Peggy Noonan

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.

The Romney campaign is better at dismantling than mantling. They’re better at taking opponents apart than building a compelling candidate of their own. They do not seem capable of deepening his meaning, making his stands and statements more textured and interesting. He comes across like a businessman who studied the data and came up with the formula that will make the deal.

A particular problem is that he betrays little indignation at any of our problems and their causes. He’s always sunny, pleasant, untouched by anger. This leaves people thinking, “Excuse me, but we are in crisis. Financially and culturally we fear our country is going down the drain. This guy doesn’t seem to be feeling it. So why’s he running? Maybe he thinks it’s his personal destiny to be president. But if the animating passion of his candidacy is about him, not us, who needs him?”

Mitt Romney’s aides are making the classic mistake of thinking the voters want maturity, serenity and a jolly spirit. What they want is a man who knows what time it is, who has a passion to reform our country, and who yet holds these qualities within a temperament that is mature, serene and jolly. Newt Gingrich has half the package: He has a passion to reform, but it exists inside a crazy suit. Mitt has no particular passion within an obviously sane suit.

Which leads to Rick Santorum. Nobody in the conservative base hates Rick. Newt is hated by many and Mitt by some. Mr. Santorum is liked. He has real indignation about what’s happened to America, and he brings passion to his ideas about reform. He’s got little money, little organization—there’s no broad assumption he can pull it off. And by the time the Romney campaign is done dismantling him, he may have some people who hate him. But this will only underscore the Romney campaign’s reputation for destroying, not creating. And nobody loves a Death Star.

Newt’s not done and could rise again. I keep thinking of what a sage old pol, a veteran former GOP governor, said two weeks ago. He turned to me in conversation and said, “By the way, don’t call it a brokered convention. That’s what the media and the Democrats will call it because it implies there are brokers. Call it a contested convention because that’s what it will be, contested.” Could it really come to that? The odds, he said, are still way against it. “But they’re probably the best in my lifetime.”

[DINGBATS]

Let’s turn to low turnout in the Republican races. Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri this week were all down, Iowa and New Hampshire were flat, Florida, that Little America, was down almost 15%. All this in a volatile race, in a time of crisis.

What are the reasons? Maybe it’s the increasing negativity of the campaign, maybe it’s widespread dissatisfaction with the field. Maybe it’s that, and more.

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it. So let’s check out. Let’s watch the game.

[DINGBATS]

An update on the furor surrounding ObamaCare and the Catholic Church. The Obama White House was surprised by the pushback but hopes it will blow over. Their thinking: The Catholics had their little eruption, letters were read from pulpits, the pundits came out, and then the pols. But life goes on, new issues arise, we’ll hunker down, it’ll go away. Meanwhile, play for time. Send David Axelod out to purr about possible new negotiations.

That would be a trap for the church. Any new talks would no doubt go past Election Day, at which time, if the president wins, he’ll be able to give the church the back of his hand.

The short-term White House strategy is to confuse and obfuscate, to spread a thick web of untruths about the decision and let opponents exhaust themselves trying to fight from under the web.

The church must be resolute and press harder. Now is the time to keep pounding—from the pulpit, in all Catholic publications and media, in statements and meetings. For how long? As long as it takes. The president and the more radical part of his base clearly thought the church was a paper tiger, a hollow shell, an entity demoralized and finished by the scandals of the past 20 years.

Now is the time for the church to show it’s alive. How?

• Educate. Unconfuse the issues. Take a different aspect of the ruling and its deeper meanings every week, and pound away.

• Reach out. This is bigger than the Catholic Church. Go to the mainline Protestant churches, evangelicals, synagogues and mosques. Plead for vocal, public and immediate support: “If the church is forced to go against its conscience, religious liberty in America is not safe. If religious liberty is not safe, you are not safe.”

• Know your people. Mr. Obama carried secular Catholics overwhelmingly in 2008. But churchgoing Catholics were evenly split, 51% to 49% for John McCain. These are the voters the president could lose by huge margins over the ruling. And he will, if they fully understand it. Such a loss could determine the 2012 outcome. He knows it, you know it. Have faith in the people in the pews. Give it to them straight, week after week, and they’ll back the church overwhelmingly. The White House is watching. Pound away.

• Call for Democratic support. Religious liberty should not be a partisan issue. Republicans have come to the fore, but it’s better for the church if Democrats do too. They’re starting to come over. Make clear from the pulpit that members of both parties are absolutely essential in this fight. “All hands on deck.”

You can win. Keep the faith. Literally: Keep it.

What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama.

But let’s do Mitt Romney first.

He’s taken heavy fire for his statement, in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, in which he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

Every criticism has been true. It was politically inept, playing into stereotypes about Republicans and about his own candidacy. It was Martian-like in its seeming remove from the concerns of everyday citizens. We’re in a recession here! It was at odds both with longtime American tradition and with rising conservative concern over the growth and changing nature of what used to be called the underclass.

So: inept.

Advice? Treat the mistake as an opportunity. First, admit the blunder. A political communications expert would add, “And move on.” But don’t. Use this mistake, and others—”I like being able to fire people”—as the basis for a true, thoughtful and extended statement that will allow people more deeply into the mind of Mitt Romney. Call it “Let me tell you about my gaffes.” Use it to deepen people’s understanding of your views not only on poverty but on the whole American picture.

Three reasons to do this. First, the networks, in their Romney gaffe reels, will have to use some of the lengthier address for the appearance of fairness. Second, it’s good to dwell on this problem now because Democrats want it to go away. That’s because they want to bring it back fresh in the fall, when people have forgotten it. The third reason has to do with still-widespread conservative unease with what Mr. Romney really thinks and why he thinks it. He should set himself to giving a fuller picture of his thoughts.

[DINGBATS]

Which leads us to the Republican establishment, and how it feels about Mr. Romney.

That establishment is not what it was decades ago, when it was peopled by seasoned veterans who made decisions and got people in line. That’s gone. What has replaced it is a loose confederation of groups and professionals—current and former elected officials and their staffs, activists, the old party machinery, bundlers and contributors, journalists, radio and TV stars, mostly but not exclusively based in Washington.

The great myth of the election year is that they are for Mitt Romney. They are not. They are almost all against Newt Gingrich because they know him, they’ve worked with him. But they mostly do not love Mr. Romney.

The establishment didn’t get its candidate: Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, John Thune or Paul Ryan, Haley Barbour or Chris Christie. It is, secretly, as bereft as some of the grassroots.

Why doesn’t the establishment like Mr. Romney? Because they fear he won’t win, that he’ll get clobbered on such issues as Bain, wealth, taxes. Because when they listen to him, they get the impression he’s reciting lines his aides came up with in debate prep. Because if he wins, they’re not sure he’ll have a meaning or mandate.

But mostly because his insides are unknown to them. They don’t know what’s in there. They fear he hasn’t absorbed any philosophy along the way, that he’ll be herky-jerky, unanchored, merely tactical as president. And they think that now of all times more is needed. They want to reform the tax system and begin reining in the entitlement spending that is bankrupting us. They don’t read him as the guy who can perform those two Herculean jobs, each of which will demand first-rate political talent. And shrewdness. And guts.

Mr. Romney doesn’t have the establishment in his pocket. He needs to win it. All the more reason for him to get serious now. If he is serious.

This is the authentic sound of the establishment: At a gathering in Washington last week, I spoke to a grand old man of the party who enjoyed high and historic appointed position. “Where is the Republican Party right now?” I asked.

“Waiting for Jeb,” he said. Waiting for rescue.

That’s what Mitt Romney’s up against, not Newt.

[DINGBATS]

But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says under ObamaCare Catholic Institutions—including its charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church’s charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. Priests in an estimated 70% of parishes last Sunday came forward to read strongly worded protests from the church’s bishops. The ruling asks the church to abandon Catholic principals and beliefs; it is an abridgement of the First Amendment; it is not acceptable. They say they will not bow to it. They should never bow to it, not only because they are Catholic and cannot be told to take actions that deny their faith, but because they are citizens of the United States.

If they stay strong and fight, they will win. This is in fact a potentially unifying moment for American Catholics, long split left, right and center. Catholic conservatives will immediately and fully oppose the administration’s decision. But Catholic liberals, who feel embarrassed and undercut, have also come out in opposition.

The church is split on many things. But do Catholics in the pews want the government telling their church to contravene its beliefs? A president affronting the leadership of the church, and blithely threatening its great institutions? No, they don’t want that. They will unite against that.

The smallest part of this story is political. There are 77.7 million Catholics in the United States. In 2008 they made up 27% of the electorate, about 35 million people. Mr. Obama carried the Catholic vote, 54% to 45%. They helped him win.

They won’t this year. And guess where a lot of Catholics live? In the battleground states.

There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney’s gaffes a little bitty thing.

There was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him.

Enjoy it while you can. You have awakened a sleeping giant.

This is the most volatile and tumultuous presidential primary race of our lifetimes. Look at these numbers. In June 2011, in South Carolina, Mitt Romney led Newt Gingrich by 15 points, 27% to 12%, in a Public Policy Polling survey. Two months later, PPP had Rick Perry leading Mr. Romney by 20 points, 36% to 16%, with Mr. Gingrich running third. In early December Mr. Gingrich vaulted to the top, leading Mr. Romney by 23 points (CNN). A month later Mr. Romney led by 18.

Last Saturday, South Carolina voted. Mr. Gingrich won in a 12-point blowout.
Jump to Florida. In late November, Mr. Gingrich led Mr. Romney by 30 points. (PPP). In mid-January, Mr. Romney led by 26 points (Sunshine State News). A week later Mr. Gingrich was back on top by nine (Rasmussen). This Thursday Rasmussen said Romney was leading Gingrich by eight, 39% to 32%.

This isn’t “different polls say different things,” this is tumult, and it’s left almost everyone in politics scratching their heads: What the heck is going on? An unusually high number of voters have reported making up their minds late, just before the voting. Never before have three different candidates won the first three races in a GOP nomination contest.
We are in uncharted territory.

[DINGBATS]

What it appears we are seeing is a new iteration of the age-old split between the grassroots and a perceived GOP establishment. It is like split between the Goldwater forces and the Eastern Rockefeller wing of the party in the 1960s. It is an update of the split between the Buchanan brigades and the establishment in 1992. It is the old True Conservative versus Ambivalent Accomodationist split.

Thursday’s debate: Romney had a better night than Gingrich.

Actually it’s more a wound than a split, and the only one who healed it in our time was Ronald Reagan. He did it in three ways. He did it by being definitive: We believe in this and this, not that. He healed it by winning: Two landslides told everyone in the party who’d resisted him what time it was. And he healed it by governing well: By 1989, everyone who’d fought him within the party had to look at the results of what he’d done—the comeback of the U.S. economy, the fall of the Berlin Wall—and admit that it worked.

The healing lasted roughly a quarter-century, until the second Bush administration, when everything began to come apart again. The GOP was now a party split on spending, immigration, a dozen other issues. It was rocked even more than it knew by the crash of 2008, and further sundered.

The question now is whether the old split, the old wound, is tearing open in a deeper and more definitive way, in the first real presidential contest since the great healing went fully by the boards.

[DINGBATS]

The issue of Ronald Reagan himself, in the Florida primary, has been a sideshow and mildly absurd. Newt says he is Reagan’s successor, that he helped him rout the Soviet Union and create 16 million jobs. The Romney forces say Newt attacked Reagan, called him a failure, he’s nothing like the Gipper.

Newt is not Reagan, Mitt is not Reagan, and, by the way, President Obama isn’t Truman. People are themselves. They live in the era they live in.

One way Newt is unlike Reagan is that Reagan was a constructive figure, not destructive. If Newt is the donkey who knocked down the barn, Reagan’s the guy who’d build it. He wasn’t driven by need, and anger wasn’t his fuel. He was equable, even-tempered, personally content. Martin Anderson always said Ronald Reagan didn’t need high office to feel good, Ronald Reagan dated Lana Turner. He already thought he was quite a fella.

As for the history, Newt was new to Washington and had been in Congress two years, a back-bencher, when Reagan was sworn in. He had almost nothing to do with Reagan’s achievements. He was a politician looking for attention. He talked a lot, took to the floor a lot, and was sometimes impressive. He was excited by C-Span: It showed America he was there. Usually he said things that were supportive of conservative aims, sometimes not; sometimes he lauded Reagan, sometimes not. Henry Hyde summed up the bopping of Newt’s brain with a uniquely conservative putdown: “Him and his new ideas—there are no new ideas!”

Mr. Gingrich in the 1980s was hungry and ambitious, and no one had prepared the way for him, which is actually his firmest claim on outsiderness: he was no fortunate son. He was on his own, self-invented; he made the mistakes young men make when no wise, sophisticated hand is available to guide them.

It was after Reagan left that Mr. Gingrich became a leader, spearheading the insurgency that resulted in the 1994 Republican takeover of the House. It was a breathtaking achievement. It was what inspired Nancy Reagan’s statement that her husband’s torch was passed to him. But he could not govern, could not build the barn, and was ousted four years later.

During those years he concluded the growth area within the party was a critique of Reaganism from the right, and sometimes the left. So that’s where he was. By the mid-2000s, when Reagans dominance as an iconic GOP figure was fully established, Mr. Gingrich was aligning himself with him fully and enthusiastically, in films and books. He is an entrepreneur; it was where the business was.

Mr. Gingrich does not disdain Reagan and surely never did. He says he loves him and he probably does, in the way that people come to love what they need to love. They come up with reasons!

But the point is Newt senses the lay of the land. If a new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism looked like it was about to take hold, he’d see the virtues in that. Right now the growth area looks like it’s in opposition to elites and establishments. So that’s where he is.

[DINGBATS]

To Thursday night’s debate, the 19th of the primary year.

First, Rick Santorum’s mother for president—93 years old and she sprang from her seat beaming like the sun when her son called out her name.

It was a good night for Mr. Romney. He seemed stronger, more in command than in the recent past, polished. Actually he looked tall again. It was OK for Mr. Gingrich, no great moments—they’re almost expected of him now, especially when the audience is allowed to applaud—but fine. He seemed sluggish and off his game the first 45 minutes, but sort of caught up.

Mr. Santorum had a great night, scoring points on health care and South America, and giving a silent thumbs up to answer a time-wasting question. Ron Paul had three good lines. On his health records, he warned Wolf Blitzer: “There are laws against age discrimination.” On whether we should return to the moon: “Maybe we should send the politicians to space.” On the battle of the blind trusts he gave voice to the thoughts of a grateful nation: “That subject really doesn’t interest me a whole lot.”

Mr. Gingrich decried “the Romney attack machine.” Mr. Romney more or less let it go, which was wise since he’s got quite an attack machine there.

One senses Mr. Romney stabilized his situation. But who knows? The first big sound at the debate came from the audience. At first it sounded like boos, but it wasn’t, it was a chant. “Newt, Newt, Newt!”