Peggy Noonan

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.

An upset is a surprise. The loss of Anthony Weiner’s former seat to the Republicans was not a surprise. It was the latest in a long string of referendums on the president’s leadership. That string started in 2009 when the New Jersey and Virginia governorships went Republican, and continued in 2010 with the loss of Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat. Then there was last November.

At first these elections looked like, and could be experienced by the White House as, an attempt at a corrective: Change your ways or you’ll lose us. By November 2010 they were a warning: You’re losing us, we’re leaving. Now they are simply more proof of a broad rejection: You’ve lost us.

How did it happen? It still comes down to three big mistakes: the president’s spending decisions, his health-care bill, and the White House’s strange inability to understand the breadth and depth of the economic crisis. Spending was both high and same-old-same-old: The 2009 stimulus and the budget proposals were Democratic wish lists. This at the exact moment voters were coming to fear that we are losing America, the strong country of old, and the first thing we must do to right things is stop the hemorrhagic spending in Washington. The health-care bill was huge, expensive, vaguely menacing and lacking in any serious reform. Most amazingly, the White House failed to understand what the financial crisis was. They did not understand it was systemic, world-wide, would last years, and would change everything. They seemed to think it would pass. But the crisis rendered old campaign promises null and demanded new approaches.

History will write of this era when history has the time and the distance. The president would have been helped by wise old aides with wise old heads, people who somewhere along the line had had to meet a payroll. Instead he was surrounded by bright, committed, energetic naïfs who didn’t know what they didn’t know. They knew Democratic Party politics. They did not know national politics. To know that you have to know the nation’s mood.

Anyway, what a disaster cluster.

*   *   *

To the New York race. As this is written, with 92% of precincts counted, Republican Bob Turner leads Democrat David Weprin 53% to 47%. That doesn’t look big but is. In 2008, Mr. Weiner won the district with 93%. In 2010, a bad year for Democrats, he beat Mr. Turner with 61%. In 2008 Barack Obama carried the district 55% to 44%. This week a Sienna College poll said voters there now had an unfavorable opinion of the president by 54% to 43%. It’s a perfect reversal.

Orthodox Jews and Israel, gay marriage, the economy—all these things played a part, but at the end of the day it was about Mr. Obama. It is always about his leadership now. And that is a great quandary for Democrats, because they are not going to get rid of him, they are not going to primary him, because they don’t want to break their party open.

Lloyd Green, a close follower of New York politics and former staffer in the George H.W. Bush campaign of 1988, looked at the voting patterns. The predominantly Catholic 23rd Assembly District went for Mr. Turner by 2,000 votes out of roughly 10,000 cast. In predominantly Jewish and Russian Flatbush, Mr. Turner got more than twice the votes Mr. Weprin did. “The white middle class is heading for the exits,” said Mr. Green. The Republican won with a coalition of Catholics, ethnics and Jews. “This was not only Rudy Giuliani’s base, it was Bill Clinton’s New York base as well.”

Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner: “For nearly two decades it has been taken for granted that white residents [of] metro New York are heavily Democratic.” Not in this election: “They just issued what amounts to an emphatic thumbs down on the policies of the Obama Democrats.”

The best day-after reporting came from Michael Daly in the Daily Beast, who accompanied Mr. Weiner as he voted in Forest Hills. At one point the former congressman saw a woman with her arm in a sling and asked what happened. She said she’d fallen down some steps. “Just a little advice,” said Mr. Weiner: “Come up with a more dramatic story.” She said that she’d been taking care of someone’s dog when it caused her to fall. Mr. Weiner suggested she change it by saying she and the dog had been chasing a bad guy down the street. “Heroically,” Mr. Weiner added. He said his advice was from “a politician.” He caught himself and said, “a former politician.”

Meanwhile, those who write about politics struggle each week to find new ways to say the president’s poll numbers are worsening. From Bloomberg this week: Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy 62% to 33%. “The president’s job approval rating also stands at the lowest of his presidency,” 45%. In Virginia, which Mr. Obama carried 53% to 46%, voters in a Quinnipiac poll said 51% to 41% that he doesn’t deserve four more years.

In California, which Mr Obama carried with 61% vote in 2008, a Field poll reported only 46% of respondents approve the president’s performance. That is a big change even from three months ago, when Californians gave him 54% approval. What happened in those three months? The debt ceiling. Republicans insisted on cuts to equal the debt raise. The nation was anxious, markets jittery, and you have to know where—and when—to pick your battles. The president should have agreed to the cuts, avoided a crisis, and kept walking. He did not, and he continues to pay.

*   *   *

This is all so dire and critical that I will swerve and end with three things I’ve admired about the president since he entered the White House.

The first is that he has an intact, multigenerational family, a wife and kids and mother-in-law all living together in that big house. This is no doubt a source of strength for him, but it’s also moving and impressive to see in a country ravaged by family breakup and fatherless—and sometimes motherless—children. It is a needed example. As nothing human stays intact without great effort, all credit to him, and them.

The second is that he isn’t mean. His staffers do snark and push-back, but they don’t do targeted abuse, they don’t seem to try to take down foes in a personal way, as administrations before them have. Credit goes to the president because it’s always the boss who sets the tone.

The third has been a relative absence of deep political scandal. It’s been good not to have a Watergate, a Whitewater. But there are signs this week that could change with the Solyndra loan scandal. The White House apparently tried to rush almost half a billion dollars of taxpayer loans to a solar panel manufacturer that later went belly up and took a thousand jobs with it. The reason for the rush: The awarding of the loan would make good PR. This looks bad, and if it’s true, heads should quickly roll. It’s one thing to be branded as “out of your depth but not corrupt,” quite another when it’s “out of your depth and corrupt.” That is much worse.

People are discussing the geopolitical implications of 9/11 and how the tragedy changed our country, and most of what’s been said has been worthy and serious. But my thoughts, as we hit the 10th anniversary, are more local and particular. I’m in a New York state of mind.

There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.

But New York saw a world end. New York saw the buildings come down.

That was the thing. It’s not that the towers were hit—we could have taken that. It’s not the fire, we could have taken that too. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and took out five floors, and the next day we were back in business.

It’s that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren’t there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.

And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between “safe” and “not safe.” It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability. It marked the end of “we are protected” and the beginning of something else.

When you ask New Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big—the first news report, the phone call in which someone said, “Turn on the TV.” But then they go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. “Have you seen Carla? Last seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World.”

The bus driver as I fumbled in my wallet to find my transit card. “Free rides today,” he mumbled, in a voice on autopilot. The Pompeii-like ash that left a film on everything in town, all the way to the Bronx. The smell of burning plastic that lingered for weeks. A man who worked at Ground Zero told me: “It’s the computers.” They didn’t melt or decompose, and they wouldn’t stop burning. The doctors and nurses who lined up outside St. Vincent’s Hospital with gurneys, thinking thousands would come, and the shock when they didn’t. The spontaneous Dunkirk-like fleet of ferries that took survivors to New Jersey.

The old woman with her grandchild in a stroller. On the stroller she had written a sign in magic marker: “America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You.” She was all by herself in the darkness, on the side of the West Side Highway, as we stood to cheer the workers who were barreling downtown in trucks to begin the dig-out, and to see if they could find someone still alive.

The notes neighbors left under each other’s doors. “Are you OK? Haven’t seen you and just thought I’d make sure all is all right.” The flags in every bodega, on every storefront, in the windows of apartments, up and down the proud facades of Park Avenue. My beautiful cynical town covered in flags, swept by love and protectiveness toward our country.

At first we didn’t know what to call it, so we called it what happened. “Do you believe what happened?” “They think he died in what happened.” It was weeks before we called it 9/11. Sometimes tragedy takes time to find a name.

We were half crazy those days. We were half nuts and didn’t know it. The trauma on Tuesday was followed in the middle of Thursday night by a storm, a howling banshee that shook buildings—thunder like a cannonade, lightning tearing through the sky. And then there were the stories. We kept hearing about guys who dug themselves out of the rubble. We’d hear a guy came out of the rubble and said, “There’s 20 firemen down there in an air pocket,” and we’d all put on the news and it was never true. I will never forget this one: As the first tower went down some guy on the 50th floor grabbed a steel girder that was flying by, and he held on for dear life and it landed on a pile of rubble 30 floors below and he got up, brushed himself off, and walked away. That wasn’t true either. The stories whipped through the town like the wind, and people grabbed onto them.

And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into, they made a decision. And a lot of them were scared, you can see it on their faces on the pictures people took in the stairwells. The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they’d call out, “Good luck, son,” and, “Thank you, boys.”

They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That’s the last time he was seen.

Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.

Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there’s no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.

But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.

They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can’t bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: “America You Are Not Alone.” To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.

You’ve got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.

On the Republican presidential side, things are winnowing down and speeding up. There will be five debates between now and Oct. 18, starting next Wednesday at the Reagan Library. The vetting is in high gear. Previous debates put Michele Bachmann on the map, did in Tim Pawlenty, and showed Mitt Romney had improved as a candidate since 2008.

Wednesday’s debate will be all about the current front-runner versus the former front-runner. Rick Perry will be the object of all eyes. He’s new, it’s his debate debut. He has to show he’s not a two-week wonder, his appeal is not overblown, he’s a formidable presence. The amazing thing about his rise is not that he’s become the front-runner, but that he’s zoomed to the top with such comfortable and sudden margins. Public Policy Polling last week had Mr. Perry at 33% to Mr. Romney’s 16%. CNN this week has Mr. Perry at 27% to 14% for Mr. Romney. What’s it about? Mr. Perry has to start convincing a broad Republican audience that it’s about his excellence and electability.

Mr. Romney has to regain his footing. Up to now in debates he has pretty much coasted—he’s big, radiant and smiling, the others were small, yappy and querulous. He can continue that way, as if he’s unruffled by an Austin interloper who’ll do himself in with his mouth or get done in by good oppo. Or he can conclude that new circumstances dictate new strategies, and fight. He ought to be looking to slow Mr. Perry’s momentum, to ding him and dent him, to get people raising a skeptical brow.

On Wednesday night they may wind up looking like two boxers circling each other in the ring and looking for an opening. Mr. Perry, about now, may be wondering if he should mention Mr. Romney’s Massachusetts health-care plan. Will that pack a punch, or is it old hat? Just in case, Mr. Romney will be formulating an answer: “I know health care is on your mind because I read the other day how you praised Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan. You called it ‘most commendable.’ You were still a Democrat then, right? Or were you a Republican when you praised HillaryCare?”

It will all be light taps and feints, decorous and dignified, but if ever two candidates saw each other as Exactly the Kind of Guy I Don’t Like, it would be Messrs. Perry and Romney. Mr. Romney’s people see Mr. Perry as a dopey Texas barbarian. Mr. Perry’s people see Mr. Romney as Northeastern, elite, effete and opportunistic. If they go head to head through the fall and winter, their contest could wind up looking like a scene in “Raging Bull.” “I’ll wipe that smile off your face, pretty boy. I’ll do what Jake LaMotta did to Marcel Cedan, I’ll barely break a sweat and you’ll be in the corner screaming at your valet, ‘Cut me, George, cut me!’”

*   *   *

The night after the debate, President Obama will outline his long-awaited—too-long-awaited—jobs plan. The speech will have to be very good not to be called very bad. The White House has talked about it too much for too long and built expectations too high. They’ve put too much weight on the back of a single address. The good news is that few may be listening. The bad news is that’s because “Obama Is About to Solve Our Problems” is not a compelling headline in a country that is starting to think “Obama Is Our Problem.”

The real challenge for the speech is the collapse of trust in the president’s economic leadership. There are any number of ways to illustrate this. Here is a CNN poll: 65% of respondents disapprove of how he is handling the economy, 34% approve.

The president’s problem is that shortly after he was sworn in, the size and severity of the recession became apparent, and from that moment he did not do things that the majority of the American electorate, in hindsight, would say were helpful. And that’s the problem with the speech Thursday night, a national mood of, “Nothing personal, but we don’t think you can help in this area.”

What should he do, what approach should he take? His supporters say, “Go big.” I think they mean, “Go left in a big way.” But there’s another way to go big, and it has to do with sharing your actual thoughts.

It would be interesting if the president spoke about how he really, truly sees things right now—how he understands America’s quandary, what caused it, who caused it, why. What the structural problems are, why the Western nations are broke, what we can do about it. How—or if—we can create growth again. How we can balance our books.

This seems obvious and boring, but oddly enough few people know how Mr. Obama really views things, how he sees the big picture. He keeps it to himself, as if he doesn’t want the natives to get restless with too much information. His supporters say he is a pragmatist, a practical progressive. Fine, but what does that mean? At this point he’s in so much trouble he could declare he was a character out of a Clifford Odets play, wave a copy of “Das Kapital,” and shout, “I’ve got the answer!” and it would probably improve his position.

He tends to confine himself to generalizations and platitudes, and he tends to follow them with assertions of support for small measures—a tax credit for the makers of environmentally safe housing, or some money to repair school buildings—that address a little part of an overall problem whose contours and causes he leaves undefined. His legislative affairs people must think small pieces of legislation add up to a large pointillist portrait of political meaning. But they don’t, they just seem like disconnected dots.

The president is addressing a country that, fairly or not, would tell any pollster that he is speaking on the economy next week because of politics. His numbers are down, he’s trying to get back in the game.

But at least the Republicans have a plan. It may or may not be a good plan, it may or may not be enough for the moment, but it’s a plan, and it has emerged as a consensus in the Republicans debates.

Every one of the Republican candidates believes American government has grown too big, too ponderous and inhibiting. They see it as an impediment to growth. They want to cut it back. Every one of them believes regulations are too burdensome. They think our debt and deficits must be reduced. God is in the details, and we’ll see what the details are, but the point is they have a plan.

Mr. Obama’s plan is . . . what? It’s still, after all this time, unclear.

He should go to the meaning of things, to his view of that meaning. He should attempt a new frankness, a new candor, a broad clarity.

The benefits of this approach? He would appear to be thinking, not only calculating. He would seem aware of the big picture, of this moment in history. It might lift him beyond the platitudes and out of the smallness. And who knows, it just might spark the debate we often say we are having, but so far are not, about the size, role, purpose and responsibilities of government. That wouldn’t be bad.