of so many women into American politics.

At the exact same moment something else was happening in our public life, and it had equal or greater impact on our culture—the rise of the Internet.

Suddenly, by the mid 1990s, there was a new public place of complete freedom. Suddenly everyone—in blog posts, on personal websites, on news sites, in comment threads—had an equal voice and was operating on an equal field. The Internet became—this is America, we have a certain DNA—a bit of a Wild West. It was exciting and invigorating, a new frontier, but it held dangers, too, and darkness.

When anyone can say anything, anyone will. When the guy in the basement having his third Grey Goose finally got a telephone line on AOL, he found out he could take his Id out for a ride. He could log on, indulge his angers, and because it was anonymous he never had to stand by his words, or defend them. He never had to be embarrassed in front of his kids.

The Internet is a breakthrough in human freedom. But over the past 20 years it has had a certain leveling effect. It hypes the cheap and glitzy, it reduces the worthiness of a thought to the number of clicks it gets.

It has helped set a new cultural tone. It is not a higher one than we’ve enjoyed in the past.

Our comics and commentators went with the flow, but it only flows downward. And now you have to worry about young men of 20 and 30, who grew up in the age of the Internet and modern media, and learned the rules of political discourse there. Which suggests the future may be even rougher rhetorically.

If there is a bright side to the Limbaugh fracas maybe it is to put a spotlight on the need to clean up our act.

It would have been good if President Obama had discussed this in his news conference, instead of dodging a question about misogyny on the left. He called Sandra Fluke, he explained, because he wants public life to be safe for his daughters, if they choose to enter it. He would have made a braver, truer, more meaningful statement if he’d noted that Bill Maher has become so rich on sexism he had a million dollars to give to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. And now, so as to discourage the bad treatment of women, Mr. Obama is handing it back.

That would have made an impression. That could have been a step forward.

John Boehner is sighing. It’s one of those days, or maybe epochs. He’s just spoken to the House GOP conference. Some members are feeling fractious, disheartened. Time for a St. Crispin’s Day speech. What did he tell them? “I told them they have ocular rectitis. That’s when your eyes get confused with your butt, and it develops into [an unnecessarily fecal] outlook on life.”

It’s late Wednesday morning and the speaker of the House is seated in his Capitol office smoking and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. What the conference is feeling is “the normal state of affairs for a majority that’s frustrated by a president who doesn’t want to work with us and a Senate that doesn’t do the bills we send over. And then the frustration builds and they get to nipping at each other. And so it was one of those mornings where you had to kind of re-set the table.”

He told them the historical moment is more promising than it looks: “Instead of looking at what we can do with it, we’re busy gnawing at each other over small differences that we might have.”

He sighs. A really big sigh.

“There’s a much bigger prize here. You can’t get the bigger prize without action. And we need to be united in order to have action.”

The prize is winning the White House and the Senate. “They all understand there’s big limits on what we can do only having one house. And while we’ve been able to stop all the real craziness of what’s going on, trying to peel this back . . . is gonna be difficult.” By “this,” he means the size, cost and power of the federal government. “It took the other side 80 years to build this monstrosity . . . and our guys want to get rid of it tomorrow.” Congress, he says, doesn’t work that way. The Founders designed it not to work that way.

What of the charge the tea party has made the House ungovernable? “False,” he says, it’s a media creation. “Virtually every Republican in the House was supported by the tea party in the last election. My problem is not with our 89 freshmen, my problem is with a few senior members who—they always want more. They always want more than what you can produce.” His predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, “went through the same problem with her side.”

But it gets on his nerves. “With modern communications, a handful of them who feel differently will go out there and make their case on why we oughta go further, why we oughta do more. And there’ll be a couple of outside organizations who come along and gin it up, and then all of a sudden [some] members are getting heat, and you know they really want to be with us but they don’t want to put up with the heat at home. But it’s not the freshmen, that’s the amazing part of this.”

His relationship with Majority Leader Eric Cantor? “Eric and I have never disagreed on strategy, ever. From time to time there’s been some disagreement on tactics, not usually between Eric and I, usually on the staff level.” The speaker, the leader and their staffs met in the speaker’s office after the House retreat. “Eric and I . . . both knew that we can’t be divided, and he and I had some conversation with our staffs that we’re all going to be on the same page.”

As for the president, “he and I get along fine. But boy do we have big differences.”

Mr. Boehner turns to the debt ceiling struggle of six months ago: “We had a little rough spot last summer. I would argue he moved the goal posts, and blew up negotiations about the debt deal.”

Congress needs “to show . . . that in spite of our differences we can find common ground to do the work of the American people. But I’ll just say this. There’s nobody who tried harder last year with the president to do the right thing. There’s nobody who walked further out on a limb than I did to try to get him to do the right thing. And one of my greatest disappointments was not getting an agreement.”

The drama was a trauma. “Oh, it really was. And we were pretty close to doing something nobody would have ever believed—real changes, real cuts. I put revenues on the table.” He says he put forward $800 billion in spending cuts and tax reforms—closing loopholes while lowering corporate and personal rates. “A lot of my guys would have choked to death on it.” But the deal, he says, was doable.

What happened? The White House “spun this thing that I walked away from this.” Actually, he says, the president did: “He lost his courage. . . . He just couldn’t bring himself to do what he had to do.”

Mr. Boehner says his staff felt some anxiety about what he’d offered. “I looked at them all because they were all getting nervous. I said, ‘Listen, if this means the end of my Speakership, fine.’” The famously emotional Boehner’s eyes filled with tears, and he paused: “I can walk out of here knowing I did the right thing. . . . If we don’t deal with it we’ll be like Greece and the rest of them.”

On the question of Congress’s low approval ratings, the speaker names the usual reasons: The economy is bad, Americans are frustrated, they look to Washington “and all they see is chaos.” Also Congress has been America’s “favorite whipping boy for 200 years.” So the low numbers are “not surprising.”

What about corruption? You’re the speaker of the whole House. Is corruption part of Congress’s DNA? Is it the No. 1 thing that’s bipartisan? “All members,” he says, “should be held to the highest ethical standards.” In the past six years, since becoming majority leader, he’s had many conversations with members about “allegations that were out there, public and not public.”

“People think I’ve got this job as a leader. They don’t realize that I have about 200 responsibilities and roles. I’ve gotta be the big brother, the father, I gotta be the disciplinarian, the dean of students, the principal, the spouse—you can’t believe all the roles that I have to play! But one of them is, you know, some problems you can nip early. I had three guys in here a few years ago, I said ‘Boys, you’re cruising down the wrong path.’ Two of them listened, one of them didn’t. He’s no longer here.”

“We got 435 members. It’s just a slice of America, it really is. We got some of the smartest people in the country who serve here, and some of the dumbest. We got some of the best people you’d ever meet, and some of the raunchiest. We’ve got ‘em all.”

How does word reach him that a scandal may be brewing? “Oh, it gets to me a lot of ways. The press, I hear about it from friends, I hear about it from colleagues. I’m out and about, I do what I do, I hear everything. There are no secrets in this town.”

In his time, has congressional misbehavior, publicly known or not, tended to go under the broadly defined category of “romance” or of “finance”?

A long sigh.

“Rarely is money an issue.”

The conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, who died Thursday, was a piece of work—bombastic, sensitive, angry, deeply generous, full of laughter. Spirited, too, like some kind of crazy knight. He was a battler and a warrior and he was brave and he made mistakes. He was a warm-blooded animal, not a cold one, and I suppose the thing that wounded him most was the thing that wounds everybody: He wanted to be understood. That’s a lot to ask of the other humans, who are mostly trying to understand themselves.

So many conservatives are mourning his passing, at 43, because he was irreplaceable, a unique human soul. The other day in a seminar at a university, a student of political science asked a sort of complicated question that seemed to be about the predictability of human response to a given set of political stimuli. I answered that if you view people as souls, believe that we have souls within us, that they are us, then nothing political is fully predictable, because you never know what a soul will do, how a soul will respond, what truth it will apprehend and react to. I was thinking as I spoke of the headline when the Titanic went down: “1,400 Souls Lost.” We used to see people in that larger dimension, which is not a romantic but a realistic one. The puniest person is big, and rich.

I had criticized Andrew last year in a column. A few weeks ago we bumped into each other at an airport, arranged to sit together on the plane, spoke our peace, hashed it through, and wound up laughing. He was endearing because he was exposed: If he felt it, he told you.
Afterward I thought again of something that has been on my mind the past five years or so. Longer, actually, but more so with time. In a way the argument between conservatives and progressives is that for the left, everything is about politics. Because they seek to harness government and the law in pursuit of what they see as just and desirable ends, everything becomes a political fight. Conservatives fought that narrow, constricted, soulless view of life: “We are not only political, we have other spheres, we are human beings.” But in their fight against liberalism and its demands, too many conservatives have unconsciously come to ape the left. They too became all politics all the time. Friendships were based on it, friendships were lost over it. “You agree with me? You’re in. You don’t? You’re out.” They became as good at ousting, excluding and anathematizing as Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, as Jacobins. As self-righteous, too, and as adept at dehumanizing the enemy.

It is not progress when you become what you hate, when you take on its sickest aspect.

Andrew and I talked about this that day on the plane. I agreed with his passion: We’re in a big struggle, we have to fight. His argument was in a way like Flannery O’Connor’s: You have to push back hard against the age that is pushing you. But he agreed too that politics can leave you twisted and deformed inside, that fighting those who would impose their will can leave you as consumed as they are. You have to be careful and not let political struggles take over your life, your affections—your soul.

We were not built to be all about politics. Empires rise and fall, nations come and go, but the man who poured your coffee this morning is eternal, because his soul is eternal. That’s C.S. Lewis. I don’t know if Andrew was a religious person or a believer, but I know he respected faith, understood it, felt protective of it. For which good on you, Andrew, and thanks. Rest in peace.

[DINGBATS]

So: this week in the run for the GOP nomination for the presidency.

They’re making me nervous. Are they you? I don’t mean nervous they’ll lose, I mean nervous.

There’s a sense now, encouraged by the press but also played into by almost all the candidates, that the subject matter out there on the stump has little relation to the actual and daily concerns of the American people.

They don’t seem to be speaking enough of the essentials, the central things that can actually be improved by governmental action. I’m not talking about Satan, contraception, class snobbery and whether JFK’s Houston speech made you want to throw up. Well, actually, I am, but also more. When the candidates do talk about pertinent issues—spending, taxes, energy—they tend to raise them through thought-killing clichés, to save time.

What is striking, too, is a growing air of goofiness. Its latest incarnation started with Mitt Romney’s Michigan aria. “You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just right.” But it got a little too free associative the night of the Michigan primary.

Rick Santorum, in his concession speech: “This oil, yeah, this is oil. Oil. Out of rock, shale. It leaches oil. In fact, the highest quality oil in the world, light sweet crude.” And: “The British were the most powerful army in the world and the navy in the world. They were ruled by highly educated, noble people. The uniforms were crisp and stiff. They looked good.”

Newt Gingrich’s speech was mostly about trees: “He had a really big tree. . . . How hard can it be to cut down the tree? . . . None of us had studied physics. . . . Now the tree was dead.”

As I watched them, I thought what you probably thought: It’s not good to take an Ambien before giving a concession speech.

It is getting to them. Everyone gets goofy on the trail because the trail is exhausting, it’s a daily sandpapering that rubs you raw. Constant pressure, high stakes, long days, cameras and mics, the attempt at irony that becomes the gaffe that dominates the day.

But they should buck up. Running for president is tough, but it also means aides, gofers, strangers whispering praise in your ear, and people holding signs saying you’re great. Someone else gets the dry cleaning, someone lays out the crisp shirt. The worst that can happen if you lose is seats on boards, cable contracts, honoraria, book advances and a free office in a think tank. How terrible. No wonder they’re under stress.

To comfort myself on Thursday, I looked for great candidate gaffes in history. There was the candidate who in 2008 said: “I’ve now been in 57 states, I think one left to go.” That wasn’t Michele Bachmann, it was Barack Obama. Here’s one talking about hard times: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” That wasn’t Mitt Romney, it was Sen. Obama. And how’s this for grandiose, when one candidate defined the meaning of his future victory: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” That wasn’t Newt, of course, but Mr. Obama.

All this makes me feel better, sort of.

Couldn’t the candidates make a pact? That from here on out nothing outré, strange, off point or nonessential will be discussed? That way they won’t embarrass themselves and have to put up a defense. And neither will their party.

Their central problem is that they’re all trying come across as normal. They shouldn’t. They’re running for president, they’re not normal. And anyway normal is overrated.

Obama supporters are beginning to feel more confident, or at least less embarrassed. A year ago, even three months ago, they were thinking: What a confounding, confusing loser this man is. They didn’t bother defending him never mind advancing him. But now they’re starting to get friskier. They believe there’s a new lay to the land: The economy is coming back, at least for now and at least a little; the Republican nominee will emerge so bloodied his victory will hardly be worth having; the Republicans are delving into areas so extreme and off point that by the end Mr. Obama will look like the moderate.

Here is a local Democratic political figure in conversation in New York: When you look at where we were after the crash in 2008-09, you look back and realize that whatever mistakes Mr. Obama made, “He got us through it.” He looked to me for agreement. That’s not really how I see it, I said. “But he got us through it!” Well, I said, in the sense that we’re here and not all dead, yes, but that would be an unusual standard by which to judge a president’s success.

We started to laugh, and he pressed on into foreign affairs. “He got Osama,” he said, “He kept us safe.” I’m not sure if he was knowingly mimicking what Republicans used to say in defense of George W. Bush: There was no second 9/11, “he kept us safe.” That grated badly on Democrats: “Are you kidding? He created catastrophes that will haunt us for decades!” One suspects it’s about to grate badly on Republicans.

Anyway, I heard two memes emerging, subliminal messages of the Obama campaign: “He got us through it” and “He kept us safe.” Or maybe they’re liminal.

[DINGBATS]

It is true the Republican candidates are making the president look better, and part of it has to do with circumstances. They’re locked in battle, full of argument and attack. He gets to be serene, above it all. They’re accusing each other, he’s ignoring them. He pounds away on his issues, they have a thousand issues, a jumble of questions and answers and stands. There is no nominee and so no prioritizing of concerns, and therefore no central meaning. It’s all an acrimonious blur.

Good news: This may be the Republicans’ low point. Bad news: The low point may last until the convention, and through it. It’s all getting a little exhausting. Thus the relatively lackluster debate this week. Everyone looked a little tired, out of gas, each playing a role: Mitt as Fred McMurray in “My Three Sons” in the episode where he’s tired and the kids keep interrupting his nap, Rick as the soulful seminarian who’s sort of defensive. Newt morphed into Grandpa, holding his wrist and smiling.

For almost a year Rick Santorum was made of Teflon. No one bothered to attack him, he’s a nothingburger at 4%, just be nice in preparation for the inevitable moment when he takes the stage and endorses you with an awkward man-hug. Now he’s Velcro, and trapped in a web laid by the administration’s claim that the furor over the ObamaCare mandate isn’t about religious freedom and abortion drugs, it’s about crazy people trying to take away your contraceptives. This is as big a lie as you can tell in politics, and a deeply mischievous one: It not only muddies the waters but adds a new layer of meaningless alarm to the political landscape.

But big lies can do damage unless deftly dealt with. And the mainstream media will help this particular lie along, not only because they’re carrying water and not only because they really do think Republicans are crazy on these issues and like to sit around having secret talks on ways to get CVS not to sell condoms, but because contraceptive use is an issue they can understand. What an abortifacient is and why it is unconstitutional to force the Catholic Church to ensure their provision is not something they really want to delve into. They don’t only have biases, they are, some of them, quite stupid.

But has Mr. Santorum learned anything from his 2006 loss in Pennsylvania? Since then he has gotten used to talking in venues where there was nothing to lose and little at stake (Fox News contributor) or the audience was fully versed in the reasoning behind his beliefs and supportive of them (Ave Maria University). Now he’s struggling with the fact that he’s in the leagues, and the leagues play by Miranda rules: Everything you’ve said can and will be used against you.

Since there’s no hiding from past statements, Mr. Santorum would be well advised to address it all thoughtfully and at length. He should sit down and pour out his thoughts on the extent to which one’s religious beliefs should and do inform one’s political views. Mitt Romney had his 2008 Mormon speech, and JFK his Catholic speech. Time for another. Mr. Santorum might keep this picture in mind as he writes. There’s a guy watching him in an interview, and he likes what he’s hearing. Then he thinks, “Wait—if the economy tanks in 2013 and I put on the news to hear the president’s statement, am I going to hear this guy saying, ‘And another thing that is societally destructive about how America conducts its sexual life is . . .’?” We’re talking about the presidency. No one’s going to hire that guy for the presidency.

[DINGBATS]

Meanwhile the story of the ObamaCare mandate continues.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, in essence the leader of the church in America, wrote a letter to the bishops this week saying that religious freedom is “a fundamental right” that “does not depend on any government’s decision to grant it: it is God given.” The president’s decision (including what Mr. Obama calls his “accommodation”) “violates the Constitutional limits on our government” and reduces religious liberty to “a privilege arbitrarily granted by the government.” This reflects, he suggested, “an extreme form of secularism.”

It was a strong letter, making clear the church is not backing down. But since the so-called accommodation, the call-to-action part of the church’s response has been weak. What should Catholics do? What should they know about legislative remedies? Whom should they call? Are the cardinals flooding the Sunday news shows?

There are bills in both the House and the Senate that would beat back the ruling. One may come to a vote next week in the Senate. But members of both houses fear nothing will go forward without full, explicit and vigorous church backing. Some Democrats are pursuing various fig-leaf bills that will give them political cover but not change the basic facts. They do not want to defy the administration or—more important—anger its powerful backers, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion provider in the United States.

What happens if the ruling stays? Will Catholic Charities close down? Assuming not, how big an annual fine will they have to pay if they refuse to bow to the mandate?

A fine on faith. Who thought they’d live to see that in America?

Will the priests be talking about this on Sunday so the phones of senators are ringing Monday?

A man’s voice, urgent:

“America is in crisis. It feels like we’re coming apart.”

Shots from a hand-held camera—blurry, indistinct. Angry citizens, protests. Closeup on a bearded young man, his face distorted by rage.

“We face unprecedented challenges.”

Cuts of lonely farms, small houses with for-sale signs. A little girl with pleading eyes.

“Is this any time for inexperience?”

A tattered flag blows in the wind.

“One candidate has silky words, but what do they mean? What do we really know of him?”

Video shot from behind a candidate who stands at a podium. We see his back, the jerky movement of his arms. We see faces in the crowd—confused, shaking their heads. Are they being gulled?

“His backwoods chatter can’t hide the facts. He’s never had a college education—or any education at all. He claims he read the classics at night, by candlelight. But that’s not really what the frontier was about.”

Cut to a raucous bonfire—frantic dancing, men and women, drinking. A hysterical laugh pierces the outer darkness.

“He says he’s for the little guy. Why is he hiding the fact that he’s a big-time lawyer who sold himself to the highest bidder?”

Archival film shot: a saloon table, a wad of bills gathered up by a fat man’s hand. Gleaming cuffs, cufflinks, ruby ring. In the background, a woman’s chuckle. Somehow we know her name is Belle.

“He served just one term in the House—one. And wasn’t reelected.”

Blurry photo of a man. We’re not sure who it is. Slowly it begins to come into focus—stark face, rude cheekbones, slick black hair. Now cut to close-up: his irregular eyes. One pupil is more dilated than the other. He’s cockeyed.

“He ran for the Senate, and failed.”

Video of torches being extinguished. A slump-shouldered voter walks away, alone.

“They said they loved his speeches, but what were they beyond words? His wife? Imperious. His address? Impeccable. As for the family he came from, he left them in the backwoods when he went to the big city.”

Shot of sad, impoverished family in an empty field.

Then quick shots: An honest American worker in front of a toolshed. Yearning families on farms and in cities. A little girl holding a flag, which droops wanly on her shoulder.

“This is a time of crisis—and he’s telling jokes.”

Screen goes black.

“They call him ‘Honest Abe.’ But he’s just another Springfield insider.”

Another man’s voice:

“I’m Stephen A. Douglas, and I approved this message.”

[DINGBATS]

So that’s my Abe Lincoln attack ad. It can claim to be factual, or at least arguable, and the parts that are too mean would ensure it got plenty of free play on “Hardball,” “Special Report” and “Morning Joe,” where we’d all deplore it. Then the Douglas campaign would pull it after complaining they have no control over their stupid, independent Super PAC, Americans for Sort of More Slavery at Least for a While.

I wish someone would make this ad and show it across the country and say at the end: “Cheer up, have faith, greatness is possible, sometimes it’s there but you only see it in retrospect. Not everyone’s a bum.”

Attack ads are the dreck of democracy. There are too many of them and there will be more. In the next 8½ months we will be engulfed. The Republican presidential primary is in full swing so we’ve already seen Bain Capital Took Your Job and Newt Is a Hypocritical Big Government Hack. Senate and House candidates will launch this spring and summer, so it’s going to get a lot more negative.

Why are attacks ads bad? Because at the end of the day they are damaging to our country and its processes, and they are most damaging to the degree their messages enter our children’s heads.

Someone once said that if you want to know the source of a person’s political views, go back to the newspaper headlines when he was 20. See what the country was talking about, and how it was talking about it, when he first started thinking of himself as a citizen, a stakeholder, a member of America.

But imagine you are today 8 or 10 or 12. You watch TV, you hear the radio in the car, you go on the computer, you see the ads. They inundate you. And they make, in the aggregate, an indelible impression: “They are all bad.” If your child is a happy little psychopath, he will be encouraged: “Good, I’ll fit right in when I grow up.” But assuming your children are not psychopaths, and in spite of their daily behavior that tends to be true, they will be discouraged. They would never want to take part in public life some day. They would never even want to pay attention to it. Because they want to grow up and be admirable.

We are poisoning their minds. I used to say liberalism was more damaged by this because liberals are inclined to think the answer to public ills resides in governmental action. Negative ads imply the people who run government are bad, so government must be too. Why trust it? But conservatism is undercut just as much, certainly now, because to make the changes they want, they need big numbers, big margins. Numbers come from passion. Passion is diminished by sourness, by “they’re all bums.”

Many say our politics are no more negative than they used to be, and they have a point: It’s always been a brute sport. We all know the drill, from “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” to the presidential election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson had one of his henchmen—excuse me, surrogates—accuse John Adams, in a series of newspaper essays, of being a “hideous hermaphroditical character,” a “strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “repulsive pedant.” That’s worse than what Mitt said about Newt. By the end, Adams was so beside himself he lost his temper and called Alexander Hamilton “a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard . . . a foreigner.” That’s worse than what Newt said about Mitt.

The man in front of whom Adams lost his temper made sure to get the word out, through letters, the press, and word of mouth. And that of course is what’s different now. They didn’t have mass media to blanket everyone’s minds. You used to have to be sort of sophisticated to know Alexander Hamilton hated Adams. You had to read long newspaper accounts to find out why, and you had to go to the city to find the newspapers. You could find it if you wanted to, but if you didn’t, there was less chance it would find you.

And now there’s no place to hide. All screens are on.

What remedies might ease this situation will have no impact on 2012. What about self-policing?

You there, political consultant, genius ad cutter, sitting at your laptop reviewing the images and the script. Are you making a brutal ad to take the enemy down? Are you thinking of anything but your status as an effective guru and your pay? Are you thinking at all of the net effects of your dark work?

No? Then a curse upon you as you hit “save” and “send.” May your hand be palsied. May it lose its power.