Peggy Noonan

The talk this week was of who was most damaged politically by the failure of the super committee. The first, admittedly earnest answer is: the country. We have a projected deficit over the next 10 years of $44 trillion. A group of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in cuts. Just 1.2 out of 44. Not that hard. And they couldn’t do it. Everyone says we will now fight out the basic issues on which the committee failed to achieve agreement, taxes and spending, in the 2012 election. And we will. Maybe the electorate will yield up a clear answer and produce an obvious mandate. But maybe not. Maybe the big muddle will continue. Which won’t be good, because that way we sink deeper in the ditch.

Super committee success would have been important for this reason: It would have shown us, and the world, that we are not Greece. That we aren’t helpless, incapable, deadlocked, that we can take at least baby steps in the right direction.

The second party most damaged by the failure was President Obama, that grand strategic thinker who’s always playing long ball. It is a time of unprecedented and continuing economic crisis, and he went AWOL. He didn’t put his public prestige behind a good outcome, didn’t corral the Democrats on the committee, which could have made a real difference. He thought the super committee would likely fail on its own, and if it did, it only backed up his narrative—that dread word—about a do-nothing Congress dominated by Republicans in thrall to their billionaire slavemasters.

What he doesn’t understand is that Americans are tired of hearing the words “In Washington today,” followed by the words, “another failure to . . .” They think: Another failure under Obama. Can’t this guy get anything done? Doesn’t anything ever work under him?

That is what will damage him. At the end of the day, he didn’t want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt. Maybe the most harmful aspect of the president’s leadership style is that all of his political instincts were honed and settled before 2008, when he was rising. What he learned before he reached the presidency is what he knows. But everyone else in America knows the crash and the underlying crisis it revealed—on our current course, we are bankrupt—changed everything. Strangely, inexplicably, the president thinks the old political moves apply to the new era. They do not.

[DINGBATS]

To The Republicans, who met in debate Tuesday night in Washington. A note on the presentation of the debate itself. The videos each cable outfit now makes to introduce each debate have taken on a weird, hyperventilating tone. Tuesday’s theme-setter included bombs dropping, jets roaring, presidents sweating, machine guns, screaming dictators, explosions and street demonstrators. Then, in urgent and dramatic tones: “The Republican National Security Debate begins—now.” Guys, get a grip. Republican National Committee, start asking to OK the videos beforehand. This is a major-party nomination for the presidency, not a trailer for “Homeland.”

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and we really do want to be pleasant. But the trailer seemed to set the tone for the candidates and the questioners.

Granted the candidates are Republicans, granted there was a bit of macho I’m-tougher-than-you-are, granted the audience of think-tankers seemed rather grimly, professionally hawkish. Granted also that America faces deep challenges, real threats, true dangers. But the tone of much that was said was so dire and besieged. The language was stark.

Here are just a few phrases and sentences that were lobbed about for two hours. “Protect ourselves from those who, if they could, would not just kill us individually but would take out entire cities,” “expanded drone campaign,” “they can’t be trusted,” “strong special forces presence,” “hot pursuit,” “slapped new sanctions,” “no-fly zone over Syria,” “nuclear weapon in one American city,” “break the Iranian regime,” “sabotaging the oil refinery,” “crippling sanctions,” “centrifuges spinning,” “covert actions within Syria to get regime change,” there is an “imminent threat” in Latin America, “we have been attacked,” “doctrine of appeasement.”

It was all pretty revved up and dramatic. Putting aside the substance for a moment, what I was hearing reminded me of something that happened in the Reagan White House in the mid-1980s. The president had referred in a speech to some communist insurgencies in Central America. He had spoken of them forcefully. A few days later the president’s pollster came in. The president’s language, he said, had been so forceful that a number of people listening thought he was declaring multifront wars. Sometimes you have to cool your ardor, or you begin to sound like the War Party.

I also wondered if it actually serves U.S. interests to have possible presidents in a formal venue pressed on whether they will topple this regime or bomb that sovereign nation. At one point Wolf Blitzer asked Newt Gingrich: “Would you, if you were president of the United States, bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power?”

Messrs. Blitzer and Gingrich, longtime Washington insiders, live in a cultural cosmos in which things like this are chattered about with no more sense of import than if they were talking about the Redskins. In fact it’s exactly what they talk about after they talk about the Redskins game. But should we be discussing those things so blithely and explicitly in such a public way? You have to wonder what the world thinks when it hears such talk—and the world is watching.

It would have been nice to hear one of the candidates say, “You know, Wolf, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to talk the way we’re talking at a time like this, with the world so hot and our problems so big. Discretion isn’t cowardice, so let me give you the general and overarching philosophy with which I’d approach these challenges, and you can infer from it what you like. I prefer peaceable solutions when they are possible. I think war is always a tragedy, sometimes necessary, sometimes even inevitable, but always tragic, and so I don’t speak lightly or blithely of taking up arms . . .”

By the end, some of what was said sounded so dramatic that Ron Paul seemed like the normal one. He very much doesn’t want new wars or new military actions. This is not an unreasonable desire! Jon Huntsman was normal too. They both seemed to think our biggest foreign-policy challenge is the American economy, which pays for our arms and diplomacy but has grown weak. It has to be made stronger, because without it we can afford nothing.

The tone of the debate seemed to me another example of the perils of Republo-world, where politicians, consultants and policy professionals egg each other on in hopes of reaching the farthest points of the base.

The Democrats have a Demo-world too, and show every sign of wishing they could be in it, wishing they could have a presidential primary, wishing they could stop chafing under the leadership of a political figure whose instincts they doubt, and whom they don’t much like.

But Republo-world is up and operating, and should try to remember how it sounds to everyone else, who doesn’t live in it.

There is an arresting moment in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in which Jobs speaks at length about his philosophy of business. He’s at the end of his life and is summing things up. His mission, he says, was plain: to “build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.” Then he turned to the rise and fall of various businesses. He has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM and Xerox, Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

Jobs’s theory of decline was elegant and simple as an iPad, and when I asked business leaders about it the past few weeks, they agreed, some with the kind of engagement that suggested maybe their own companies had experienced such troubles.

The theory applies also to our politics. America is in political decline in part because we’ve elevated salesmen—people good on the hustings and good in the room, facile creatures with good people skills—above people who love the product, which is sound and coherent government—”good government,” as they used to say. To make that product you need a certain depth of experience. You need to know the facts, the history, how the system works, what the people want, what the moment demands.

You might say the rise of Barack Obama was the triumph of a certain sort of salesman. He didn’t know the product, but he was good at selling an image of the product, at least for a while. In time even his salesmanship came to seem hollow. One of the most penetrating criticisms of Mr. Obama came again from Jobs, who supported him but was frustrated by him. He met with the president last year and urged him to move forward on visas for foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the U.S. Mr. Obama blandly replied that this was covered in his comprehensive immigration bill, which Republicans were holding up. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson: “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done.”

He does do that a lot. Nothing is ever shovel-ready with him. But leaders tell us how things will get done, how we can move forward. They can tease a small element out of a large bill, and get it passed.

Mr. Obama is a very dignified and even somber man, but he never seems to get the seriousness of the moment, the sense that we’re in a gathering crisis.

But then a lot of his would-be contenders seem unserious and unresponsive, don’t they? Which gets us briefly to Herman Cain, who thought he was engaged in a yearlong branding experiment and wound up a serious contender for the GOP presidential nomination.

Mr. Cain’s famous version of the brain freeze this week wasn’t really that, a brain freeze. It was more like a public service. Because he was showing us a candidate for the presidency of the United States desperately trying to retrieve a soundbite and not even trying to hide the fact that he was trying to retrieve a soundbite. Because we’re kind of all in on the game, and it is a game, right?

The reporter asked him if he agreed, in retrospect, with President Obama’s decisions on Libya. Mr. Cain said, “OK, Libya.” Ten seconds of now famous silence ensued. Then: “I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reasons.” Another pause, and then: “Um, no, that’s a different one.”

He was saying: That’s a different soundbite.

Later, with an almost beautiful defiance, Mr. Cain told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “I’m not supposed to know anything about foreign policy.” That’s what staffers are for. “I want to talk to commanders on the ground. Because you run for president [people say] you need to have the answer. No you don’t! No you don’t!”

Yes you do. It was as if history itself were unknown to him, as if Harry Truman told Douglas MacArthur, “Do what you want, cross the Yalu, but remember to tell me if we invade China.”

As for the commanders on the ground, Mr. Cain clearly doesn’t know something crucially important about modern American generals: that they tend to be the last to want to go to war and the last to want to leave. They’re the last to want to go to war because they know what war is—chaos, destruction, always “a close-run thing.” And they know the politicians who direct them to go to war often don’t know this, or know it fully. But once action has been taken—once they’ve fought, seen their men die, planned, executed, taken and held territory—generals tend to counsel against leaving. Because they’ve worked with the good guys and seen the bad guys, and know what they’ll do on our departure.

A candidate for president ought to be at least aware of this dynamic, and many other dynamics, too. To know little and to be proud of knowing little is disrespectful of the democratic process, and of the moment we’re in.

The purpose here isn’t to slam Mr. Cain but to point out that when Republicans talk like this—no, when GOP voters cheer Republicans who talk like this—it leads their opponents to smile in smug satisfaction.

A central line of Democratic attack against Republicans is that they’re not really for anything, they just hate government. That, Democrats say, is why Republicans speak so disrespectfully of government as an institution, that’s why they blithely dismiss the baseline requirements of a public office, as Mr. Cain does.

The charge that Republicans just hate government carries other implications—that they’re stupid, that they’re haters by nature, that they’re cynical and merely strategic, that they enjoy having phantom foes around whom to coalesce, like cavemen warming themselves around a fire.
Republicans don’t hate government, but they’re alive to what human beings are tempted and even inclined to do with governmental power, which is abuse it. And so they want that power limited. It’s not really that complicated. Democrats may try to paint it one way, but when they do, Republicans shouldn’t help them. They should show respect for the moment. They shouldn’t be unserious.

One of the people in the debate was bombastic to the point of manic, and another was more pointedly aggressive than her usual poised and beautiful self. But enough about Jim Cramer and Maria Bartiromo. It was a revealing debate. It would be wonderful to see President Obama grilled as the Republicans were Wednesday night in Michigan. What exactly will you cut in the entitlement programs? How will you solve the foreclosure crisis? And we’d like you to answer in 30 seconds while we look at you with the sweet-natured gaze of a cop at a crime scene.

Those who say the debates are hurting the Republicans may be right. There is a freak-show element. But seeing Republicans repeatedly walk through fire may in the end make them seem far more impressive than the Democrat who doesn’t have to. People notice the disparity. And this isn’t a bad time in history to see would-be leaders get nailed, and fight back up.

But there was a moment in the debate that suggests something bad. Too many people in that audience were fully locked into Republo-world, a nice place but one that exists apart from the reality-based community. More on that in a moment. First a quick overview.

Rick Perry’s candidacy wasn’t going anywhere before the famous 53-second brain freeze. Now it’s official. To me it was the first thing he’s done that was endearing. You’re out there live in front of six million people, they’re watching closely, you’re under the lights, every word counts—and you blank. You forget the third element of your robotic soundbite. This is human. But we don’t want our presidents to be human, we want them to be perfectly prepped and drilled so we can make fun of their inauthenticity. Anyway, Mr. Perry continues to be dead, just as Newt Gingrich continues to make the debates come alive. Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain addresses the sexual harassment allegations against him.

Jon Huntsman made a mistake in speaking sympathetically of Occupy Wall Street. Timing is everything. We’re two months into it now, and people have come to see the rampant creepiness. Much of OWS is juvenile, but some of it—the physical bullying, reports of small-time criminality, the intimidation of merchants—has taken on a more sinister cast.

Mitt Romney, of course, did well, and continues to deserve an award for Heroic Self Discipline in the Cutaway Shot. He looks at the other candidates with a benign, encouraging look, as if he’ll take no pleasure in it at all when he squashes them like bugs.

The debates continue to winnow things down. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are second tier and will stay so. Ditto Ron Paul. Mitt Romney is the front-runner because he’s Mitt Romney. This week in a poll more Republicans said they expect him to be the nominee than any other candidate, which must mean something. Mr. Huntsman has a chance to break through in New Hampshire. Mr. Gingrich will never not be compelling, intelligent and fearless in his way, but there was a small moment in the debate in which he was asked about his apparently lucrative past lobbying for Fannie Mae. Keep your eye on that. Right now he’s on the uppalator, as a child once called an elevator going up. But the voting starts in 7½ weeks, the press has never really unleashed on him, and it’s Full Oppo Dump time. He may be on the downalator soon.

Which gets us to Herman Cain, and the bad moment.

Republicans are excited about the race. They’re feeling fierce in their desire to remove the incumbent, and they’re certain America is in a moment of profound crisis. But they’re losing perspective and acting in a way that is insular.

Herman Cain has guts. This is stipulated. He’s a black man of his generation who yet holds and defends conservative views. On the economic crisis, he thought big: Don’t tinker with the system, tear it down—replace the tax structure with something coherent, reliable. He forced the other contenders to think big.

His views on foreign policy are not views but declarations of disinterest. He doesn’t know China is a nuclear power, he’ll let the generals tell him what to do about Afghanistan. All the world’s Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. This is funny until it’s not. At any rate, Mr. Cain has been leading in the polls.

Over the past two weeks he has been accused of sexual misconduct by, at this point, four separate women. Two have come forward. In two cases there were financial settlements. They may all come forward together. The story is likely not going to go away. It is serious. The women may be telling the truth.

Mr. Cain followed the original accusations with a nervous shifting of stories—suddenly remembering details, not recalling others, contradicting himself, blame shifting—it’s the Democratic machine, it’s the Perry campaign, it’s race, the woman is unstable.

At the debates, when he was questioned on this—as he should have been—the Republican audience booed the question and the questioner. Mr. Cain surfed on crowd response. These are “unfounded accusations,” it is “character assassination.” This brought cheers.

Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe he’s not. But again, this isn’t a small thing. What the Republicans in the audience were seeing was a sympathetic guy struggling with grave charges that may or may not be true. (Though yes, in any audience there would be some who react, inside and down deep, as if they run Penn State: Why let a few allegations get in the way of the fun?)

But what everyone else is seeing—what those who do not live in Republo-world are seeing—is a guy who, faced with the charges, nervously dodged, deflected and denied. What they are seeing is four women, not one or two. What they are seeing is something that may amount to a pattern.

What the charges deserve is consideration, attention, deep reporting. What they don’t merit is raucous boos, and an insular spirit of “You’re either with us or against us.”

And here is the part that speaks of Republo-world. It’s very easy when you really want something to happen to see signs all around you that it is going to happen. It’s tempting, when you’re surrounded by like-minded people, to cheer your guys no matter what.

But this is a time to be sober. The voting begins in 7½ weeks. We’re picking a president now, right now, every day as we make our decisions.

Did you see the Ohio numbers from Quinnipiac this week? Mr. Obama beating all comers. In an initiative, voters rebuked his health-care, but Gov. John Kasich’s effort to gain some control over unions and public-sector spending was roundly defeated in a referendum. In Ohio, that bellwether state. This thing isn’t over.

Republicans should sober up. They should be thinking not about what the Republican at the local GOP meeting is thinking, but what the independent across the street is thinking. He’s catching the Cain story on TV and thinking: “This guy may have a problem. I want more evidence, but if it’s true, then man, we don’t need to go there again.”

That independent is a pretty important guy. The GOP better start doing a better job of considering how he sees things. He doesn’t live in Republo-world, but he’s right across the street, and he votes. He’s going to pick the next president.

The Republican Party continues to struggle with its brand. A Washington Post-ABC poll this week tells us that in spite of Barack Obama’s relative unpopularity, and in spite of the economy, the Democratic Party is still more popular with voters than the GOP. Forty-eight percent said they view the Democratic Party favorably, while the Republicans came in at 40%. (Neither of the parties in our two party system broke through to fifty, which tells you something about the moment we’re in.) Only 13% said their view of the GOP was “strongly” favorable, down from 19% in February 2010 and well below the 21% who “strongly” favor the Democrats. Also in the poll a nameless Democrat beats a nameless Republican for the presidency. Republicans are lucky the president has a name.

The first thing to say, and the reports on the poll said it, is that it has always been this way. The Democratic Party has always polled better than the Republican Party. But this is a good time to consider why.

The broad and overarching reason is that 20th-century branding is still culturally powerful.

What is the Democratic brand? It is the party of the little guy, the outsider. The party of “We Shall Overcome,” of great movements—civil rights, feminism, the environment. The party of “Listen, isn’t this country rich enough to afford a little for the old, the infirm, people who need a boost?” You can argue the facts and legitimacy of this all day, but it lingers as a powerful part of the Democratic Party brand.

And there’s still a certain lingering mystique to the Democratic Party. It retains a vestigial reputation for a kind of glamour, sophistication and broadness. Isn’t that Averell Harriman over there with Chip Bohlen? There’s Babe and Bill, Jack and Jackie. There was an ethos of easily worn wealth joined to a spirit of declared egalitarianism. The guy standing with Averell, the rough-featured labor leader with hands like shovels: It’s Dave Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The Democratic Party in its best days was hard hat and top hat, a party of the little guy run by the most interesting and glamorous big guys.

Is all this in any way relevant to today? No. Now it’s is brute, grubby and lacking in grace. But it’s part of the vestigial brand.

And who in the 20th century were the Republicans? The sober ones. The ones who said you had to live within your limits. The ones who said there actually were limits. The ones who said you have to know who man is, don’t push him too far.

You remember your grandfather with respect because he worked hard, made sure the household stayed afloat, earned the money, and warned of things: Don’t run up debt, be true to your word. Because he saved, your father went to engineering school and your family was lifted up.

You acknowledge this and speak of it with pride. But you know what you remember with a surge of love? When grandma used to slip you a five. When she’d put her hands in her pockets and bring out candies she brought just for you.

Grandpa was protective: He locked the door and paid the bills. Grandma would have a drink Sunday night and talk about how you should all go to France on a steamer and eat eclairs.

You know grandpa was a Republican. You survived because of him. You know grandma was a Democrat. She made life fun. At his worst, he was a bit of a scold. At her worst, she was dreamy and scattered. Actually, maybe that’s a definition of the best of the old bipartisanship.

The Democrats have all that going for them. And of course there was something else. American culture, high and low, is governed and run by the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry is, and has been since the New Deal, firmly rooted in the Democratic Party. It was invented by the ethnics of the East, the children of immigrant Irish and Jews and others who joined the Democratic Party as soon as they got here. And they let everyone in America know, and they do it to this day, that the Democratic Party is the cool party, and the Republican Party is the one a nice person should be slightly embarrassed to belong to, the one that seems like a character flaw to belong to. You know this if you are a conservative in a blue state. You wind up constantly emphasizing that no, you like everyone and no, you’re not angry. “I’m trying to be protective over here and keep the family going!”

Democrats were, through most of the 20th century, better at propaganda, though they didn’t think of it that way. Liberalism attracted artists and artists made stories about the greatness of liberal leaders: “Sunrise at Campobello,” “PT 109.” Democrats know how to celebrate themselves.

That the Republican Party could overcome all this is actually quite a feat, and speaks of the enduring strength of core conservative convictions.

Party brand don’t dictate outcomes. But they matter anyway, because a brand is a reputation. Here both the Republicans and the Democrats face challenges.

A Republican challenge is what happened to the party in the years 2000-08. Conservatives, in the Washington Post-ABC poll, did not speak as highly of the Republican Party as they have in the past. Somewhere around 2004 the Republican Party broke in a new way. The GOP had been riven before—Taft-Eisenhower, Goldwater-Establishment, Reagan-Ford—and always healed back. But the split that grew after 2004 was different. Trust broke, and in a time not of peace and prosperity but of crisis. Which made the impact deeper.

What is called the tea party is the rightward part of the conservative base. They became angry that they had trusted the Republican establishment during a Republican presidency, only to see that establishment run up huge debt, launch foreign wars, contribute to the surveillance state, and refuse to control America’s borders. What made the anger deeper is that they were angry at themselves. They felt complicit: They had not rebelled, they had trusted the party: “They’re the GOP establishment, they must know what they’re doing.” What the conservative base had learned by 2008 is: Don’t trust the Republican party. Don’t trust its establishments. The old loyalty was over. It may or may not come back.

The Democrats’ challenge? They’re living on faded glory, and Mr. Obama has done nothing for the brand. In January 2009 it was bright and shiny. He has murked it up pretty good. The cascade of government-private sector scandals, from Fannie Mae to Solyndra, has dulled the brand further. Party of the working man? Party of the guy who kited the mortgage deals, got bailed out, and left the working man living in his car.

The Republicans’ challenge now: holding together, and breaking 20th-century stereotypes. They should distance themselves from government even as they prove they can govern, and not only oppose but propose. They should put themselves apart from the rigged, piggish insider life of Washington. And try not to look nuts while they’re doing it.

People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there’s a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly—”To whom much is given much is expected”; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations—liberty, equality—and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved. That’s from “The Killer Angels,” a historical novel about the civil war fought to right a wrong the Founders didn’t right. We did in time, and at great cost. What a country.

But there is a broad fear out there that we are coming apart, or rather living through the moment we’ll look back on as the beginning of the Great Coming Apart. Economic crisis, cultural stresses: “Half the country isn’t speaking to the other half,” a moderate Democrat said the other day. She was referring to liberals of her acquaintance who know little of the South and who don’t wish to know of it, who write it off as apart from them, maybe beneath them.

To add to the unease, in New York at least, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. If you are a New Yorker, chances are pretty high you hate what the great investment firms did the past 15 years or so to upend the economy. Yet you feel on some level like you have to be protective of them, because Wall Street pays the bills of the City of New York. Wall Street tax receipts and Wall Street business—restaurants, stores—keep the city afloat. So you want them up and operating and vital, you don’t want them to leave—that would only make things worse for people in trouble, people just getting by, and young people starting out. You know you have to preserve them just when you’d most like to deck them.

[DINGBATS]

Where is the president in all this? He doesn’t seem to be as worried about his country’s continuance as his own. He’s out campaigning and talking of our problems, but he seems oddly oblivious to or detached from America’s deeper fears. And so he feels free to exploit divisions. It’s all “the rich versus the rest,” and there are a lot more of the latter.

Twenty twelve won’t be “as sexy” as 2008, he said this week. It will be all brute force. Which will only add to the feeling of unease.

Occupy Wall Street makes an economic critique that echoes the president’s, though more bluntly: the rich are bad, down with the elites. It’s all ad hoc, more poetry slam than platform. Too bad it’s not serious in its substance.

There’s a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in “Reckless Endangerment”: that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great catering, and then “slipped quietly from the scene.”

It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job. Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie’s Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of Occupy Wall Street. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don’t think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

This week he spoke on “The American Idea” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He scored the president as too small for the moment, as “petty” in his arguments and avoidant of the decisions entailed in leadership. At times like this, he said, “the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns.” Politicians divide in order to “evade responsibility for their failures” and to advance their interests.

The president, he said, has made a shift in his appeal to the electorate. “Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment.”

But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn’t be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis. Here Mr. Ryan slammed “corporate welfare and crony capitalism.”

“Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?” Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? “Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?”

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should “lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive.” The “true sources of inequity in this country,” he continued, are policies “that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.” The real class warfare that threatens us is “a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.”

If more Republicans thought—and spoke—like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn’t be seeing his numbers go up.

The candidates were not-so-subtly pitted against one another, and the Vegas staging—the lights, the applause, the set—was like a 1970s game show. And now here’s your host, Mi-i-i-it Romney! I wondered if this was CNN’s sly spoof of the Republican Party, or just someone’s idea of good TV in the age of “Dancing With the Stars.” The candidates’ arguments, which occasionally descended into bickering, yielded a soundbite festival for future Democratic ads: “You hired illegals in your home!”

But in the end, Tuesday night’s debate was a real plus for the GOP. All the Republican debates have been, because they’ve made the Republicans look like the alive party. There’s been jousting and predictable disagreement, but there has also been substance. Often this is thanks to Ron Paul, who had the wit and depth the other night to score Herman Cain for not seeing that the unemployed are the victims of bad policy, not the perpetrators.

Ratings have been strong for the eight debates so far: Thursday’s delivered 5.5 million viewers to CNN, and Fox News’s two weeks before drew 6.1 million. Most of those viewers are politically engaged; most will be voters.

I’ve never seen TV debates play such a prominent role in a nominating process. The reasons people are watching are obvious: They’re deeply concerned about America’s future. They’re shopping for a new president, and TV is an easy way to judge the merchandise. It’s live, so that if something dramatic happens—some flub, some breakthrough—it won’t be removed in the editing. And the debates have developed an internal arc of their own. Because they’ve been held so regularly, five in the past six weeks, people can see particular candidates rise and fall, they can see their dramas play out. This one impresses you against your will (that would be Newt Gingrich), that one consistently fails to gain his footing (Rick Perry.) And so the debates have gained a reputation as decisive: They did in Pawlenty, made Cain, solidified Romney.

[DINGBATS]

This week Mr. Romney got jarred and did fine. Mr. Perry drew blood, but that only proved Mr. Romney can bleed, like a normal person. A big Romney virtue is the calm at his core. The word unflappable has been used, correctly, and that puts him in contrast to the incumbent, who often seems not so much calm as insensate. Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad. Mr. Romney’s added value is his persona. He’s a little like the father in one of those 1950s or ‘60s sitcoms that terrorized and comforted a generation of children from non-functioning families: Somewhere there was a functioning one, and it was nice enough to visit you on Wednesday at 8. He’s like Robert Young in “Father Knows Best,” or Fred MacMurray in “My Three Sons: You’d quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he’d buck you up and throw you the keys.

Mr. Romney’s past flip-flopping continues as the challenge that does not go away. A problem for him is that when you go to YouTube and see his old statements, and then watch more recent ones, he always looks the same. When he says in 1994 or 2002 that he’s pro-choice on abortion, and when he says in 2008 or today that he’s pro-life, he seems to be the same person: an earnest, dark-haired man whose views are serious, well-grounded and equally sincere. Which is disorienting. It’s not the flip-flopping itself. People are allowed to change their minds. Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the first California law legalizing abortion in 1967. By the late 1970s he had changed his mind, partly because of the influence and arguments of the Catholics around him, such as Bill Wilson and Judge William Clark. But he was allowed to change his mind, because you believed he changed his mind. Not his stand, his mind.

[DINGBATS]

Herman Cain continues to rise in the polls, in large part because people like his bold tax-reform plan, and also because they like him. To many of his supporters, his lack of experience in government seems not an impediment to but an argument for his candidacy. People are desperate for leadership; they look at what Washington has given us and think: The establishment got us into this, maybe it will take a gifted amateur to get us out. It didn’t start with Mr. Cain. The longing for the gifted outsider helped fuel the rise of Barack Obama. He was the furthest thing possible from George W. Bush, and he was uncorrupted by experience.

But I also suspect some Republicans tell pollsters they like Mr. Cain as a way of keeping Mr. Romney in line—to keep him from daydreaming about who’ll be in his cabinet, to keep him scared and make him humble.

The Republican Party is going to make Mitt Romney work for it. They’re going to make him earn it. They’re going to make him suffer. Because that’s what Republicans do.

As for Mr. Perry, he freely admits that he is not at his best in debate, and he’s not. He doesn’t know how to do it, and so it’s all jugular with him, no finesse, no calibration in the uses of aggression.

[DINGBATS]

We turn briefly to Occupy Wall Street, because people, including the president, continue to compare it to the tea party. It is not the tea party. The tea party was a middle-class uprising that was only too happy to funnel its energy into the democratic process. They took their central concerns—spending, taxes and regulation—and followed the prescription of Joe Hill: Don’t mourn, organize. They did. They entered politics and helped win elections. They did the Republicans a big favor by not going third-party but working within the GOP—at least for now.

Occupy Wall Street is completely different. They mean to gain power and sway by going outside the political system. They are a critique of the political system. They went to the streets and stayed there. They are not funneling their energy into the democratic process because there is no market for what they are selling: Capitalism should be overturned, I am angry that my college loan bills are so big, the government is bad, and the answer is more government. You can’t win elections in America with that kind of message. So they will stay in the streets, where they can have an impact by stopping traffic, inconveniencing people going to and coming from work, and appearing to be an amorphous force that must be bowed to.

The difference between the occupiers and the tea party is the difference between acting out and taking part.

Where is Mr. Obama in all this? He has made sympathetic sounds about Occupy Wall Street, probably seeing it as ultimately part of his base. Beyond that, he’s out campaigning. Sometimes he is snarky about Congress: He’s giving them “another chance” at voting on his jobs bill. Sometimes he is self-justifying. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper that “all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones.” Sometimes he lectures America. But he doesn’t buck it up, and he must know in his heart that it’s coming for the keys.

“Ten years ago, Steve Jobs was alive, Bob Hope was alive, Johnny Cash was alive. Now we’re outta jobs, outta hope and outta cash.” I heard that from a TSA agent in New York the other day, as he eyed me for explosives. We laughed, but there was a poignant edge. Part of the outpouring over Steve Jobs last week was that he was a huge symbol of what seems a lost world of American dynamism. The inventor in his garage changes the world. We’ll not only make the new machine powerful and fast, we’ll make it so beautiful it will make you cry. Like you’re looking at the future, like you’re looking at a baby in its crib. Johnny Cash: American soulfulness. Real American soul, not fake soul. “I’m stuck in Folsom prison . . .” Bob Hope’s good cheer. He could poke the establishment because in those days it was strong enough to take it. People hoped to join it. Because it wasn’t then a bad word.

Anyway, the TSA man’s joke was as good a summation of the current moment and the public mood as I’ve heard.

So a moment on Occupy Wall Street, then some thoughts on the Republican field.

Ten years ago, we had Jobs, Cash and Hope.

OWS is not in itself important—it is obvious at this point that it’s less a political movement than a be-in. It’s unfocused, unserious in its aims. But it is an early expression, an early iteration, of something that is coming, and that is a rising up against current circumstances and arrangements. OWS is an expression of American discontent, and others will follow. The protests will grow as the economy gets worse.

A movement that will go nowhere but could do real damage would be “We hate the rich, let’s stick it to them.” Movements built on hatred are corrosive, and in the end corrode themselves. Ask Robespierre. In any case, the rich would leave. The rich are old, they feel like refugees in the new America anyway. A movement that would be helpful and could actually help bring change would be one that said, “Enough. Wall Street is selfish and dishonest, and Washington is selfish and dishonest. Together their selfishness and dishonesty, their operating as if they are not part of a whole, not part of a nation of relationships and responsibilities, tanked a great nation’s economy. We will reform.”

Why is this happening now, and not two years ago? Because at some point in the past year or six months, people started to realize: The economy really isn’t going to get better for a long time. Everyone seems to know in their gut that unemployment is going to stay bad or get worse. Everyone knows the jobless rate is higher than the government says, because they look around and see that more than 9% of their friends and family are un- or underemployed. People put on the news and hear about Europe and bankruptcy, and worry that it’s going to spread here. Eighteen months ago smart people could talk on TV about how we’re on a growth path and recovery will begin by fall of 2010. Nobody talks like that now.

And people have a sense that nothing’s going to get better unless something big is done, some fundamental change is made in our financial structures. It won’t be small-time rejiggering—a 5% cut in this tax, a 3% reduction in that program—that will get us out of this.

[DINGBATS]

The other night the Republicans debated the economy. Nationally, the lightning strikes are all on the Republican side of the field. That’s where it’s all lit up, that’s where people look. The other side of the field is still and dark. No movement there, no lights.

President Obama’s jobs bill failed in the Senate this week, and the headline is not that it lost, it’s that it lost and nobody noticed. Polls actually showed support for various parts of it. You know why it failed? Because he was for it. Because he said, “Pass this bill.” So weak is public faith in his economic leadership that people figure if he’s behind it, it must be a bad idea. After the bill failed, the president said he won’t accept defeat: He and the American people “won’t take no for an answer.” Why does he talk like that, in a way so removed from reality? He didn’t sound resolute, he sounded plaintive, like someone doing a sound check in an empty hall he knows will never fill.

As to the Republicans: Do you know who looks most surprised by the rise of Herman Cain? Herman Cain. He thought he was on a book tour. Mr. Cain’s strength is not his charm. It’s not that he means it or that he’s a businessman. It’s that he’s the only one who’d throw out the entire U.S. tax code. He’d level it and start anew. He’d do something fundamental. And that has enormous appeal. Because our tax code is a rotting old edifice, and we can’t live in it anymore.

Jon Huntsman continues as an undervalued stock. He’s finally emphasizing that he was a successful, conservative two-term governor of Utah. He’s not actually a blue-blood, patrician Rockefeller Republican, he just plays one on TV. It would be better for him if he had an accent. His talents are broad enough that he was appointed ambassador to a major country, China. But he’s from Utah. He should say this a lot.

Rick Perry looks like someone who’s trying to find a graceful way out of this thing. It’s not going to work, and he must know it. He’s not playing to his strengths—he’s local, not national. In debate he’s like the handsome star of a 1960s TV Western, tilted back in his chair at the gambling table, cowboy hat over his brow, spurs clicking on the floor. And then he pulls the gun and he can’t shoot. He can’t even aim! No one is going to elect another Texan who has an insufficiently intimate relationship with the English language. He should liberate himself by internalizing the fact that he’s going to lose, and just say what he thinks, relax, and have a good time.

Like Newt.

Mitt Romney is the front-runner, whatever the polls say, and Chris Christie’s endorsement is a huge boon. People say Mr. Romney hasn’t budged from roughly 25% support. But through every rise of every challenger, he hasn’t lost a thing. He holds his position, and he can grow. But watching him the other night I thought: His strength is his weakness. He is, essentially, a moderate. Those who love him, love that best. Those who don’t, hate it most. But he is a moderate man, and when he gets dramatic, it’s always on tertiary issues. A trade war with China? Good, that will turn everything around. Or is it just so he can use words like war, and look strong, and please those in the party who are always impressed by war?

Moderation is normally the American mood, and good thing too. But maybe on the economy we need something bigger—something more fundamental and dramatic—to get back the old dynamism. At one point Mr. Romney spoke approvingly of “a tax break for middle-income Americans.” It sounded like the authentic sound of last year’s tax debate, not next year’s.

Look, we are in a remarkable moment and I’m not sure we’re noticing it in the day-to-day of politics and media. Last week I wrote of the new patriotism that I see taking hold of the American establishment, if that’s the right word—business leaders, doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, journalists and lawyers who find themselves feeling a great, deep yearning to help save their country. That public-spiritedness is waiting to be harnessed and led by good men and women who, in words I’ll explain in a moment, have passion not for themselves but for America.

What’s behind it is fear. The economy is tanking and can take a whole world with it. But what’s interesting—and new—is that the fear is not finding its expression (again, among those loosely described as the establishment) in rage, or in deeper partisan antagonism. Democrats could be feeling bitter and snarky: President Obama didn’t work, and they’re not in love with him anyway, so why not bash Republicans just for fun? Republicans could be feeling mindlessly triumphant: We’re on the verge of a major victory, make way for your new rulers. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is a new convergence of thought among Democrats and Republicans who are not in Washington and not part of the political matrix. They are in new agreement about our essential problems and priorities: that the economy comes first, all other crises (in foreign affairs, in our culture) come second, because they cannot be helped without an economy that is healthy and growing. They all agree—no one really argues about this anymore—the government is going bankrupt. They all agree the entitlement system has to be reformed. Heck, they all respect Paul Ryan, for his seriousness. They all want grown-ups to come forward with ideas that maybe each party wouldn’t love but that might do the country some good.

That is what I see in every business and professional meeting, in conversations with Democrats and Republicans: a new convergence of thought among the thoughtful.

Which makes this a promising moment. For once everyone knows what time it is. It’s not like 2008, ‘04 and ‘00, when establishments were polarized.

[DINGBATS]

But here’s the most remarkable thing I saw this week. I watched, by computer, two focus groups of so-called Wal-Mart moms—middle- and working-class women who’d shopped at least once the past month at Wal-Marts. The polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, assembled the groups, 10 women in Orlando, Fla., and 10 in Des Moines, Iowa. In Orlando they were mothers in their 20s and 30s; in Des Moines in their 40s and 50s.

They were spirited women, genial—there was laughter—and grateful for what they had, especially their families. But they were tired too, and scared.

In Orlando they were asked to describe in a word or two how things are going in the country. The responses: “Depressing,” “different,” “discouraged,” “sour” and “bad.” Any positive words to describe our country right now? Silence. How, asked the moderator, do you see our economic troubles in your life? “I see it every day in my job,” one woman said. Two weeks ago her company put up a posting for a position. Two hundred fifty applicants responded, “all overqualified.”

Another: “Most houses in my neighborhood are under foreclosure or for sale.” Another: “If I had the financial stability I think I’d just get out of here.”

They don’t say “unemployment,” they said “laid off,” and they all had stories of a husband, a father, themselves. One woman’s husband left her, so she took the kids to live with her parents. Then her father was laid off, then her brother-in-law.

They’re all trying to save money however they can—juggling credit cards, couponing, not eating out, no vacations, changing where they shop, buying the cheapest food in bulk. One woman spoke of donating blood. Another said she wasn’t raising her boys for college so much as to be “self-sufficient.” She was teaching them how to collect aluminum cans.

How does this time compare with a few years ago when the recession started? “I feel like it’s getting worse.” Were things better for you in 2008? “Oh yeah,” they said, heads nodding. What is your immediate fear? “Saving money for Christmas—that we won’t be able to buy Christmas presents.” “Losing my job. That’s my fear every day.” “That my parents are going through all their savings.”

They all think the government is lying about the jobless numbers. It’s worse than the official reports.

Who are the culprits behind our economic calamity? “The banks and the people who took the loans.” But more the banks, because they had, as one woman put it, “the authority.” When they gave out the loans, people thought “it must have been OK.” People were “lured in” by the banks—don’t worry, home values will keep going up—which pocketed the fees and kept walking.

People lampoon the Occupy Wall Street movement as a bunch of marginal freaks, but these women from the heart of the country shared a basic resentment: The banks got bailed out, everyone else was left holding the bag.

How do they feel about Mr. Obama? Silence. Then “indifferent,” “disappointed,” “great speaker.” A woman in Iowa said, “Lukewarm.” No one railed against him, there was no anger. There was a lot of “He tried.” “He hasn’t done the stuff that he said he would,” said one woman.

Both groups were feistier about Congress. “They’re playing a game.” “What have they done? They wasted a lot of time.” In Iowa the words they used were “Dysfunctional,” “sides,” “defensive,” “childish” and “can’t work together.” Are Democrats more to blame or the Republicans? “The same,” said a woman, and everyone nodded.

Republican contenders for the presidency haven’t registered in Orlando, but Iowa, with caucuses coming, is paying attention. Herman Cain was catching on, Michele Bachmann was not. Any reaction to Sarah Palin not running? “Good!” said an Iowa woman, to laughter. Anyone disappointed? “No,” they said.

What do they want in a political leader? Someone who cares about “Jane Doe on Main Street that can’t pay her electric bill.” Someone “with passion not for himself but for America.”

Do elected officials in Washington know how you live? In Orlando there was a chorus of noes: “They have a bunch of chefs cook for them.” “They’re more privileged.” “They’re compensated above and beyond their salaries. They have health care.”

Do they care about you? “No, not so much.” “They won’t care till they’re affected.”

What do you want Washington to do? From Iowa: “Fix it.” “Start looking at the big picture.”

What do you want from leaders. From Iowa: “Someone who isn’t hollow.”

They all said they care about 2012. They all said they’d vote.

[DINGBATS]

We are in a remarkable moment. Everyone understands the stakes. Everyone wants action. From comfortable professionals to people barely scraping by, everyone wants both parties to work together, to think of our country and not themselves.

And of course everyone really gets this except Washington, which says it gets it and doesn’t.

But those who think 2012 is just a clash of big parties had better wake up. They think they’re pulling in a tug of war, but they are dancing on the precipice.

At a symposium in Colorado at which thoughtful people from many professions spoke, and later in conversation with people who care about books in California, two things we all know to be true became more vivid to me.

The first is that nobody is optimistic about the world economy. No one sees the Western nations righting themselves any time soon, no one sees lower unemployment coming down the pike, or fewer foreclosures. No one was burly: “Everything will be fine, snap out of it!” Everyone admitted tough times lie ahead.

The second is that everyone hungers for leadership. Really, everyone. And really, it is a hunger. They want so much to be able to respect and feel trust in their political leaders. Everyone hungers for someone strong, honest and capable—as big as the moment. But the presidential contest, the default topic when Americans gather, tended to become somewhat secondary. Underlying everything was a widespread sense among Democrats and Republicans, lefties and righties, that President Obama isn’t big enough, and that we don’t have to argue about this anymore. There was also a broad sense that there is no particular reason to believe any one of the Republicans is big enough, either.

Actually, I saw a third thing. There is, I think, a kind of new patriotism among our professional classes. They talk about America now and their eyes fill up. With business people and doctors and scientists, there used to be a kind of detachment, an ironic distance they held between themselves and Washington, themselves and national problems. “The future of our country” was the kind of earnest topic they wouldn’t or couldn’t survey without a wry smile. But now I believe I see a deep yearning to help, to do the right thing, to be part of a rebuilding, and it is a yearning based in true and absolute anxiety that we may lose this wonderful thing we were born into, this America, this brilliant golden gift.

At the end of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” Tom, the narrator, tells us he never stopped thinking of his sister and his mother and their sadness, for “I was more faithful than I intended to be.” That, I think, is the mood taking hold among members of what used to be called the American leadership class—slightly taken aback by their love for America, by their protectiveness toward her.

The president reads ‘Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters’ by Barack Obama.

The untapped patriotism out there—if it were electricity, it would remake the grid and light up the world. And it’s among all professions, classes and groups, from the boardroom to the Tea Party meeting to the pediatric ICU.

We think patriotism reached its height after 9/11, but I think it is reaching some new height now, and we’re only beginning to notice.

[DINGBATS]

And here we turn to politics. Are those running for president aware of the fix we’re in? I’m not sure they are. For one thing, if they knew, they wouldn’t look so dementedly chipper. And they wouldn’t all be talking about The Narrative. Which is all I heard once I came back East.

The Narrative has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the country. That would make too much sense. The Narrative is the story of a candidate or a candidacy, or the story of a presidency. Everyone in politics is supposed to have one. They’re supposedly powerful. Voters believe them.

Everyone in politics should stop this. For one thing, a narrative is not something that can be imposed, it is something that bubbles up. It’s something people perceive on their own and then talk about, and if it’s true, the talk spreads.

Here I return to Ron Suskind’s book, “Confidence Men.” As noted last week, Mr. Suskind has been criticized for getting quotes and facts wrong. But the White House hasn’t disputed his interview with Mr. Obama, who had some remarkable things to say.

It turns out he too is obsessed with The Narrative. Mr. Suskind asked him why his team had difficulty creating a policy to deal with unemployment. Mr. Obama said some of it was due to circumstances, some to the complexity of the problem. Then he added: “We didn’t have a clean story that we wanted to tell against which we would measure various actions.” Huh? It wasn’t “clean,” he explained, because “what was required to save the economy might not always match up with what would make for a good story.”

Throughout the interview the president seems preoccupied with “shaping a story for the American people.” He says: “The irony is, the reason I was in this office is because I told a story to the American people.” But, he confesses, “that narrative thread we just lost” in his first years.

Then he asks, “What’s the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?” He answers: “What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people” about where we are as a nation and should be.

Tell a story to the American people? That’s your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?

The interview reflects the weird inability of so many in political leadership now to acknowledge the role in life of . . . reality.

Overthinking the obvious and focusing on the artifice and myth of politics is a problem for all political professionals, including Republicans. Sarah Palin was out there this week trying to impose her own narrative: that she’s all roguey and mavericky and she’d win if she ran, but she’s not sure the presidency—”the title”—wouldn’t dull her special magic. It was like Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” She’s still big, it’s the presidency that got small.

But this is mostly a problem for the Democratic Party at the national level, and has been since the 1980s. It reflects a disdain for the American people—they need their little stories—and it springs from an inability to understand the Reagan era. Democrats looked at him and the speeches and the crowds and balloons and thought: “I get it, politics is now all show biz.” Because they couldn’t take Reagan’s views and philosophy seriously, they couldn’t believe anyone else could, either. So they explained him through a story. The story was that Reagan’s success was due not to decisions and their outcomes but to a narrative. The narrative was “Morning in America”: Everything’s good, everyone’s happy.

Democrats vowed to create their own narratives, their own stories.

Here’s the problem: There is no story. At the end of the day, there is only reality. Things work or they don’t. When they work, people notice, and say it.

Would the next president like a story? Here’s one. America was anxious, and feared it was losing the air of opportunity that had allowed it to be what it was—expansive, generous, future-trusting. It was losing faith in its establishments and institutions. And someone came out of that need who led—who was wise and courageous and began to turn the ship around. And we saved our country, and that way saved the world.

There’s a narrative for you, the only one that matters. Go be a hero of that story. It will get around. It will bubble up.

A small secret. In writing about the White House or Congress, I always feel completely free to attempt to see things clearly, to consider the evidence, to sift it through experience and knowledge, and then to make a judgment. It may be highly critical, or caustic, even damning. But deep down I always hope I’m wrong—that it isn’t as bad as I say it is, that there is information unknown to me that would explain such and such an act, that there were factors I didn’t know of that make bad decisions suddenly explicable. Or even justifiable.

I note this to make clear the particular importance, for me, of Ron Suskind’s book on the creation of President Obama’s economic policy, “Confidence Men.” If Mr. Suskind is right, I have been wrong in my critiques of the president’s economic policy. None of it was as bad as I said. It was much worse.

The most famous part of the book is the Larry Summers quote that he saw it as a “Home Alone” administration, with no grown-ups in charge. But there’s more than that. Most of us remember the president as in a difficult position from day one: two wars and an economic crash, good luck with that. But Mr. Suskind recasts the picture.

Like FDR, Mr. Obama had big advantages: “overwhelming popular support, Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and the latitude afforded by crisis.” But things were weird from the beginning. Some of his aides became convinced that his “lack of . . . managerial experience” would do him in. He ran meetings as if they were afternoon talk shows. An unnamed adviser says the 2009 stimulus legislation was the result of “poor conceptualizing.” Another: “We should have spent more time thinking about where the money was being spent, rather than simply that there was this hole of a certain size in the economy that needed to be filled, so fill it.” Well, yes.

The decision to focus on health care was the president’s own. It could have been even worse. Some staffers advised him—this was just after the American economy lost almost 600,000 jobs in one month—that he should focus on global warming.

Mr. Suskind’s book is controversial, and some of his sources have accused him of misquoting them. The White House says Mr. Suskind talked to too many disgruntled former staffers. But he seems to have talked to a lot of gruntled ones, too. The overarching portrait of chaos, lack of intellectual depth and absence of political wisdom, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter at this paper, rings true.

*   *   *

Let me say here clearly what I’ve been more or less saying in this column for a while. It is that Mr. Obama cannot win in 2012, but the Republicans can lose. They can hand the incumbent a victory the majority of American voters show themselves not at all disposed to give him. (No column is complete without his latest polling disasters. A Quinnipiac poll this week shows Florida voters disapprove of the job the president is doing by 57% to 39%.)

Republicans only six months ago thought the president was unbeatable. Now they see the election as a bright red apple waiting to fall into their hands. It’s not. They’ll have to earn it.
Related Video

Dan Henninger analyzes Thursday night’s debate. Plus, Mary O’Grady and Steve Moore explain this week’s economic turmoil.

Mr. Obama isn’t as resilient as a Bill Clinton, with his broad spectrum of political gifts and a Rasputin-like ability to emerge undead in spite of the best efforts of his foes. His spectrum of political gifts is more limited. That’s a nice way to put it, isn’t it?

But consider what happened this week in New York.

Mr. Obama’s speech Wednesday at the United Nations was good. It was strong because it was clear, and it was clear because he didn’t rely on the thumping clichés and vapidities he’s lately embraced. When the camera turned to the professionally impassive diplomats in the audience, they seemed to be actually listening.

“It has been a remarkable year,” he said: Moammar Gadhafi on the run, Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali deposed, Osama bin Laden dead. “Something is happening in our world. The way things have been is not the way they will be.” Technology is putting power in the hands of the people, history is tending toward the overthrow of entrenched powers. But “peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.”

On the Mideast conflict: “The people of Palestine deserve a state of their own.” But the proposed U.N. statehood resolution is a “shortcut” that won’t work: “If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.” Peace can be realized only when both parties acknowledge each other’s legitimate needs: “Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.” Friends of the Palestinians “do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two-state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine.”

“I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress,” the president said. “So am I.” All in all, it was a measured statement at a tense moment. It was meant to defuse tensions, to cool things down.
Contrast it with the words of Rick Perry, who zoomed into New York to make his own Mideast statement the day before the president’s speech. The Obama administration’s policy, the Texas governor said, amounts to “appeasement.” It has encouraged “an ominous act of bad faith.” We are “at the precipice of such a dangerous move” because the Obama administration is “arrogant, misguided and dangerous.” “Moral equivalency” is “a dangerous insult.”

This was meant not to defuse but to inflame. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Perry that when you are running for president you have to be big, you have to act as if you’re a broad fellow who understands that when the American president is in a tight spot in the U.N., America is in a tight spot in the U.N. You don’t exploit it for political gain.

Perry competitor Rick Santorum responded: “I’ve forgotten more about Israel than Rick Perry knows about Israel,” he told Politico. Mr. Perry “has never taken a position on any of this stuff before, and [the media is] taking this guy seriously.”

The Israeli newspaper Ha’artez likened Mr. Perry’s remarks to “a pep rally for one of Israel’s right-wing politicians, and a hard-liner at that,” adding that the governor “adopted the rhetoric of Israel’s radical right lock, stock and barrel.”

I’d add only that in his first foreign-policy foray, the GOP front-runner looked like a cheap, base-playing buffoon.

As I said, Mr. Obama can’t win this election, but the Republicans can lose it by being small, by being extreme, by being—are we going to have to start using this word again?—unnuanced.