Peggy Noonan

“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.

Rick Perry this week roared away from the pack. Gallup had him the party favorite, with 29% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents saying they’re most likely to support him. Next came Mitt Romney with 17%, Ron Paul with 13%, and Michele Bachmann at 10%. All the rest were single digits except for “no preference,” which got 17%.

On top of that, Mr. Perry got the much-coveted Kinky Friedman vote. The political gadfly and musician, who in 2006 ran as an Independent against Mr. Perry, wrote in the Daily Beast that he didn’t always like the Texas governor. It had in fact been his plan to, upon death, be cremated and have the ashes thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. But now he sees Mr. Perry as “a good, kind-hearted man” with a solid economic record. Mr. Friedman admitted he’d vote for Charlie Sheen before Barack Obama, but asked: Could Perry fix the American economy? “Hell yes.”

Mr. Perry’s primary virtue for the Republican base is that he means it. He comes across as a natural conservative, Texas Division, who won’t be changing his mind about his basic premises any time soon. His professed views don’t seem to be an outfit he can put on and take off at will. In this of course he’s the anti-Romney. Unlike Ms. Bachmann, he has executive experience, three terms as governor of a state with 25 million people.

His primary flaw appears to be a chesty, quick-draw machismo that might be right for an angry base but wrong for an antsy country. Americans want a president who feels their anger without himself walking around enraged.

Mr. Perry’s announcement speech on Aug. 13 was strong and smart. Biography: He’s the son of tenant farmers from Paint Creek, a town too small to have a zip code, in the Texas plains. The meaning of the biography: The American dream lives on. “You see,” he said, “as Americans we’re not defined by class, and we will never be told our place. What makes our nation exceptional is that anyone, from any background, can climb the highest of heights.” He laced into the incumbent: “Now we’re told we’re in a recovery. Yeah. But this sure doesn’t feel like a recovery to more than 9% of Americans out there who are unemployed, or the 16% of African-Americans and 11% of Hispanics in the same position.” The recovery is really a “disaster.”

Then, stingingly, “[The president’s] policies are not only a threat to this economy, so are his appointees a threat. You see he stacked the National Labor Relations Board with antibusiness cronies who want to dictate to a private company, Boeing, where they can build a plant. No president, no president should kill jobs in South Carolina, or any other state for that matter, simply because they chose to go to a right-to-work state.” Mr. Perry was speaking in Charleston, so the Boeing reference had local resonance: But what appears to be the Obama administration’s attempt to curry favor with unions by stopping a Boeing plant may have national resonance, too.

Mr. Perry’s now-famous gaffes, for which he’s been roundly criticized, are said to suggest an infelicity of language. But they look more like poor judgement. On Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” On the subject of secession: “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” On President Obama’s patriotism—in response to a question from this newspaper’s Danny Yadron, who asked Mr. Perry if he was suggesting that Mr. Obama didn’t love this country: ‘I dunno, you need to ask him.’” On Mr. Obama’s lack of military service: “The president had the opportunity to serve his country I’m sure, at some time, and he made the decision that that wasn’t what he wanted to do.”

The secession reference was off the cuff, not spoken in a speech that had been fully thought through. Still, to refer blithely to secession, even in that context, as anything but tragic—which both it and the potential reasons behind it would be—suggests a lack of reflection, a lack of gravitas, a carelessness. As for Mr. Bernanke, he is an earnest public servant who is either right or wrong in his assumptions and decisions, but certainly not treacherous or treasonous.

Why does this kind of thing matter? Because presidential temperament has never been more important. We can’t escape presidents now, they’re all over every screen, and they set a tone.

And the nation is roiling and restive. After Mr. Obama was elected, the right became angry, feisty, and created a new and needed party, the tea party. The right was on fire. The next time a Republican wins, and that could be next year, it will be the left that shows real anger, with unemployment high and no jobs available and government spending and services likely to be cut. The left will be on fire. The only thing leashing them now is the fact of Mr. Obama.

So there will be plenty of new angers out there. It probably won’t be helpful if the next president is someone likely to add to the drama with a hot temperament or carelessness.

In 1980 the American electorate was so disturbed by economic disorder that it took a big leap. The leap was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge was elected in 1924. Ronald Reagan was not the moderate in the GOP field, he was not the “establishment candidate.” It took a real leap to get to him.

The public was able to make the leap for two big reasons. He represented a conservatism that could be clearly asserted, defended and advanced, and which marked a break from the reigning thinking which had gotten us into trouble. And he was a person of moderate temperament and equability. He was good natured, even-keeled, competent and accomplished. Just because he wanted to do some “radical” things didn’t mean he would allow a spirit of radicalism to overtake his personality or essential nature.

And this was important in 1980 because Mr. Carter, at the end of the campaign, tried to paint Mr. Reagan as an angry cowboy with crazy ideas. You don’t want that guy with his finger on the button.

It was a serious charge. People would listen, and consider whether there seemed to be truth in it. Then Mr. Reagan would walk out on the TV screen and give a speech or an interview and people would see this benign and serious person and think, “He isn’t radical. That’s not what radical looks like.”

They only leapt toward him after they looked.

In 2012, the Republican candidate will be called either mean or dumb, or both. Certainly, his politics will be called mean. And if the candidate is Rick Perry, people will look at him and think: Hmmm, is there something to the charge?

He should keep that in mind as he pops off. If there is a deeper, more reflective person there he’d best show it, sooner rather than later. This is the point where out of the corner of their eye, people are starting to get impressions.

The phrase of the day is “new lows.” It blares from every screen. The number of Americans satisfied with the ways things are going hits new lows—11%. President Obama’s popularity: new lows. The Dow Jones Industrial Average this year: new lows. Maybe it will enter ordinary language. “Charlie, it’s been ages. How are you, how’s Betty?” “I’m experiencing some volatility, but she’s inching toward new lows.”

The market is dispirited. I’m wondering if the president is, too, and if that won’t carry implications for the 2012 race. You can imagine him having lunch with political advisers, hearing some unwanted advice—“Don’t go to Martha’s Vineyard!”—putting his napkin by his plate, pushing back from the table, rising, and saying in a clipped, well-modulated voice: “I’m tired. I’m going. If they want this job so much let them have it.”

How could he not be depressed? He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He’s got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.

Nothing worked! And nothing’s going to work. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but he’s got the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to—well, unsatisfying outcomes.

The president shows all the signs of becoming a man who, around the time he unveils his new jobs proposal in September, is going to start musing in interviews about whether anyone can be a successful president now, what with the complexity of the problems and the forces immediately arrayed, in a politically polarized age, against any specific action. That was probably his inner rationale for not coming up with a specific debt-ceiling plan: Why give the inevitable forces a target? But his refusal to produce a plan became itself the target. Reverse Midas.

Under these circumstances he could not possibly be enjoying his job. On the stump this week in the Midwest, he should have been on fire with the joy of combat, he should have had them whooping and hollering with fresh material and funny lines. But even at his feistiest, he was wilted. Distracted. Sometimes he seems to be observing himself and his interactions as opposed to being himself and having interactions. His audiences wanted to show support, it was clear, that’s why they came. But there was something tentative in their response, as if they wanted to come through for the applause line but couldn’t figure out exactly where the applause line was. The president was dropping his g’s, always a terrible sign, a kind of bowing that assumes he speaks from a great height. He also started saying “folks” again. That too is a tell. It’s the word politicians who think they’re better and brighter than normal people use when they’re trying to make normal people think they’re normal.

Now he goes on vacation. Every president deserves a vacation, to the extent presidents can really have vacations, and that extent is limited. If a vacation is defined as something carefree and removed, then presidents never get vacations. There are always briefings, calls, the decisions on how to respond to a crisis or event. It’s hard to begrudge any president his attempts at escape. But political foes do.

Mr. Obama’s like to show him playing golf. The Democrats did the same to Eisenhower. Nixon was knocked for going so often to San Clemente, Reagan and George W. Bush to their ranches.

Mr. Obama shouldn’t be faulted for wanting to rest, relax and spend whole days with his family. But the timing of this vacation is incongruent, and so is the location.

On the timing, there’s an air of economic crisis hanging over everything, a sense that other shoes may drop. Actually it’s a sense of something impending, with unemployment high, Europe broke and the Mideast reaching full boil. A politician who wanted to impart a sense of leadership in crisis, who passionately wanted to keep the presidency, and who was prudently anxious about his prospects, just might let such a moment change his plans.

As for the location, the president loves Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s a lot to love—beautiful beaches, hills, biking. But it’s a little island whose summertime population is dominated by those who, due to their affluence, are essentially detached from everyday life in America. It’s a playground of the liberal rich: hedge-fund maestros, network producers, Wall Street heavyweights, left-leaning activists. It’s the kind of place that reverberates in the national imagination—that tags you as elitist no matter how many g’s you drop.

Both parties have to deal with certain tropes, symbols and clichés. If you’re a conservative president, you probably shouldn’t spend your vacation at a house on the edge of an exclusive golf club that’s had a history of problems admitting blacks, Jews, and the self-made sons of Dad’s old half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican cook. If you’re a liberal president, you probably shouldn’t be on vacation at a place known for snooty liberal insularity.

Mr. Obama’s media specialists probably told him what Bill Clinton’s mavens told him: If you’re going to the Vineyard, you have to go to some real American place first, like the Rockies. Which Mr. Clinton did. Going to the Vineyard didn’t harm him. But Mr. Clinton had prosperity, and Americans will forgive a lot from a guy who does nothing to stop prosperity, or actually may help it along.

Mr. Obama doesn’t have that advantage. It seems important to him to be true to himself—not to be the kind of person who’d poll-test a vacation. Or maybe he thinks that no matter what he does, it won’t work, so what the heck. But his decision to go now, and there, seems either ham-handed or vaguely defiant.

In early 2010 this space made much of the president’s pre-State of the Union interview with Diane Sawyer, in which she pressed the president about his political predicaments. He said: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” I thought at the time: He means it, he can accept being a one-termer.

Maybe he’s feeling it now more than ever.

Maybe it means not much will change in terms of his leadership between now and the election.

Maybe he’ll be as wilted next year as he was this week.

The riots in Britain left some Americans shaken. In the affluence of the past 40 years, and with the rise of the jumbo jet, we became a nation of travelers. We have been to England, visited a lot of those neighborhoods. They were peaceful; now they’re in flames. But something else raised our unease as we followed the story on TV and on the Net. I think there was a ping on the national radar. We saw something over there that in smaller ways we’re starting to see over here.

The British press, left, right and center, was largely united in a refusal to make political excuses for the violence. Almost all agreed on the cause and nature of what happened. The cause was not injustice; this was not a revolt of the downtrodden masses, breaking into stores looking for food. The causes were greed, selfishness, a respect and even lust for violence, and a lack of moral grounding. Conscienceless predators preyed upon the weak. The weak were anyone who happened to be passing by, and those, many of them immigrants, who tried to defend their shops and neighborhoods. The iconic scene was the 20-year-old college student in East London who was beaten for his bicycle and fell bloody to the ground. His tormentors, with a sadistic imitation of gentleness, helped him up. Then they rifled through his backpack to get his phone and wallet. It was cruelty out of Dickens. It was Bill Sikes with a million YouTube hits.

The denunciations were swift and fierce. Max Hastings, in the conservative-populist Daily Mail: “The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. . . . Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. . . . Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.”

In the left-tilting Guardian, youth worker Shaun Bailey called the rioters opportunists. “Young people have been looting the shops they like: JD Sports and mobile phone shops have been hit, yet Waterstone’s [a bookstore] has been left alone. These young people like trainers [sneakers] and iPhones; they are less interested in books. This is criminality in a raw form, not politics.”

In the right-leaning Telegraph, Allison Pearson asked: “Where are the parents?” She told of a friend who’d called a mother to tell her her son was out and acting up. The mother yelled at her for calling at 2:15 a.m. “The adults are afraid and the children, emboldened by adult timidity, are fearless.”

More stinging and resigned was the brief essay by Theodore Dalrymple in the intellectually bracing City Journal. The subject—the decline of Western society—has been his for 20 years. He has written what he saw as a doctor working in British prisons. “The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population” in the riots did not surprise him. “To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance.”

At fault in the riots were the distorting effects of the welfare state and a degenerate British popular culture: “A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice.” Much of what they have is provided by others, but they are not grateful: dependency doesn’t encourage gratitude but resentment.

*   *   *

What does this have to do with America? What we’re seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn’t come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it’s growing. And as in Britain, it doesn’t have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of “flash mobs.” Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It’s happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald’s, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You’ve seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them “Les Miserables.”

Some of these young people come from brokenness, shallowness and terror, and are bringing those things into the world with them. Here are some statistics of what someone last week called a new lost generation. In 2009, the last year for which census data are available, there were 74 million children under 18. Of that number, 20 million live in single-parent families, often with only an overwhelmed mother or a beleaguered grandmother. Over 700,000 children under 18 have been the subject of reports of abuse. More than a quarter million are foster children.

These numbers suggest the making—or the presence—of a crisis.

Some of these youngsters become miracle children. In spite of the hand they were dealt, they learn to be constructive, successful, givers to life. But many, we know, do not. Some will wind up on YouTube.

The normal, old response to an emerging problem such as this has been: The government has to do something. We must start a program, create an agency to address juvenile delinquency. But governments are tapped out, cutting back, trying to avoid bankruptcy. Which means we can’t even take refuge in the illusion that government can solve the problem. The churches of America have always helped the young, stepping in where they can. That will continue. But they too are hard-pressed these days.

Where does that leave us? In a hard place, knowing in our guts that a lot of troubled kids are coming up, and not knowing what to do about it. The problem, at bottom, is love, something we never talk about in public policy discussions because it’s too soft and can’t be quantified or legislated. But little children without love and guidance are afraid. They’re terrified—they have nothing solid in the world, which is a pretty scary place. So they never feel safe. As they grow, their fear becomes rage. Further on, the rage can be expressed in violence. This is especially true of boys, but it’s increasingly true of girls.

What’s needed can’t be provided by government. When the riot begins or the flash mob arrives, the best the government can do is control the streets, enforce the law, maintain the peace.

After that, what? Britain is about to face that question. We’ll likely have to face it, too.