Peggy Noonan

It all seems rather mad, doesn’t it? The decision to become involved militarily in the Libyan civil war couldn’t take place within a less hospitable context. The U.S. is reeling from spending and deficits, we’re already in two wars, our military has been stretched to the limit, we’re restive at home, and no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you’d follow over the top. “This way, men!” “No, I think I’ll stay in my trench.” People didn’t hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn’t expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?

He has no happy experience as a rallier of public opinion and a leader of great endeavors; the central initiative of his presidency, the one that gave shape to his leadership, health care, is still unpopular and the cause of continued agitation. When he devoted his entire first year to it, he seemed off point and out of touch.

This was followed by the BP oil spill, which made him look snakebit. Now he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs. He is more observed than followed, or perhaps I should say you follow him with your eyes and not your heart. So it’s funny he’d feel free to launch and lead a war, which is what this confused and uncertain military action may become.

What was he thinking? What is he thinking?

Which gets me to Mr. Obama’s speech, the one he hasn’t given. I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest. He referred to his aims in parts of speeches and appearances when he was in South America, but now he’s home. More is needed, more is warranted, and more is deserved. He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It’s what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.

Without a formal and extended statement, the air of weirdness, uncertainty and confusion that surrounds this endeavor will only deepen.

The questions that must be answered actually start with the essentials. What, exactly, are we doing? Why are we doing it? At what point, or after what arguments, did the president decide U.S. military involvement was warranted? Is our objective practical and doable? What is America’s overriding strategic interest? In what way are the actions taken, and to be taken, seeing to those interests?

Matthew Kaminski of the editorial board explains America’s role in the Libyan campaign.

From those questions flow many others. We know who we’re against—Moammar Gadhafi, a bad man who’s done very wicked things. But do we know who we’re for? That is, what does the U.S. government know or think it knows about the composition and motives of the rebel forces we’re attempting to assist? For 42 years, Gadhafi controlled his nation’s tribes, sects and groups through brute force, bribes and blandishments. What will happen when they are no longer kept down? What will happen when they are no longer oppressed? What will they become, and what role will they play in the coming drama? Will their rebellion against Gadhafi degenerate into a dozen separate battles over oil, power and local dominance?

What happens if Gadhafi hangs on? The president has said he wants U.S. involvement to be brief. But what if Gadhafi is fighting on three months from now?

On the other hand, what happens if Gadhafi falls, if he’s deposed in a palace coup or military coup, or is killed, or flees? What exactly do we imagine will take his place?

Supporters of U.S. intervention have argued that if we mean to protect Libya’s civilians, as we have declared, then we must force regime change. But in order to remove Gadhafi, they add, we will need to do many other things. We will need to provide close-in air power. We will probably have to put in special forces teams to work with the rebels, who are largely untrained and ragtag. The Libyan army has tanks and brigades and heavy weapons. The U.S. and the allies will have to provide the rebels training and give them support. They will need antitank missiles and help in coordinating air strikes.

Once Gadhafi is gone, will there be a need for an international peacekeeping force to stabilize the country, to provide a peaceful transition, and to help the post-Gadhafi government restore its infrastructure? Will there be a partition? Will Libyan territory be altered?

None of this sounds like limited and discrete action.

In fact, this may turn out to be true: If Gadhafi survives, the crisis will go on and on. If Gadhafi falls, the crisis will go on and on.

Everyone who supports the Libyan endeavor says they don’t want an occupation. One said the other day, “We’re not looking for a protracted occupation.”

Protracted?

Mr. Obama has apparently set great store in the fact that he was not acting alone, that Britain, France and Italy were eager to move. That’s good—better to work with friends and act in concert. But it doesn’t guarantee anything. A multilateral mistake is still a mistake. So far the allied effort has not been marked by good coordination and communication. If the conflict in Libya drags on, won’t there tend to be more fissures, more tension, less commitment and more confusion as to objectives and command structures? Could the unanticipated results of the Libya action include new strains, even a new estrangement, among the allies?

How might Gadhafi hit out, in revenge, in his presumed last days, against America and the West?

And what, finally, about Congress? Putting aside the past half-century’s argument about declarations of war, doesn’t Congress, as representative of the people, have the obvious authority and responsibility to support the Libyan endeavor, or not, and to authorize funds, or not?

These are all big questions, and there are many other obvious ones. If the Libya endeavor is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns, then why haven’t we acted on those concerns recently in other suffering nations? It’s a rough old world out there, and there’s a lot of suffering. What is our thinking going forward? What are the new rules of the road, if there are new rules? Were we, in Libya, making a preemptive strike against extraordinary suffering—suffering beyond what is inevitable in a civil war?

America has been through a difficult 10 years, and the burden of proof on the need for U.S. action would be with those who supported intervention. Chief among them, of course, is the president, who made the decision as commander in chief. He needs to sit down and tell the American people how this thing can possibly turn out well. He needs to tell them why it isn’t mad.

The biggest takeaway, the biggest foreign-policy fact, of the past decade is this: America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there—the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint—there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.

So we wind up in long, drawn-out struggles when we didn’t mean to, when it wasn’t the plan, or the hope, or the expectation.

We have to keep this phenomenon in mind as we chart our path in the future. It’s easy to start a war but hard to end one. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to get in but hard to get out. Even today, in Baghdad, you hear that America can’t leave Iraq because the government isn’t sturdy enough, the army and police aren’t strong enough to withstand the winds that will follow America’s full departure, that all that has been achieved—a fragile, incomplete, relative peace—will be lost. America cannot leave because Iraq will be vulnerable to civil war, not between Sunnis and Shiites, they tell you now, but between Arabs and Kurds, in the north, near the oil fields.

America is scheduled to leave Iraq this December, of course, but everyone seems to be waiting for Nouri al-Maliki’s government to request an extension. (A longtime observer told me he thought Prime Minister Maliki would not ask, in part because he assumes that if he gets in trouble the U.S. will come back.) Meanwhile, another observer told me, the December hand-off from the U.S. to the Iraqi government will actually be more like a hand-off from the Defense Department to the State Department, with the part of U.S. security forces played by contractors from Uganda.

In Afghanistan, America cannot leave because it is the 9/11 place, the place that helped 9/11 to happen. America cannot leave because, as the iconic Time cover had it, the Taliban will cut off women’s noses and brutalize them in other ways. America cannot leave because al Qaeda will return, fill the vacuum left by our departure, and create a new terror state. America cannot leave because of turbulent, dangerous Pakistan. America cannot leave because from the day we arrived, we invested blood and treasure, and it cannot have been in vain. America can never leave because American troops always bring their kindness and constructiveness with them, and their rule of law. Innocent people will be defenseless without them.

There are always a million facts and forces arrayed against the idea of America leaving. So America has to watch where it goes.

In the troubled future we are entering, America must be prudent as never before, know and respect its own interests and limits as never before. It must be careful of the lives of its soldiers. It must be careful, even, of its purse, which is something we haven’t always worried about, but must now, and not only because of the crash and the deficits. What if what just happened in Japan had happened on the San Andreas fault? What if it were a broken American nuclear reactor? You have to keep some wealth and force in reserve, you can’t just assume you’ll always be lucky.

These are the thoughts I brought back from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. I left with the sound of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech at West Point ringing in my ears. The time for big counterinsurgency efforts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested, has passed: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. McCarthy so delicately put it.”

Who could argue? No one I spoke to in Iraq or Afghanistan protested Mr. Gates’s remarks. They are attempting to do their jobs through the end stages of both conflicts. In Afghanistan especially, the professionalism of the U.S. troops—we were at Bagram and Kandahar, at forward operating bases; they flew us at night in the dark in C-130s—is more than impressive, it is moving. They are well-trained, well-educated, skillful, and they would die for you.

Two points worth noting: You are aware in Kabul and elsewhere that the war is the work of a coalition, that the Brits are there and the French, and they fight. Everyone seems to have admired the Aussies; there is sympathy for the Poles, who were treated particularly badly by Afghans because their uniforms and faces reminded them of the Russians. And the logistical challenge of the surge—the scale, scope and speed of the movement of men and matériel—has the look of a small managerial masterpiece.

But in terms of a fully believable long-term strategy, the U.S. seems to be scrambling to find a thread that was lost somewhere between 2003 and 2009. We are nation-building in a nation that shows little sign of wanting us to build it. The military surge has been accompanied by a “civilian surge”—representatives of State, U.S. Agency for International Development and provincial reconstruction teams—that the Army, in an Orwellian locution, has taken to calling “The Uplift,” in hope you will too.

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What is ahead for all of the troops is a hard time that those on the ground say they believe will be decisive. Gen. David Petraeus referred to it this week in congressional testimony, but officers in briefings mentioned it every day: With winter over and the fields, including the poppy fields, harvested, the Taliban are about to launch a new offensive. They mean to answer the American surge with a “spectacular” surge of their own—suicide bombings, assassinations, IEDs, attempts to take back cities such as Kandahar. The American strategy is to beat them back and, in the process, break the back of the insurgency, forcing the Taliban to the bargaining table to take part in a negotiated political settlement. No one can explain exactly how this would happen, or what the elements of such a settlement might be.

The same people who tell you a settlement is the only way out, that the war will be resolved not militarily but politically, tend also to mention, later in the conversation, that the rising generation of the Taliban, the new ones coming up, are believed to be more radical and extreme than those who came to power in the 1990s and were sent packing, for a while, in 2001-02. So we’re hoping people who are even more extreme than the earlier Taliban will ask for a negotiated peace?

Meanwhile, support for the war among the American people is falling. The Washington Post this week had a poll saying two-thirds no longer think the war is worth it. Intensified fighting and higher casualties this spring and summer will likely further erode U.S. support.

America has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was; we mark the 10th anniversary of our presence in October. The surge is on, and we’ll know more in six months. But I’m thinking of a Pashtun taunt sometimes thrown at Americans: “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

I like Donald Rumsfeld. I’ve always thought he was a hard-working, intelligent man. I respected his life in public service at the highest and most demanding levels. So it was with some surprise that I found myself flinging his book against a wall in hopes I would break its stupid little spine.

“Known and Unknown,” his memoir of his tumultuous time in government, is so bad it’s news even a month after its debut. It takes a long time to read because there are a lot of words, most of them boring. At first I thought this an unfortunate flaw, but I came to see it as strategy. He’s going to overwhelm you with wordage, with dates and supposed data, he’s going to bore you into submission, and at the end you’re going to throw up your hands and shout, “I know Iraq and Afghanistan were not Don Rumsfeld’s fault! I know this because I’ve now read his memos, which explain at great length why nothing is his fault.”

Fault of course isn’t the point. You’d expect such a book (all right—you’d hope) to be reflective, to be self-questioning and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin of U.S. foreign policy circa 2001-08. He was secretary of defense until 2006, in the innermost councils. He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You’d expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since some of those decisions are in the process of turning out badly, and since he obviously loves his country, you’d expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets and assumptions so that later generations will learn. When he doesn’t do this, when he merely asserts, defends and quotes his memos, you feel overwhelmed, again, by the terrible thought that there was no overall, overarching strategic thinking. There were only second-rate minds busily, consequentially at work

Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection. Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t ignore the generals, he listened to them too much. Not enough troops in Iraq? That would be Gen. Tommy Franks. Turkey’s refusal to allow U.S. troop movements? Secretary of State Colin Powell. America’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction? “Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error.” Yes, I’d say so. He warned early on in a memo he quotes that the administration was putting too much emphasis on WMD. But put it in context: “Recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.”

A word on the use of memos in memoirs. Everyone in government now knows his memos can serve, years later, to illustrate his farsightedness and defend against charges of blindness, indifference, stupidity. So people in government send a lot of memos! “Memo to self: I’m deeply worried about Mideast crisis. Let’s solve West Bank problem immediately.” “Memo to Steve: I’m concerned about China. I’d like you to make sure it becomes democratic. Please move on this soonest, before lunch if you can.” A man in the Bush administration once told me of a guy who used to change the name on memos when they turned out to be smart. He’d make himself the sender so that when future scholars pored over the presidential library, they’d discover what a genius he was.

Most memos prove nothing. It is disturbing that so many Bush-era memoirs rely so heavily on them.

But the terrible thing about the Rumsfeld book, and there is no polite way to say this, is the half-baked nature of the thinking within it. The quality of analysis and understanding of history is so mediocre, so insufficient to the moment.

Which gets me to the point at which I tried to break the book’s spine.

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations. New York at the time of the invasion, October 2001, was still, literally, smoking; the whole town still carried the acrid smell of Ground Zero. The scenes of that day were still vivid and sharp. New York still isn’t over it and will never be over it, but what happened on 9/11 was fresh, and we wanted who did it to get caught.

America wanted—needed—to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom. Or, less good but still good, to find him, kill him, put his head in a Tiffany box with a bow, and hand-carry it to the president of the United States.

It wasn’t lust for vengeance, it was lust for justice, and for more than justice. Getting Osama would have shown the world what happens when you do a thing like 9/11 to a nation like America. It would have shown al Qaeda and their would-be camp followers what kind of unstoppable ferocity they were up against. It would have reminded the world that we are one great people with one terrible swift sword.

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment—the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world—from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused. The administration in Washington, emboldened by what it called its victory over the Taliban, decided to move on Iraq. Its focus shifted, it took its eye off the ball, and Afghanistan is now what it is.

You’d think, nearly a decade after the events of Tora Bora, that Mr. Rumsfeld would understand the extent of the error and the breadth of its implications. He does not. Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else—Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet. “Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run” was “worth the risks.” Needless to say “there were numerous operational details.” And of course, in a typical Rumsfeldian touch, he says he later learned CIA operatives on the ground had asked for help, but “I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had.” I can.

Osama bin Laden was not “one man on the run.” He is the man who did 9/11. He had just killed almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, in a field in Pennsylvania. He’s the reason people held hands and jumped off the buildings. He’s the reason the towers groaned to the ground.

It is the great scandal of the wars of the Bush era that the U.S. government failed to get him and bring him to justice. It is the shame of this book that Don Rumsfeld lacks the brains to see it, or the guts to admit it.

When you step back and try to get a sense of the larger picture in the battle between the states and their public employee unions, two elements emerge. One seems small but could prove decisive, and the other is big and, if I’m seeing it right, carries significant implications.

The seemingly small thing is that the battles in the states, while summoning emotions from all sides, are not at their heart emotional. Yes, a lot of people are waving placards, but it’s also true that suddenly everyone’s talking about numbers; the numbers are being reported in the press and dissected on talk radio. This state has a $5 billion deficit; that state has projected deficits in the tens of millions. One estimate of New Jersey’s bill for health and pension benefits for state workers over the next 30 years is an astounding $100 billion—money the state literally does not have and cannot get. The very force of the math has the heartening effect of squeezing ideology right out of the story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal or a conservative, it’s all about the numbers, and numbers are sobering things.

The rise of arithmetic as a player in the drama is politically promising because when people argue over data and hard facts, and not over ideological loyalties and impulses, progress is more possible. Governors can take their stand, their opponents can take theirs, and if they happen to argue the budget problem doesn’t really exist, they’ll have to prove it. With numbers.

The big thing that is new has to do with the atmospherics of the drama.

Asst. Editorial Features Editor David Feith on teachers union priorities

Let’s look for a second at one of the most famous battles, in New Jersey. A year ago Chris Christie was sworn in as the new governor. He immediately faced a $10.7 billion deficit and catastrophic debt projections. State and local taxes were already high, so that if he raised them he’d send people racing out of the state. So Mr. Christie came up with a plan. He asked the state’s powerful teachers union for two things: a one-year pay freeze—not a cut—and a modest 1.5% contribution to their benefit packages.

The teachers union went to war. They said, “Christie is trying to kill the unions,” so they tried to kill him politically. They spent millions on ads trying to take him down.

And it backfired. They didn’t kill him, they made him. Chris Christie is a national figure now because the teachers union decided, in an epic political drama in which arithmetic is the predominant fact, to ignore the math. They also decided to play the wrong role in the drama. They decided to play the role of Johnny Friendly, on whom more in a moment.

If the union leaders had been smart—if they’d had a heart!—they would have held a private meeting and said, “Look, the party’s over. We’ve done great the past 20 years, but now taxpayers are starting to resent us, and they have reason. They’re losing their benefits and footing the bill for our gold-plated plans, they don’t have job security and we do, taxes are high. We have to back off.”

They didn’t do this. It was a big mistake. And the teachers union made it just as two terrible but unrelated things were happening to their reputation. In what might be called an expression of the new spirit of transparency that is sweeping the globe, two documentaries came out in 2010, “The Lottery” and “Waiting for Superman.” Both were made by and featured people who are largely liberal in their sympathies, and both said the same brave thing: The single biggest impediment to better schools in our country is the teachers unions, which look to their own interests and not those of the kids.

In both films, as in real life, the problem is the unions themselves, not individual teachers. They present teachers who are heroic, who are creative and idealistic. But they too, in the films, are victims of union rules.

That’s the unions’ problem in terms of atmospherics. They are starting to destroy their own reputation. They are robbing themselves of their mystique. They still exist, and they’re big and rich—a force—but they are abandoning the very positive place they’ve held in the American imagination. Polls are all over the place on union support, but I’m speaking of the kind of thing that is hard to quantify and that has to do with words like “luster” and “tradition.”

Unions have been respected in America forever, and public employee unions have reaped that respect. There are two great reasons for this. One is that unions always stood for the little guy. The other is that Americans like balance. We have management over here and the union over here, they’ll talk and find balance, it’ll turn out fine.

But with the public employee unions, the balance has been off for decades. And when they lost their balance they fell off their pedestal.

When union leaders negotiate with a politician, they’re negotiating with someone they can hire and fire. Public unions have numbers and money, and politicians need both. And politicians fear strikes because the public hates them. When governors negotiate with unions, it’s not collective bargaining, it’s more like collusion. Someone said last week the taxpayers aren’t at the table. The taxpayers aren’t even in the room.
As for unions looking out for the little guy, that’s not how it’s looking right now. Right now the little guy is the public school pupil whose daily rounds take him from a neglectful family to an indifferent teacher who can’t be removed. The little guy is the beleaguered administrator whose attempts at improvement are thwarted by unions. The little guy is the private-sector worker who doesn’t have a good health-care plan, who barely has a pension, who lacks job security, and who is paying everyone else’s bills.

This is a major perceptual change. In my lifetime, people have felt so supportive of unions. That great scene in the 1979 film “Norma Rae,” in which the North Carolina cotton mill worker played by Sally Field holds up the sign that says UNION—people were moved by that scene because they believed in its underlying justice. When I was a child, kids bragged if their father had a union job because it meant he was part of something, someone was looking out for him, he was a citizen.

There were hiccups—the labor racketeering scandals of the 1950s, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. But they served as a corrective to romanticism. Men in groups will be men in groups, whether they run a government or a union. Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan captured this in their 1954 masterpiece, “On the Waterfront,” in which Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, stands up to the selfish, bullying union chief Johnny Friendly. Brando’s character testifies to the Waterfront Commission and then defiantly stands down Johnny and his goons. “I’m glad what I done today. . . . You hear me? Glad what I done.”

We’re at quite a moment when public employee unions remind you of Johnny Friendly. They’re so powerful, such a base of the Democratic Party, and they must think nothing can hurt them. But they can hurt themselves. And they are. Are they noticing?

I was talking the other day with a new member of the U.S. Senate, and conversation turned to what had surprised him most in his first months on Capitol Hill. He said it was the number of people who still don’t seem to understand that we’re in crisis, that if we don’t move now on spending, it could do us in.

I’m always surprised when I hear this, yet I’ve heard it a lot. “There’s no sense of urgency up here.”

There are many reasons for this, and some, but not all, are political. If you are from the deep left, if you’re on the leftward ridges of the Democratic Party, you believe in high spending, higher taxing and a more dominant role for the federal government. So you wouldn’t be alarmed at the current crisis, you’d be more or less happy: You’re sort of getting what you want. If you’re told entitlement spending will ultimately force severe cuts in America’s defenses, you might think, “Good, fewer guns, more butter.” Since you likely think America is a prime source of trouble in the world, you wouldn’t be too concerned that nations that hold our debt might come to exert influence on our foreign-policy choices. In the new and emerging global world, what’s so bad about a more bridled America?

But that’s just the deep left. What about everyone else? How could a regular moderate Democrat, or an experienced old Republican bull, not be alarmed at spending projections and their implications?

I think some of the answer has to do with what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call crisis-ism. This is a condition in which you don’t know you’re in crisis because you’re always in crisis, you’ve always been in crisis, and you’ve always gotten through, so what the heck. Crisis-ism is the inability to apprehend that this time it’s different, that this time the crisis is an actual crisis.

There are senators and congressmen who’ve been on the hill for 10 and 25 years, and from the day they walked in, all they heard about was the budget crisis. “This spending will kill us.” But it never did. So maybe it wasn’t so bad, and, ergo, isn’t so bad. They are inured to warning. You can tell them 10 different ways that we’re in crisis and they’ll think, “Some think-tank guy told me that 20 years ago, and we’re still here.”

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Another reason for budget denialism is that everyone now in Congress lived through the greatest expansion of wealth in the history of man on earth. It happened here, in America, in the past 30 years. And we were rich even before that. But when you grow up in a time of constant expansion, when you grow up immersed in the assumption that we are rich and will always be rich, that we’re powerful and will always be powerful, you start to think that America can take any amount of damage and still continue. This is called optimism, but it is not optimism, it is Rich Boy Syndrome. A boy is lucky enough to be born to rich parents who are themselves the product of generations of wealth going back as far as the eye can see. But he never got into the habit of making money, never learned to respect it, and never felt protective of the system that allowed it to exist. So the money went away. Rich Boy Syndrome is thinking wealth will just continue no matter what you do. A lot of members of Congress have Rich Boy Syndrome. They think they can do anything and America will always be rich.

A final reason is simply human. It is really convenient and pleasant not to see a crisis, because if you don’t see it, you don’t have to do anything about it. You don’t have to be brave, you don’t have to put yourself on the line, you don’t have to lead. You can tell yourself you don’t have to be brave and lead because really, at the end of the day, despite all the screaming, there is no crisis.

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I end with optimism, as why not. One ways to change minds about the current crisis is through information. We all know this, and we all know about the marvelous changes in technology that allow for the spreading of messages that are not necessarily popular with gatekeepers and establishments. But there’s something new happening in the realm of political communication that must be noted. Speeches are back. They have been rescued and restored as a political force by the Internet.

In the past quarter-century or so, the speech as a vehicle of sustained political argument was killed by television and radio. Rhetoric was reduced to the TV producer’s 10-second soundbite, the correspondent’s eight-second insert. The makers of speeches (even the ones capable of sustained argument) saw what was happening and promptly gave up. Why give your brain and soul to a serious, substantive statement when it will all be reduced to a snip of sound? They turned their speeches into soundbite after soundbite, applause line after applause line, and a great political tradition was traduced.

But the Internet is changing all that. It is restoring rhetoric as a force. When Gov. Mitch Daniels made his big speech—a serious, substantive one—two weeks ago, Drudge had the transcript and video up in a few hours. Gov. Chris Christie’s big speech was quickly on the net in its entirety. All the CPAC speeches were up. TED conference speeches are all over the net, as are people making speeches at town-hall meetings. I get links to full speeches every day in my inbox and you probably do too.

People in politics think it’s all Facebook and Twitter now, but it’s not. Not everything is fractured and in pieces, some things are becoming more whole. People hunger for serious, fleshed-out ideas about what is happening in our country. We all know it’s a pivotal time.

Look what happened a year ago to a Wisconsin businessman named Ron Johnson. He was thinking of running for the Senate against an incumbent, Democratic heavy-hitter Russ Feingold. He started making speeches talking about his conception of freedom. They were serious, sober, and not sound-bitey at all. A conservative radio host named Charlie Sykes got hold of a speech Mr. Johnson gave at a Lincoln Day dinner in Oshkosh. He liked it and read it aloud on his show for 20 minutes. A speech! The audience listened and loved it. A man called in and said, “Yes, yes, yes!” Another said, “I have to agree with everything that guy said.” Mr. Johnson decided to run because of that reaction, and in November he won. This week he said, “The reason I’m a U.S. senator is because Charlie Sykes did that.” But the reason Mr. Sykes did it is that Mr. Johnson made a serious speech.

A funny thing about politicians is that they’re all obsessed with “messaging” and “breaking through” and “getting people to listen.” They’re convinced that some special kind of cleverness is needed, that some magical communications formula exists and can be harnessed if only discovered. They should settle down, survey the technological field and get serious. They should give pertinent, truthful, sophisticated and sober-minded speeches. Everyone will listen. They’ll be all over the interwebs.

There were two big speeches this week, and I mean big as in “Modern political history will remember this.” Together they signal something significant and promising. Oh, that’s a stuffy way to put it. I mean: The governors are rising and are starting to lead. What a relief. It’s like seeing the posse come over the hill.

The first speech was from Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor who is the answer to the question, “What if Calvin Coolidge talked?” President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she’d made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, “You lose.” But he was principled, effective and, in time, broadly popular.

The other speech was from a governor newer to the scene but more celebrated, in small part because he comes from a particular media market and in large part because he has spent the past year, his first in office, taking on his state’s most entrenched political establishments, and winning. His style—big, rumpled, garrulous, Jersey-blunt—has captured the imagination of the political class, and also normal people. They look at him and think, “I know that guy. I like that guy.”

Both Mr. Daniels, who spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, were critical of both parties and put forward the same message: Wake up. We are in crisis. We must save our country, and we can. But if we don’t move now, we will lose it. This isn’t rhetoric, it’s real.

Here’s why response at both venues was near-rapturous: Everyone knew they meant it. Everyone knew they’d been living it.

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Mr. Daniels began with first principles—the role and purpose of government—and went to what he has done to keep his state’s books in the black in spite of “the recent unpleasantness.” He turned to the challenge of our era: catastrophic spending, the red ink that is becoming “the red menace.” He said: “No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.” If a foreign army invaded, we would set aside all secondary disputes and run to the ramparts. We must bring that air of urgency to the spending crisis. It is “our generational assignment. . . . Forgive the pun when I call it our ‘raison debt.’“

He argued for cuts and sunsetting, for new arrangements and “compacts” with the young. What followed has become controversial with a few conservatives, though it was the single most obvious thing Daniels said: “We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities. We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean,” who don’t fall asleep at night to C-Span, who are not necessarily engaged or aligned.

Rush Limbaugh, who is rightly respected for many reasons—lost in the daily bombast, humor and controversy is that fact that for 20 years he has been the nation’s most reliable and compelling explainer of conservative thought—saw Mr. Daniels’s remarks as disrespectful. Radio listeners aren’t “irrelevant or unnecessary.”

Of course they’re not. Nor are they sufficient. If you really want to change your country, you cannot do it from a political base alone. You must win over centrists, moderates, members of the other party, and those who are not preoccupied with politics. This doesn’t mean “be less conservative,” it means broadening the appeal of conservative thinking and approaches. It starts with not alienating and proceeds to persuading.

The late Rep. Henry Hyde, he of the Hyde amendment, once said to me, “Politics is a game of addition.” You start with your followers and bring in new ones, constantly broadening the circle to include people who started out elsewhere. You know the phrase Reagan Democrats? It exists because Reagan reached out to Democrats! He put out his hand to them and said, literally, “Come walk with me.” He lauded Truman, JFK and Scoop Jackson. He argued in his first great political speech, in 1964, that the choice wasn’t right or left, it was up or down.

That’s what Mr. Daniels was saying. “We can search for villains on ideological grounds,” but it’s a waste of time. Compromise and flexibility are necessary, “purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.” We must work together. You’ve got to convince the other guy.

Mr. Christie covered similar territory in a way that was less aerial, more on-the-ground. He spoke of making change in Jersey.

Pensions and benefits on the state level, he said, are the equivalent of federal entitlements. They have powerful, “vocal” constituencies. He introduced pension and benefit reforms on a Tuesday in September, and that Friday he went to the state firefighters convention in Wildwood. It was 2 p.m., and “I think you know what they had for lunch.” Mr. Christie had proposed raising their retirement age, eliminating the cost-of-living adjustment, increasing employee pension contributions, and rolling back a 9% pay increase approved years before “by a Republican governor and a Republican Legislature.”

As Mr. Chrisie recounted it: “You can imagine how that was received by 7,500 firefighters. As I walked into the room and was introduced. I was booed lustily. I made my way up to the stage, they booed some more. . . . So I said, ‘Come on, you can do better than that,’ and they did!”

He crumpled up his prepared remarks and threw them on the floor. He told them, “Here’s the deal: I understand you’re angry, and I understand you’re frustrated, and I understand you feel deceived and betrayed.” And, he said, they were right: “For 20 years, governors have come into this room and lied to you, promised you benefits that they had no way of paying for, making promises they knew they couldn’t keep, and just hoping that they wouldn’t be the man or women left holding the bag. I understand why you feel angry and betrayed and deceived by those people. Here’s what I don’t understand. Why are you booing the first guy who came in here and told you the truth?”

He told them there was no political advantage in being truthful: “The way we used to think about politics and, unfortunately, the way I fear they’re thinking about politics still in Washington” involves “the old playbook [which] says, “lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election.” He’d seen a study that said New Jersey’s pensions may go bankrupt by 2020. A friend told him not to worry, he won’t be governor then. “That’s the way politics has been practiced in our country for too long. . . . So I said to those firefighters, ‘You may hate me now, but 15 years from now, when you have a pension to collect because of what I did, you’ll be looking for my address on the Internet so you can send me a thank-you note.’“

It can be a great relief to turn away from Washington and look at the states, where the rubber meets the road. Real leadership is happening there—the kind that can inspire real followership.

So Hosni Mubarak is gone. He’d been finished since Jan. 25, when the Egyptian revolution began. That a broad uprising could spontaneously occur demonstrated that the government could be taken. That it continued and the military didn’t clamp down guaranteed that it would be.

The story is primarily and obviously a political one: Pro-democracy forces rose up against dictatorship. But there were signs from the beginning that some very human parts of the story were going to have an impact on the outcome.

One is that Mr. Mubarak was not without supporters in Egypt, but they stayed home, patrolled their neighborhoods, or went to the office. His foes took to the streets and flooded the squares. They were the picture on TV and the Internet. They gave the interviews and made speeches.

The revolution in part was a struggle between the ambivalent and the impassioned. Those who backed Mr. Mubarak for reasons of stability or personal gain knew they were supporting a system that was corrupt and oppressive. Their support made them complicit, morally compromised. They didn’t want to be targeted. They weren’t going to do interviews making the case for a dictator; they weren’t going to take to the streets holding signs.

Those who opposed Mr. Mubarak had no ambivalence. They were happy to make their case. They were fighting for a dream of the future; they were fighting for superior principles. In modern revolution, passion trumps ambivalence.

And youth trumps age. Egypt is a young nation, median age 24, with high youth unemployment. All revolutions, in the end, are about the young versus the old, because the young are driven by hope and the old by experience. The men who massed in Tahrir Square the first week looked to be aged roughly 16 to 35. A few days into the revolution, I received an email from a friend just back from Cairo. He told me, he’d seen a young man run out of his suburban Cairo house. He was off to the demonstrations, to take part in history. Running after him was his grandmother, who literally grabbed him by the ear and tried to drag him back inside.

The young want revolution and progress, the old are inclined toward stability and peace. The grandmother was probably thinking, “I want you safe.” The young man might have been thinking, “I want my freedom.” The old are certain that happiness cannot be found in politics, that life is deeper and more mysterious than that. The young believe that happiness cannot be found without freedom, that freedom cannot be won without a fight, and that the fight is political. The old of Egypt will likely think the young have no idea what they’re unleashing. The young think the old have no idea what they accepted—the limits, the oppression. “Anything is better than that,” the young say. “We’ll see,” reply the old.

The young have the numbers and the technology. They sweep away old edifices with cellphones. The young activists of the world now talk to each other, share facts with each other, inspire each other, plan their actions together, and that has changed everything. Social media is a revolutionary force. We know that, but we’re still catching up with its implications. A leader of the Egyptian revolt was a Google executive. Could the future be any clearer?

No takeable dictatorship will survive this era. The ones that do last will be so effectively totalitarian that their very brutishness will be their bulwark. It is ironic evidence that Mr. Mubarak’s government was not in the end so brutal that his people were able to topple him.

With the rise of new media, governments have fully lost the capacity to be discreet or silent. The old ability of a nation to take time to think things through, to avoid the risk of offending or inflaming, is gone and will never come back. When something happens in the world, the media press relentlessly. Within hours of the beginning of the revolt, the media was full of “No response yet from the White House,” which became, “Awaiting word from the White House,” then, “Growing controversy over the silence from the White House.” In the end, despite early bobbles and backtracking, the White House did all right, mostly because from the beginning they seemed to understand: Mr. Mubarak is over.

Finally, it was Egypt’s story, Egypt’s drama, Egypt’s decision about Egypt’s future. What happens now will have implications for America, but the revolution was not about America, which appears to have been hard for some Americans to grasp. “America’s invasion of Iraq prompted Egypt’s freedom movement.” That’s one way to look at it, an odd way. “Did Obama Lose Egypt?” It was not his to lose. Egypt prompted Egypt’s freedom movement. We are not the center of everything, the reason for everything.

Nobody knows for sure what will follow the joy, on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, of this weekend. Mr. Mubarak always told American officials who pressed him to loosen his grip that if he did so, Islamic radicals would seize power, shift Egyptian foreign policy in warlike directions, and suppress the people of his nation in far worse ways. But Fareed Zakaria, among others, has argued that Mr. Mubarak used the threat of fundamentalism as an excuse not to change. Egypt has all sorts of political activists—liberals, Arab nationalists, old-school Marxists, new-school Marxists, free-marketers, young social-media professionals. All, Mr. Zakaria noted in Time last week, are “determined to shape their destiny.” The Muslim Brotherhood is part of the mix. But now instead of playing the part of oppressed victims, they will be forced to compete in the marketplace of ideas. When they do, they may lose some of their mystique. Egyptian society, says Mr. Zakaria, has within it “a persistent liberal strain.” The trend of greater economic freedom will require the rule of law.

Most intriguingly, Mr. Zakaria noted conflicting polls the past few years about who the people of Egypt really are and what they really think. A Pew Research survey last year found 84% of the people support the death penalty for Muslims who leave the faith, and 82% support stoning as a punishment for adultery. But a 2007 poll found that 90% supported freedom of religion, 80% supported free speech, 75% oppose censorship. A 2010 report showed a large majority prefer democracy to other forms of government.

It is hard to know, if you’re not Egyptian, what to make of this. Not only will the world be watching to see what Egypt becomes, what future its people will choose, but Egypt itself will be watching, and discovering what and who it is. A Hollywood director once said that a great Western is defined by this dynamic: “The villain has arrived while the hero is evolving.” Egypt itself is evolving. May its people be heroes and do great things.

What an incredible and bizarre Thursday afternoon it must have been in Cairo.

Thousands are massed in Tahrir Square, waving banners and flags, dancing and cheering as they await a speech by President Hosni Mubarak. They have been told he will resign. They are overjoyed and eager to act out their joy for each other, for the cameras, for history.

The hours tick by, and it’s evening. The American anchors, playing for time, keep saying that they have been told the speech is coming, “expected any minute now.” But after a while you can hear something in their voices, some creeping doubt, and you know they’re wondering: “As I talk and people dance, is a military coup taking place in the palace? What’s happening? Why isn’t he speaking?”

And then the speech, a long, confusing address that seems to say nothing. And made worse by the atmospherics: the Dracula lighting, the dark-dyed hair and pale face of the president, the small, seemingly empty studio apart from everyone and everything. In attempting to assert command, he seemed utterly besieged.

At first it seemed he was resigning, and there were cheers. But by the end it seemed he was not, and there was anger and some bitterness. In the hours that followed, Egyptia’s ambassador to Washington claimed Mr. Mubarak had in effect stepped down, leaving the vice president as “de facto” leader.

As I write, it continues to be unclear exactly what he said, or rather what he meant. He may or may not continue functioning as a leader to some greater or lesser degree. He may or may not be functioning as commander of the nation’s armed forces. Talk about lost in translation.

All of which left one in mind of what Talleyrand said about Napoleon’s execution of the duke of Enghien: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” What a historic mistake Mr. Mubarak made. What a clumsy misreading of his people he made in not clearly and definitively stepping down.

The speech suggested that he was trying to survive by show business—to buy off history with an emotional, effusive and meandering address when the people of his country expected, hoped for, and had been primed for a blunt resignation. Even the translator sounded freaked out—confused, scattered, mildly frantic.

Mr. Mubarak spoke, he said, as “a father to his sons and daughters”: “I am proud of you.” He promised to punish those in his government who had moved violently against protestors, those “innocent victims.” That has “broken my heart.” The demands of those who want democracy are “just and legitimate.”

He repeated the promise he made weeks ago that he will not be a candidate in the September election. He tried to make this sound new. Power will go to “whoever the electorate chooses.” He wants a “smooth transition.” We have started a “dialogue.” We need to discuss a “road map” to peaceful transition. We are studying amendments to the constitution. His “priority” is to restore the confidence of the citizenry. He will maintain the economy.

“It’s not about me, Hosni Mubarak,” he said. “It’s about Egypt.” What followed was a tribute to himself. He has seen war. “I have preserved my dignity.” He will look to “the higher interests of Egypt.” “I am telling you again that I have lived for this homeland.”

At the end I thought: Does he not understand the people of his country? They are in revolution. They want democracy and the rule of law. They want the old ways to be over. They want him gone. They want to build something better in his regime’s place.

At a time like this, a leader must not only do the right thing, he must do it clearly. And the right thing, really, was clear. There was only one thing for Mr. Mubarak to say, and it is the statement those who wish his nation well would have been hoping to hear. He could have saved the day, acknowledged the inevitable, and spared his country a tipping point into violence.

He should have spoken of his honest love of the nation he has served for more than half a century and led for 30 years. There is no doubting he loves it. But he has become the face of oppression, and he knows it.

He should have spoken of his respect for the people of Egypt and his knowledge of the political arrangements they not only desire but deserve. And so, he could have said, he will step down, resign, leave office as of midnight tonight. His place will be taken, according to the Egyptian Constitution, by the vice president, Omar Suleiman. But this will only be temporary. Not only will Mr. Mubarak, not be a candidate for any office in the scheduled September elections, neither will Mr. Suleiman.

“My government is over,” Mr. Mubarak might have said. “Between now and the September elections, the people of Egypt will have a time of peaceful transition. New candidates for leadership will rise. Egypt, seven months from now, will choose from among them. Egypt will be free and democratic.” He could have added that he hopes to be remembered by history as a leader who did many good things, and hopes to be forgiven by the people for those things that, we all admit, were not good.

End of story. And the people would have forgiven him. Many would have thanked him.

Instead, a mess. Confusion. Anger. And the possibility that what has been, up to this point ,a revolution marked by efforts to maintain nonviolence—efforts made on both sides—will tip in the other direction.

The reaction from Tahrir Square was immediate. They were screaming, “Leave, leave!” On CNN a young protestor said, “This guy doesn’t want to leave the country in peace.”

A great question, of course, is where the famous generals of Egypt, the military officers who are broadly acknowledged to be and admired as sophisticated, secular and a source of stability, stand. Did they attempt to get Mr. Mubarak to step down, only to fail? If the people of Egypt, in their frustration, take more angrily to the streets, and violently, whose side will they be on? Whom will they protect?

One has the sad sense that a moment was missed. Mr. Mubarak could have turned everything around, and graciously been a force for calm, peace and progress. When you miss a moment like that, when you let it pass, when you bobble it, new dangers come forward. If Mr. Mubarak had clearly departed, and made it clear that his successor’s time in the presidency would be limited, pro-democracy protestors probably would have accepted it.

Now? All bets are off.

History hands you a moment like this as a gift. When you meet it, when you satisfy its requirements, it is a beautiful thing to see. When you fumble it in your vanity and ego, in your confusion and pride, in your misguided attempts at cleverness, it is a sad thing to see. And it has repercussions.

Simi Valley, Calif.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountain Range where old Hollywood directors shot Westerns, they will mark Sunday’s centenary of Reagan’s birth with events and speeches geared toward Monday’s opening of a rethought and renovated museum aimed at making his presidency more accessible to scholars and vividly available to the public. Fifty percent of the artifacts, officials note, have never been shown before—essays and short stories Reagan wrote in high school and college, the suit he wore the day he was shot, the condolence book signed by world leaders at his funeral. (Margaret Thatcher: “Well done, Thou good and faithful servant.”)

Much recently has been written about who he was—a good man who became a great president—but recent conversations about Reagan have me pondering some things he was not.

He wasn’t, for instance, sentimental, though he’s often thought of that way. His nature was marked by a characterological sweetness, and his impulse was to be kind and generous. (His daughter Patti Davis captured this last week in a beautifully remembered essay for Time.) But he wasn’t sentimental about people and events, or about history. Underlying all was a deep and natural skepticism. That, in a way, is why he was conservative. “If men were angels.” They are not, so we must limit the governmental power they might wield. But his skepticism didn’t leave him down. It left him laughing at the human condition, and at himself. Jim Baker, his first and great chief of staff, and his friend, remembered the other day the atmosphere of merriness around Reagan, the constant flow of humor.

But there was often a genial blackness to it, a mordant edge. In a classic Reagan joke, a man says sympathetically to his friend, “I’m so sorry your wife ran away with the gardener.” The guy answers, “It’s OK, I was going to fire him anyway.” Or: As winter began, the young teacher sought to impart to her third-graders the importance of dressing warmly. She told the heart-rending story of her little brother, a fun-loving boy who went out with his sled and stayed out too long, caught a cold, then pneumonia, and days later died. There was dead silence in the schoolroom as they took it in. She knew she’d gotten through. Then a voice came from the back: “Where’s the sled?”

The biggest misunderstanding about Reagan’s political life is that he was inevitable. He was not. He had to fight for every inch, he had to make it happen. What Billy Herndon said of Abraham Lincoln was true of Reagan too: He had within him, always, a ceaseless little engine of ambition. He was good at not showing it, as was Lincoln, but it was there. He was knowingly in the greatness game, at least from 1976, when he tried to take down a sitting president of his own party.

He was serious, and tough enough. Everyone who ever ran against him misunderstood this. He was an actor, they thought, a marshmallow. They’d flatten him. “I’ll wipe the smile off his face.” Nothing could wipe the smile off his face. He was there to compete, he was aiming for the top. His unconscious knew it. He told me as he worked on his farewell address of a recurring dream he’d had through adulthood. He was going to live in a mansion with big rooms, “high ceilings, white walls.” He would think to himself in the dream that it was “a house that was available at a price I could afford.” He had the dream until he moved into the White House and never had it again. “Not once.”

He ran for president four times and lost twice. His 1968 run was a flop—it was too early, as he later admitted, and when it’s too early, it never ends well. In 1976 he took on an incumbent Republican president of his own party, and lost primaries in New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois (where he’d been born), Massachusetts and Vermont. It was hand-to-hand combat all the way to the convention, where he lost to Gerald Ford. People said he was finished. He roared back in 1980 only to lose Iowa and scramble back in New Hampshire while reorganizing his campaign and firing his top staff. He won the nomination and faced another incumbent president.

In Reagan’s candidacy the American people were being asked to choose a former movie star (never had one as president) who was divorced (ditto) and who looked like he might become the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge. To vote for Reagan was not only to take a chance on an unusual man with an unusual biography, but also to break with New Deal-Great Society assumptions about the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Americans did, in a landslide—but only after Jimmy Carter’s four years of shattering failure.

None of it was inevitable. The political lesson of Ronald Reagan’s life: Nothing is written.

He didn’t see himself as “the great communicator.” It was so famous a moniker that he could do nothing but graciously accept the compliment, but he well understood it was bestowed in part by foes and in part to undercut the seriousness of his philosophy: “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it.” He answered in his farewell address: “I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.” It wasn’t his eloquence people supported, it was his stands—opposition to the too-big state, to its intrusions and demands, to Soviet communism. Voters weren’t charmed, they were convinced.

His most underestimated political achievement? In the spring of 1981 the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization called an illegal strike. It was early in Reagan’s presidency. He’d been a union president. He didn’t want to come across as an antiunion Republican. And Patco had been one of the few unions to support him in 1980. But the strike was illegal. He would not accept it. He gave them a grace period, two days, to come back. If they didn’t, they’d be fired. They didn’t believe him. Most didn’t come back. So he fired them. It broke the union. Federal workers got the system back up. The Soviet Union, and others, were watching. They thought: This guy means business. It had deeply positive implications for U.S. foreign policy. But here’s the thing: Reagan didn’t know that would happen, didn’t know the bounty he’d reap. He was just trying to do what was right.

The least understood facet of Reagan’s nuclear policies? He hated the rise of nuclear weapons, abhorred the long-accepted policy of mutually assured destruction. That’s where the Strategic Defense Initiative came from, his desire to protect millions from potential annihilation. The genius of his program: When developed, America would share it with the Soviet Union. We’d share it with everybody. All would be protected from doomsday.

The Soviets opposed this; the Rejkavik summit broke up over it, and in the end the Soviets’ arms spending helped bankrupt them and hasten their fall. Years later I would see Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Reagan’s friend. He was still grumpy about Reagan’s speeches. “Ron—he loved show business!” Mr. Gorbachev blustered. The losses of those years must have still rankled, and understandably. It’s one thing to be outmaneuvered by a clever man, but to be outfoxed by a good one—oh, that would grate.

It is a strange and confounding thing about this White House that the moment you finally think they have their act together—the moment they get in the groove and start to demonstrate that they do have some understanding of our country—they take the very next opportunity to prove anew that they do not have their act together, and are not in the groove. It’s almost magical.

The State of the Union speech was not centrist, as it should have been, but merely mushy, and barely relevant. It wasted a perfectly good analogy—America is in a Sputnik moment—by following it with narrow, redundant and essentially meaningless initiatives. Rhetorically the speech lay there like a lox, as if the document itself knew it was dishonest, felt embarrassed, and wanted to curl up quietly in a corner of the podium and hide. But the president insisted on reading it.

Response in the chamber was so muted as to be almost Xanax-like. Did you see how bored and unengaged they looked? The applause was merely courteous. A senator called the mood on the floor “flat.” This is the first time the press embargo on the speech was broken, by National Journal, which printed the text more than an hour before the president delivered it. Maybe members had already read it and knew what they were about to face.

The president will get a bump from the speech. Presidents always do. It will be called a success. But it will be evanescent. A real moment was missed. If the speech is remembered, it will be as the moment when the president actually slowed—or blocked—his own comeback.

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The central elements of the missed opportunity:

• An inability to focus on what is important now. The speech was more than half over before the president got around to the spending crisis. He signaled no interest in making cuts, which suggested that he continues not to comprehend America’s central anxiety about government spending: that it will crush our children, constrict the economy in which they operate, make America poorer, lower its standing in the world, and do in the American dream. Americans are alarmed about this not because they’re cheap and selfish but because they care about the country they will leave behind when they are gone.

President Obama’s answer is to “freeze” a small portion of government spending at current levels for five years. This is a reasonable part of a package, but it’s not a package and it’s not a cut. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who called it “sad,” told a local radio station the savings offered “won’t even pay the interest on the debt we’re about to accumulate” in the next two years. The president was trying to “hoodwink” the American people, Mr. Coburn said: “The federal government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. It’s 27% bigger than it was two years ago.” Cuts, not a freeze, are needed—it’s a matter of “urgency.”

• Unresponsiveness to the political moment. Democrats hold the White House and Senate, Republicans the House, the crisis is real, and the next election is two years away. This is the time for the president to go on the line and demand Republicans do so, too. Instead, nothing. A freeze.

• An attitude that was small bore and off point. America is in a Sputnik moment, the world seems to be jumping ahead of us, our challenge is to make up the distance and emerge victorious. So we’ll change our tax code to make citizens feel less burdened and beset, we’ll rethink what government can and should give, can and should take, we’ll get our fiscal life in order, we’ll save our country. Right?

Nah. We’ll focus on “greater Internet access,” “renewable energy,” “one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” “wind and solar,” “information technology.” “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail.” None of this is terrible, but none of it is an answer. The administration continues to struggle with the concept of priorities. They cannot see where the immediate emergency is. They are like people who’d say, “Martha, the house is on fire and flames are licking down the stairs—let’s discuss what color to repaint the living room after we rebuild!” A better priority might be, “Get the kids out and call the fire department.”

• Unbelievability. The president will limit the cost of government by whipping it into shape and removing redundant agencies. Really? He hasn’t shown much interest in that before. He has shown no general ideological sympathy for the idea of shrinking and streamlining government. He’s going to rationalize government? He wants to “get rid of the loopholes” in our tax code. Really? That’s good, but it was a throwaway line, not a serious argument. And he was talking to 535 representatives and senators who live in the loopholes, who live by campaign contributions from industries and interest groups that pay protection money to not get dinged in the next tax bill.

On education, the president announced we’re lagging behind in our public schools. Who knew? In this age of “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” every adult in America admits that union rules are the biggest impediment to progress. “Race to the Top” isn’t the answer. We all know this.

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As for small things and grace notes, there is often about the president an air of delivering a sincere lecture in which he informs us of things that seem new to him but are old to everyone else. He has a tendency to present banalities as if they were discoveries. “American innovation” is important. As many as “a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school.” We’re falling behind in math and science: “Think about it.”

“I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories. . . . I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans.” But our deterioration isn’t new information, it’s a shared predicate of at least 20 years’ standing, it’s what we all know. When you talk this way, as if the audience is uninformed, they think you are uninformed. Leaders must know what’s in the national information bank.

He too often in making a case puts the focus on himself. George H.W. Bush, always afraid of sounding egotistical, took the I’s out of his speeches. We called his edits “I-ectomies.” Mr. Obama always seems to put the I in. He does “I implants.”

Humor, that leavening, subtle uniter, was insufficiently present. Humor is denigrated by serious people, but serious people often miss the obvious. The president made one humorous reference, to smoked salmon. It emerged as the biggest word in the NPR word cloud of responses. That’s because it was the most memorable thing in the speech. The president made a semi-humorous reference to TSA pat-downs, but his government is in charge of and insists on the invasive new procedures, to which the president has never been and will never be subjected. So it’s not funny coming from him. The audience sort of chuckled, but only because many are brutes who don’t understand that it is an unacceptable violation to have your genital areas patted against your will by strangers.

I actually hate writing this. I wanted to write “A Serious Man Seizes the Center.” But he was not serious and he didn’t seize the center, he went straight for the mush. Maybe at the end of the day he thinks that’s what centrism is.