Peggy Noonan

There was drama at the White House this week when a man tried to hurl himself over the fence. But the Secret Service intervened and talked the president into going back inside and finishing his term.

That’s from Conan O’Brien’s monologue the other night. It captures the moment pretty well. Mr. Obama’s poll numbers continue to fall, his position in the battleground states to deteriorate. From Politico: “Obama emerges from the months-long [debt ceiling] fracas weaker—and facing much deeper and more durable political obstacles—than his own advisers ever imagined.” The president seemed to admit as much when he met with supporters at a fund-raiser in Chicago. “When I said ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time.” When presidents talk like that, they’re saying: This isn’t working.

One fact emerged rather starkly during the crisis, and it will likely have implications in the coming year. It is that the president misunderstands himself as a political figure. Specifically, he misunderstands his rhetorical powers. He thinks they are huge. They are not. They are limited.

His conviction led to an interesting historic moment, and certainly a dramatic one, during the debt-ceiling negotiations.

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It was late Wednesday afternoon, July 13, in the Cabinet Room in the White House. Budget negotiations between Democrats and Republicans had been going on for months. The president, the vice president and congressional leaders on both sides were meeting again. Late in the meeting, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor asked the president a question. As Mr. Cantor told it this week, he was thinking about how the White House and the Republicans were still far apart on the size of budget cuts. He felt the president and his party were hung up on an insistence on raising taxes. Mr. Cantor asked Mr. Obama if he would drop his stand that the debt ceiling should be raised without dollar-for-dollar cuts. At that point, said Mr. Cantor, the president “turned to me and said, ‘Eric, don’t call my bluff.’ He said, ‘I’m going to take this to the American people.’“ Then he got up and left.

The president was confident he could go over the heads of the opposition and win the day with his powers of persuasion. On July 25 he made his move, with a prime-time national address.

Boy, did it not work.

It was a speech with a calm surface but a rough undertow. “The wealthiest Americans” and “biggest corporations” should “give up some of their breaks.” The “burden” must be “fairly shared.” The problem is Republicans, who are “insisting” on an approach that “doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or the biggest corporations to contribute anything at all.” These Republicans ask nothing of “those at the top of the income scale.” Their stand would “threaten working families” and enrich the “corporate jet owner,” the “oil companies” and “hedge-fund managers.” But don’t worry, “the 98% of Americans who make under $250,000 would see no tax increases at all.” “Millionaires and billionaires” must “share in the sacrifice.” Otherwise the government may not be able to send out Social Security checks.

It was, obviously, an attempt at class warfare. But class warfare is inherently manipulative, and people often sense manipulation and lean away from it. Americans at this point—they’ve been through the 20th century—don’t like attempts to divide them. It turns things sour.

Beyond that, it was the kind of appeal Americans would only begin to consider if the person making it had a lot of personal trust built up in the credibility bank. People have to believe you’re genuine in your anxiety for your country, that you’re working in good faith with the other party, that you’re not using a crisis for political gain, that you genuinely mean well toward all, including even the wealthy, that you are shrewd and wise in your choice of a path. Mr. Obama doesn’t have that kind of trust. How many people think he’s broad-gauged, genuine, knowing, or that his judgment on political issues is superior?

So the big speech went nowhere. It moved the dial nowhere but down. The president’s poll numbers continued to fall. And soon the White House put up a white flag and dropped the insistence on tax increases, and Democrats and Republicans came up with a bill that finally passed both houses.

The July 25 speech was of a piece with most of the president’s rhetorical leadership through the debt-ceiling crisis. Some of his statements were patronizing: We have to “eat our peas.” He was boring in the way that people who are essentially ideological are always boring. They bleed any realness out of their arguments. They are immersed in abstractions that get reduced to platitudes, and so they never seem to be telling it straight. And he was a joy-free zone. No matter how much the president tries to smile, and he has a lovely smile, one is always aware of his grim task: income equality, redistribution, taxes. Come, let us suffer together.

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But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working anymore? One answer is that it never “worked.” The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated. It is true that a good speech put him on the map in 2004 and made his rise possible, and true he gave some good speeches in 2008. But people didn’t really vote for him because he said things like: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” They voted for him in spite of that. They voted for him for other reasons.

The president has been obsessing on Ronald Reagan the past few months, referring to him in private and attempting to use him to buttress his position in public. They say Republicans can’t get over Reagan, but really it’s Democrats who aren’t over him, and who draw the wrong lessons from his success. Reagan himself never bragged about his ability to convince the American people. He’d never point a finger and say: “I’ll go to the people and grind you to dust.” He thought speaking was a big part of leadership, but only part, and in his farewell address he went out of his way to say he never thought of himself as a great communicator. He thought he simply communicated great things—essentially, the vision of the Founders as applied to current circumstances.

Democrats were sure Reagan was wrong, so they explained his success to themselves by believing that it all came down to some kind of magical formula involving his inexplicably powerful speeches. They misdefined his powers and saddled themselves with an unrealistic faith in the power of speaking.

But speeches aren’t magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not.

The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

The Republican establishment reasserted itself this week, and good thing, too, because the establishment was right. It said Republicans in the House should back and pass the Boehner bill on the debt ceiling because it goes in the right directions, contains spending cuts but not taxes, and is viable. So accept victory, avert crisis, and get it to the Senate.

The establishment was being conservative in the Burkean sense: acknowledge reality, respect it, and make the most progress possible within it. This has not always been true of them. They spent the first decade of this century backing things a truly conservative party would not have dreamed of—careless wars, huge spending and, most scandalously, a dreamy and unconservative assumption that it would all work out because life is sweet and the best thing always happens. They were mostly led by men and women who had never been foreclosed on and who assumed good luck, especially unearned good luck, would continue. They were fools, and they lost control of their party when the tea party rose up, rebuking and embarrassing them. Then the tea party saved them by not going third party in 2009-10. And now the establishment has come forward to save the tea party, by inching it away from the cliff and reminding it the true battles are in 2012, and after.

As this is written, the White House seems desperate to be seen as consequential. They’re trotting out Press Secretary Jay Carney, who stands there looking like a ferret with flop sweat as he insists President Obama is still at the table, still manning the phones and calling shots. Much is uncertain, but the Republicans have made great strides on policy. If they emerge victorious, they had better not crow. The nation is in a continuing crisis, our credit rating is not secure, and no one’s interested in he-man gangster dialogue from “The Town.” What might thrill America would be a little modesty: “We know we helped get America into some of this trouble, and we hope we’ve made some progress today in getting us out of it.”

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But that actually is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about something that started to become apparent to me during the debt negotiations. It’s something I’ve never seen in national politics.

It is that nobody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton’s troubles there were always people who’d say, “Look, I love the guy.” They’d often be smiling—a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren’t that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications.

The past few weeks I’ve asked Democrats who supported him how they feel about him. I got back nothing that showed personal investment. Here are the words of a hard-line progressive and wise veteran of the political wars: “I never loved Barack Obama. That said, among my crowd who did ‘love’ him, I can’t think of anyone who still does.” Why is Mr. Obama different from Messrs. Clinton and Bush? “Clinton radiated personality. As angry as folks got with him about Nafta or Monica, there was always a sense of genuine, generous caring.” With Bush, “if folks were upset with him, he still had this goofy kind of personality that folks could relate to. You might think he was totally misguided but he seemed genuinely so. . . . Maybe the most important word that described Clinton and Bush but not Obama is ‘genuine.’” He “doesn’t exude any feeling that what he says and does is genuine.”

Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don’t care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat. No one was colder than FDR, deep down. But he loved the game and did a wonderful daily impersonation of jut-jawed joy. And people loved him.

The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn’t really very good at politics, and he isn’t good at politics because he doesn’t really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The “Analytics Department” is looking for “predictive Modeling/Data Mining” specialists to join the campaign’s “multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,” which will use “predictive modeling” to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. “We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.”

This wasn’t the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of ‘92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

Mr. Obama seemed brilliant at politics when he first emerged in 2004. He understood the nation’s longing for unity. We’re not divided into red states and blue, he said, we’re Big Purple, we can solve our problems together. Four years later he read the lay of the land perfectly—really, perfectly. The nation and the Democratic Party were tired of the Clinton machine. He came from nowhere and dismantled it. It was breathtaking. He went into the 2008 general election with a miraculously unified party and took down another machine, bundling up all the accrued resentment of eight years with one message: “You know the two losing wars and the economic collapse we’ve been dealing with? I won’t do that. I’m not Bush.”

The fact is, he’s good at dismantling. He’s good at critiquing. He’s good at not being the last guy, the one you didn’t like. But he’s not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he’s not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.

And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn’t serious, he was only shrewd—and shrewdness wasn’t enough. He demagogued the issue—no Social Security checks—until he was called out, and then went on the hustings spouting inanities. He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.

So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces—the presidency, the U.S. Senate. In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique. He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.

It’s good, it represents progress, build from it. That would be a helpful approach to the Gang of Six proposal on the debt. Don’t deep-six it because it’s flawed. Flawless isn’t going to happen. There will be a big election in 2012. A lot can be settled then, and after.

The Gang of Six—three Democrats and three Republicans in the Senate—this week put forward a plan aimed at reducing the national debt by almost $4 trillion over the next 10 years. It includes $500 billion in immediate cuts, and it repeals a costly provision of ObamaCare. It would lower the top individual tax rate to 29%, push corporate tax rates down to 29% from 35%, and abolish the Alternative Minimum tax. On long-term spending, the plan includes a legislative supermajority and sequester feature. In the words of a senator involved in the bargaining, For the first time, we have some real teeth” in spending controls.

This is all pretty good. It moves the ball forward in the right ways.

As for the flaws: A lot is left up to committees and future action. A lot is left vague. But a critic of the plan, the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell, highlighted with justice one of its central advantages: It “is not fueled by class-warfare resentment.” These days that always comes as a surprise and a relief. And it might have come at a cost to the Democrats in the bargaining sessions.

The primary good of the plan is that it represents the work of three serious liberals and three serious conservatives who together are moving in the right direction, not the wrong one. They admit the spending crisis is a crisis; they appear to admit that we cannot, at least now, tax our way out of it. This seems small but isn’t. Agreement on these essentials is an antidote to feelings of widespread public hopelessness: “Washington can’t do anything.” That hopelessness damages us more than we know, both at home and in the world. We have to look competent. We have to look like we can reform ourselves. The other day there was an apparently incorrect report that the Republicans and the president had neared a debt-ceiling deal. The markets immediately jumped. Everyone wants Washington to work. People hunger for it.

The plan has already garnered a lot of opposition, much of it fair, but to quickly push it aside would be a real missed opportunity. Those who critique the plan can help it. Its cuts in entitlements and its attempts to reform them are unclear and appear insufficient. If the Senate passed a final proposal along Gang of Six lines, House Republicans would have to make the bill more concrete, more reliable in its mechanisms. And they’d probably have to make deeper cuts. Overshadowing all negotiations is the persistent threat of a credit downgrade. The senator at the bargaining table said that if a final bill doesn’t contain “at least $4 trillion in cuts,” we will get a downgrade, which would carry costs greater than the cuts in the Gang of Six plan.

Attempts to find a final compromise are delicate, with a lot of moving pieces. But the Gang of Six proposal is cause for encouragement. It could not be turned into specific legislation quickly. Gang of Six member Kent Conrad said Thursday morning it could take six months to get it all done and through the appropriate committees. But President Obama signaled this week, for the first time, that he might back a temporary debt-ceiling increase to allow work to continue.

That’s good. But a note on his efforts in the drama. It is time for the president to get out of the way.

For the longest time he wouldn’t engage, and now he’s engaged. For the longest time he didn’t care about spending, and now he cares about spending. Good, both in terms of policy and for him. But his decision to become engaged has become a decision to dominate, to have his face in front of the television cameras with his news conferences, pronouncements, and what his communications people are probably calling his “ownership” of any final agreement. He’s trying to come across as the boss, the indispensable man, the leader. And, of course, the reasonable one.

That’s all very nice and part of Political Positioning 101, but at this point it’s not helping. He’s becoming box-office poison. His numbers are falling. The RealClearPolitics composite job approval poll rating has him down six points since June 2, when the debt-ceiling crisis began. That fall, from 52% to 46%, exactly tracks his heightened media presence and his increased attempts to be seen as dominant. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said that if he ran for president today he’d lose, that his job-approval numbers are “worse than they appear,” and that he continues to have real trouble with undecided voters.

And if you’ve watched him lately, you know why. When he speaks on the debt negotiations, he is not only extremely boring, with airy and bromidic language—really they are soul-killing, his talking points—but he never seems to be playing it straight. He always seems to be finagling, playing the angles in some higher game that only he gets. In two and a half years he has reached the point that took George W. Bush five years to reach: People aren’t listening anymore.

The other day he announced the Gang of Six agreement with words that enveloped the plan in his poisonous embrace: “I wanted to give folks a quick update on the progress that we’re making.” We’re. He has “continued to urge both Democrats and Republicans to come together.” What would those little devils do without Papa? “The good news is that today a group of senators . . . put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach that I’ve urged.” I’ve urged. Me, me, me.

That approach includes “shared sacrifice, and everybody is giving up something.” He was like a mother coming in and cheerily announcing: “Dinner’s served! Less for everybody!”

We’re trying to begin a comeback, not a famine. We’re trying to take actions that will allow us to grow.

He’s like a walking headache. He’s probably triggering Michele Bachmann’s migraines.

The Gang of Six members themselves should have been given the stage to make their own announcement, and their own best case.

The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.

He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner as he jointly announces it to the nation. Then his people should leak that he got what he wanted, the best possible deal, and the left has no idea the ruin he averted and the thanks they owe him.

For now, for his sake and the sake of an ultimate plan, he should choose Strategic Silence. Really, recent presidents forget to shut up. They lose sight of how grating they are.

Looked at one way, it shouldn’t be hard. Both parties in Washington have every reason to want to prove they possess the baseline political competence to meet the government’s central and pending crisis, which is the spending crisis. Both parties should be eager to reach a debt ceiling agreement, if only to prove the system isn’t broken. Because really, they are the system. If it’s broken, they’re broken, and if they’re broken, who needs them?

So you’d think the hangman’s noose would have concentrated their minds. Instead, of course, it’s a battle. As this is written, the president seems to have the edge. But if he wins—whatever winning looks like—he’ll likely pay a price for his political victory. He usually does. He won on health care, which ruined his first two years in office and sharply accelerated the decline in his popularity.

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The issues of spending and taxes should be decoupled. The spending crisis is what’s going on and demands attention now; it’s because of out-of-control spending that we are up against the debt ceiling. Taxes—whether to raise them on the wealthy, whether to reform the tax code and how—can’t be satisfyingly dealt with in the next few weeks. It is gameful of the White House to obscure the central crisis by focusing on a secondary one. The American people have very interesting thoughts and views on taxes, and in no way is it certain that this issue will always favor the Republicans. There’s an election in 2012, we can argue it through from now to then.

A central problem for Republicans is that they’re trying to do everything—cut spending, fight off tax increases, win national support—from the House. The House is probably not enough to win a fight like this. In the words of a conservative strategist, Republicans have one bullet and the Democrats have three: the presidency, the Senate, and a mainstream media generally willing to accept the idea that the president is the moderate in the fight.

The president is in the better position, and he knows it. Majority Leader Eric Cantor reports Mr. Obama went into enough-is-enough mode during White House talks this week, warned Mr. Cantor not to call his bluff, and ended the meeting saying: “Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting here?” I’m glad Reagan is his model for how presidents should comport themselves, but he should know Reagan never tried to scare people into doing things his way. Instead he tried to encourage support, and with a light touch. When locked in battle with a Democratic Congress he didn’t go on TV and make threats. He didn’t say, “Congress needs to know we must rebuild our defense system, and if they don’t, your children will die in a fiery hail of Soviet bullets.”

That was—how to put it?—not his style. It’s not any president’s style. But it’s what Mr. Obama was doing when he told CBS’s Scott Pelley that he isn’t sure there will be “money in the coffers” to send out Social Security checks. Soon he may be saying there won’t be money in the coffers to let students return to college or to pay servicemen. The president is playing Targeted Catastrophe. He’s attempting to agitate and frighten people into calling their congressmen and saying Don’t Cut Anything, Raise Taxes on Millionaires.

Three weeks of Targeted Catastrophe could be pretty effective. But if the president wins this way, there will be residual costs. He will have scared America and shook it up, all for a political victory. That will not add to affection or regard for the president. Centrists and independents, however they react in terms of support, will not think more highly of him.

Which gets me, briefly, to the latest poll on whether Americans think we’re on the right track or wrong track as a nation. The wrong-track number hit 63% this month, up from 60% last month, according to Reuters/Ipsos, which laid the increase to pessimism about the economy and “prolonged gridlock in Washington.”

Fair enough. But there’s more to be said about the nation the president seems to be busy agitating. It’s always assumed the right track/wrong track numbers are about the economy, which makes sense because economic facts are always in the forefronts of everyone’s minds. Will I get laid off, can I pay the bills, can my business survive?

But there are other reasons for American unease, and in a way some are deeper and more pervasive. Some are cultural. Here are only two. Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee. That’s because they were born in one place—the old America—and live now in another. We’re like immigrants, whether we literally are or not. One of the reasons America has always celebrated immigrants is a natural, shared knowledge that they left behind everything they knew to enter a place that was different—different language, different ways and manners, different food and habits, different tempo. This took courage. They missed the old country. There’s a line in a Bernard Shaw play, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”: “I kept myself lonely for you!” That is the unspoken sentence of all immigrants toward their children—I made myself long for an old world so you could have a better one.

But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn’t going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids’ buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That’s a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.

So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn’t so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, “Go outside and play in the culture,” and the culture—relatively innocent, and boring—could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies—all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can’t send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. And there isn’t less bad parenting now than there used to be. There may be more.

There is so much unease and yearning and sadness in America. So much good, too, so much energy and genius. But it isn’t a country anyone should be playing games with, and adding to the general sense of loss.

What brilliant good it can do a country when the world respects, and will not forget, one of its leaders. What was vividly true 30 years ago is true today: The world looks to America. It doesn’t want to be patronized or dominated by America, it wants to see America as a beacon, an example, a dream of what could be. And the world wants something else: American goodness. It wants to have faith in the knowledge that America is the great nation that tries to think about and act upon right and wrong, and that it is a beacon also of things practical—how to have a sturdy, good, unsoiled economy, how to create jobs that provide livelihoods that allow families to be formed, how to maintain a system in which inventors and innovators can flourish. A world without America in this sense—the beacon, the inspiration, the speaker of truth—would be a world deprived of hopefulness. And so we must be our best selves again not only for us but for the world.

These are the thoughts that follow eight days of celebration, in Eastern Europe and London, of the leadership of Ronald Reagan. History is rarely sweet, but it was last week when they raised statues of him in his centenary year. People old and young stopped for a moment to think and speak of him, and to define what his leadership meant to them and their countries. The celebrations in Krakow, Budapest, Prague and London were a reminder that we are all traveling through history together, that you are living not only your own life but the life of your times, as Laurens van der Post once said. And your era can actually be affected, made better, by what you do.

The subject matter was the fall of the wall, the end of communism, the reunification of Europe—those epochal events the world is still absorbing and that in retrospect seem even more amazing. Good people picked good leaders—the Big Three of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Reagan—and together they pushed until walls fell. Man is not used to such kind outcomes. A feeling of awe and gratitude colored the ceremonies: “My God, look what was done, I still can’t believe it. Let’s talk about how it happened and take those lessons into the future.” Now of all times we could use the inspiration.

In Krakow, the city from which Karol Wojtyla was called to Rome to become John Paul II, there was a thanksgiving mass celebrated by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who said in his homily: “President Reagan . . . took great pains to bring about the demise of that which he so aptly named ‘the evil empire.’ This empire of evil denied many people and nations their freedom. It did so by way of a pernicious ideology . . . the result of this experiment was the death and sufferings of millions.” “There can be no doubt,” he said, that Reagan and John Paul brought about “the collapse of communism.”

In Budapest, in a special session of the Hungarian Parliament, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen spoke of the end of Hungary as a captive nation and its beginnings as a democracy. Reagan, he said, “helped Hungary find itself.” Member of Parliament Janos Horvath spoke of Reagan’s style of peaceful liberation. What America did by being strong, by being serious in its focus, by speaking plain and true, not only inspired the victims of communism but weakened their oppressors. Reagan had “the imagination” to understand that the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a historic event: “He kept quoting Harry Truman’s commitment to the liberation of the captive nations. That, for Reagan, was a more important thing than for other presidents.” Hungary knew Truman had been “infuriated” by what the Soviets did, “arresting people, including myself.” Reagan made clear he “felt the indignation.” And so, “Hungary took seriously what America meant—human rights, democracy.” It left Horvath an optimist. “I have faith that the right thing prevails. This is the Ronald Reagan mentality.”

I asked a member of Parliament whether the people of Hungary had felt any bitterness over the fact that President Eisenhower did not commit U.S. military forces to help the Hungarians in 1956. At first he was puzzled. Bitterness? Any residual disappointment, I said. No, he said. “We understood your position.” Meaning, he explained, our position as a superpower in the nuclear age, and our position on freedom. They knew whose side we were on.

A veteran diplomat in the area, an American, said later that everything he’d heard in the speeches left him thinking how the great progress of the past quarter-century had been made not through warfare but through diplomacy, tough decisions, aid, encouragement and rhetorical clarity and candor.

At the unveiling of the Reagan statue in Freedom Square, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Reagan “managed change wisely and preserved peace. This is why he needs to have a statue in Budapest.” In tearing down “the distorted and sick ideologies of the 20th century,” Reagan “remade the world for us.”

Rather stunningly, the leader of Hungary’s government bluntly ended his speech with a sentiment often heard in Omaha, Tucson, Morristown and Tallahassee: “We need a Ronald Reagan. Is he there, somewhere, already?” The world misses him as much as we do. It misses grand leadership as much as we do.

*   *   *

In Prague they named a street for him. In London, on the Fourth of July, 235th birthday of the United States, they unveiled a statue in front of the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Two other presidents grace that square: a heroic FDR in flowing cape, and a steely-eyed Eisenhower in army uniform. The day was nonpartisan, non-narrow. A great American was being justly honored by his British friends who, as Foreign Secretary William Hague said, “will never forget” him. A statue, he said, is not just a remembrance. With statues we come “face to face” with the great men and women of the past, and ponder their greatness.

That night, members of Parliament gathered for a formal dinner in London’s magnificent Guildhall. There were speeches, some beautiful. Among the packed tables there was a former member of Mrs. Thatcher’s cabinet, who in his day had taken heavy blows for his unrepentant conservatism. Now, white-haired, he listened to the speeches, as across the room a woman watching him remembered the greatest speech in English history: “Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot/ But he’ll remember with advantages/ What feats he did that day.”

And so Mr. Reagan’s centennial nears its close. We remember him—and Thatcher, and John Paul—for many reasons. To reinforce and reinspire. To keep fresh our knowledge that history can be made better. To be loyal to the truth.

And another reason. That night in conversation, former Prime Minister John Major asked how our teaching of history was in America. Not good, I said. He said in Britain it was the same, and it concerned him. We were across from a huge, heroic sculpture of the Duke of Wellington. If we don’t teach who he was and what he did, we will not make any more Wellingtons. Glory lives only when you pass it on.

The GOP field is sorting itself out, which is to be expected. What’s surprising is that so are Republican voters. The early rise of Mitt Romney, the second-place showing of Jon Huntsman (behind Ron Paul) at the recent Republican Leadership Conference, and a Gallup poll last week saying 50% of Republicans and independents who lean Republican favor the candidate with the best chance of beating President Obama, suggests GOP voters on the ground don’t want to pick anyone the moderate Democrat down the block wouldn’t support.

It’s still early, but that makes it even more interesting. It’s at this point in a presidential race that obstreperous and passionate movements and candidacies would normally be rising. It’s later and with time that a certain soberness, a certain inherent moderation normally take hold. But Republicans at the moment seem prematurely settled, even as they watch, judge and figure out whom to support.

A quick read on a few in the field:

Mitt Romney really is the kind of candidate Republicans imagine centrists would like. He looks the part, sounds the part, has experience in the world and government. Four years ago he was new and controversial. Now he’s next in line and kind of old shoe. But the question that dogged him in 2008 hasn’t gone away: Does he have philosophical fire inside him, or only personal destiny fire? If the latter, would he do what needs doing as president? Ronald Reagan was mild and attractive as a person and candidate and never claimed to be a radical, but when he got into office at a crucial moment, he did some radical things that turned out to be the right things. He had philosophical fire, which is important.

Michele Bachmann’s got fire, a libertarian conservative who means it. She broke through in New Hampshire because she wasn’t Cable Bachmann—skittery, combative—but Candidate Bachmann, sincere and accomplished. Does she have the weight and ballast to see it all the way through? Is she a serious person or just a dramatic one who rouses a portion of the base? Will America be drawn to her brand of conservatism?

Tim Pawlenty is earnest, nice, Midwestern. Interestingly, no one doubts his grounding in political thought, or his accomplishments, and yet he’s coming across as weak. Does he want this thing? Is he the right size?

Newt Gingrich? That didn’t work. Good thing voters found out early, not late.

Herman Cain always gets applause in GOP debates because everyone likes him. The media suspect the reason is that he’s handy evidence Republicans aren’t racist. But Republicans like him because they like him.

A number of prominent conservatives are black, and they are admired because they all swam upstream, with no establishment to help them. They weren’t born into it, they had to struggle through to it. And when they arrived they were often greeted awkwardly. They were like the old working-class ethnic Democrats who joined the Republican Party in the 1970s and ‘80s and were greeted by Mrs. Waffington Wafferthird IV: “Your name is Kowalski? We had a plumber named Kowalski at Little Compton, he did wonderful work!” Yeah. Well, glad the pipes work.

It’s been a generation or two since the party was like that, and now old Mrs. Wafferthird is likely to introduce herself with theatricality and flair. “Darling, I’m the antique old stereotype we all spoof. I even spoof myself. Have a Ritz cracker.” And we all feel protective of her because she’s part of a dying wave, a great, three-centuries-long wave.

Anyway Republicans like Mr. Cain because he’s plain-spoken and humorous, and he made some money in America. He’s the American dream. But is he a president? No, he’s a businessman. It’s 2011 and he doesn’t know his own opinion on Afghanistan.

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And now Jon Huntsman. The former Utah governor and ambassador to China announced in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park on Tuesday. I went to see a Huntsman crowd, to find out who they are and why they support him. But there was no Huntsman crowd, only a hunk of milling media. Interspersed among them were perhaps a hundred individuals who got themselves there to watch and show support. When asked why they were for him, they said words like “balance,” “principles” and “expanding the umbrella.”

Two weeks ago at a Reuters lunch in Manhattan, Mr. Huntsman appeared with Henry Kissinger to talk about the latter’s new book, “On China.” As Mr. Huntsman talked—when Mr. Kissinger couldn’t remember a particular word in Chinese, Mr. Huntsman smoothly supplied it—two journalists at a table to the side came to the same conclusion at almost the same moment: This isn’t a president, this is a secretary of state. Huntsman—well-tailored, willowy, gray-haired, cerebral-looking—comes alive when talking about Asia. You imagine him in striped pants and morning coat, like Cordell Hull. Yet he’s from Utah, has seven kids, is Mormon, has lowered taxes and balanced budgets. His work in the Obama administration is supposed to be a negative with Republican voters, but it won’t be: It’s China, the big country now always in the back of the American mind. He speaks two Chinese dialects. That sounds useful.

What part of the GOP base would be Mr. Huntsman’s natural constituency? Here political professionals scratch their heads.

Maybe he’s going for moderate conservatives and Republicans who have Romney Reluctance, who just can’t get to Mitt-land, or not yet. Maybe he’s trying to take the vote of conservatives who think deep down Romney doesn’t have a deep down. He’s saying, “I’m like Romney but I have deep beliefs and a particular expertise: I won two terms as a governor, not one, and was a major ambassador. I’m cool, and my hair is just as presidential.”

Mr. Huntsman’s call, in his announcement speech, for more civility, was both appropriate and shrewd. Appropriate because there’s nothing wrong with adding a bit of grace to the political moment. There’s too much hate out there and too many people making a living peddling resentment. Shrewd because it pre-emptively forgives, or retroactively explains, his past friendliness to and support of Mr. Obama. He can flick off criticisms with a sad shake of the head: “That’s the kind of thing I was talking about when I asked for a higher tone.”

His support for gay civil unions is supposedly controversial, but is it? It is a compromise position, and the tea party won’t be made unhappy by it: Social issues are not their focus. Mitch Daniels was knocked for calling for a social issues truce some months ago, but only because he put a name on what is happening anyway. There is an informal truce on social issues in the GOP, but no one likes hearing potential leaders mention it, because then the other leaders have to take a side. But almost everyone in the party is focused now on economic issues, in part because a strong economy fosters everything else, including American compassion. Six months ago a profoundly pro-life U.S. senator who now speaks more on economic issues was asked how he explains the shift in emphasis to his pro-life allies. “I tell them unless we turn things around, no one’s going to be able to have babies.”

First impressions from a presidential debate are always about how things look, how people come across. Tim Pawlenty doesn’t really assert, he natters. Rick Santorum is earnest, Michelle Bachmann serious. Mitt Romney knows how he looks in every camera shot from every angle: He is a master of the cutaway shot, when the camera isn’t on him. He keeps his posture and maintains a kindly smile, as if he’s pleased the other candidates are sharing their nice little thoughts.

But the GOP debate in New Hampshire was a big success in two ways. First, there was no obvious candidate from Crazytown, which was a boon to the party’s reputation and brand, and which may help it more easily shake itself out and pick an electable candidate. In a functionally 50-50 nation and in a campaign in which Democrats hope to spend a billion dollars, this could turn into a significant benefit. Second, and more important, the foreign-policy discussion, though limited, was marked by a new sobriety. There was no spirit of adventurism, there were no burly promises of victories around the corner and lights at the ends of tunnels. It was more muted than that, more realistic, different in tone and tenor from four and eight years ago. This signaled a real shift, and a heartening one.

No one was dreamy. Those on the stage staked a claim in the reality-based community. Mitt Romney, asked if it’s time to bring our combat troops home from Afghanistan, said yes, “as soon as we possibly can.” Then, more interestingly, he offered, “I think we’ve learned some important lessons in our experience in Afghanistan. . . . We’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.”

The last sentence is so thumpingly obvious that Mr. Romney was soon under pressure to recant, or rather clarify.

Every candidate who was asked took issue with U.S. involvement in Libya. Michele Bachmann asserted no “American interests” were at stake: “We were not attacked. We were not threatened with attack.” Newt Gingrich spoke of “fundamentally . . . reassessing our entire strategy in the region.” Ron Paul said we should get our troops home. Tim Pawlenty nattered on about something, but even he didn’t take an opportunity to ask for patience on Afghanistan. John Huntsman, who was not announced and not present at the debate, told CNN he has doubts about the cost of Afghanistan and the likelihood of U.S. success there.

All of this had the sound of the Republican Party inching its way back from 10 years of un-Republican behavior, from a kind of bullying dreaminess about the world: “Everyone wants to be like us.” Actually, everyone doesn’t. There are days when even we, with our political paralysis, financial collapse and coarse culture, don’t want to be like us.

Does this suggest a return of isolationism, as some critics have said? No, and not necessarily by any means. Isolationists think they can be isolated, which is just another form of romanticism and unreality. We live in the world. We will never again be apart from it; trade and technology wouldn’t allow us to if we wanted to. We have real alliances and real foes. But there is little taste now for what is fast becoming an old vision that progress can be made and U.S. security enhanced through invasion, pacification and occupation. There is little taste for the idea that we can easily, or even arduously, force the complete cultural change of other hearts and other minds. Terrorism is a threat. There are many ways to fight it.

But the larger point is that sometimes parties step away from themselves, stop being what they are. The Democrats are doing it now, in their soggy interventionism in Libya. So it’s especially good to see the Republicans start to return to themselves, to their essential nature as a party, which was invented to be genially sober, like Lincoln, optimistic but not unrealistic, like Reagan, and accepting that life has limits and it’s not unpatriotic to say so.

A flurry of polls this week show the public is on the side of the new sobriety. CNN had 62% now opposing the war in Afghanistan, just 36% in favor. CBS News found 64% want the number of U.S. troops decreased, and 51% said the U.S. shouldn’t be in Afghanistan at all. A Washington Post/ABC News poll said 54% of respondents feel the war has not been worth fighting, and 73% said the U.S. should withdraw combat forces this summer. A Rasmussen survey found a combined 56% who said the U.S. should withdraw from Afghanistan immediately or on a firm timetable, up four points since March.

What has been behind decline in support for the war? The obvious. It has gone on almost 10 years. It is America’s longest war. We have been there longer than the Soviets were. No one in a position of authority credibly or coherently explains the path to victory, or even what victory would look like. Are we losing young men so that a year from now we can commence 10 years of peace talks with the Taliban? Toward what end? What will we be asking for, that they be nice?

America is now full of veterans of Afghanistan, and while many will agree with the original mission, or the current mission as they understand it, it is certain that at the American dinner table the cost, complexity and confusion of the effort are being discussed. And the killing of Osama bin Laden provided a psychic endpoint to the drama. The day we went into Afghanistan, we were trying to find him and kill him. Six weeks ago, we found him and killed him. All wars run on a great rush of feeling, of fervor. That feeling and fervor have on an essential level been satisfied.

But there’s something else, probably the most important fact of all.

We are as a nation, on paper, almost bankrupt. Or bankrupt, depending on how you judge. Among the Republican candidates for president, there is a growing awareness that America does not have a foreign policy unless we have the money to pay for it. We do not have an army unless we can fund it. We do not have diplomacy and a diplomatic structure without money. We do not have alliances and friendships sealed by aid without money. We do not go forward and impress the nations with our values, might and leadership without money.

We cannot lead, or even be an example, without money. And we are out of it. Therefore, reordering our financial life and seeing to our financial strength is the single most constructive thing we can do to create and maintain a sound U.S. foreign policy. If we want to be safe in the world, we must be sturdy at home.

That is why those inclined to take an unfriendly or competitive view toward us increasingly see us as a paper tiger. Because they hold our paper.

The problem with Afghanistan, and Iraq for that matter, is not only that after 10 years our efforts have turned out to be—polite word—inconclusive. We are spending money we don’t have for aims we cannot even articulate.

Of course he [ed – Anthony Weiner] should resign—or, better, and as a statement, the House should remove him. I speak as a conservative who wishes to conserve. If I were speaking as a Republican I’d say, “By all means keep him, let him taint all your efforts.”

But sometimes all of Washington has to put up its hand up like a traffic cop and say no. It has to say: That doesn’t go here, it’s not acceptable, it’s not among the normal human transgressions of back stairs, love affairs and the congressman on the take. This is decadence. It is pornography. We can’t let the world, and the young, know it’s “politically survivable.” Because that will hurt us, not him, and define us, not him. So: enough.

*   *   *

In other news, Mitt Romney had his first good week. It was startling. He stepped out from the blur. The other candidates now call him “the front runner.” By most standards he was the front runner months ago, but nobody talked about him. He didn’t live in the Republican imagination. It was “Will Mitch run?” and “You like Pawlenty?” Only seven minutes into the conversation would you get, “How will Romney do?” He was so ‘08, that disastrous year.

But this week he got three big boosts. He had a reasonable announcement speech followed by a lot of national interviews. Then the Washington Post poll: Mr. Romney leads President Obama. On top of that, the two most visible Republicans the past 10 days were Sarah Palin, on her magical mystery tour, and him. They got all the coverage, and for a moment it seemed like a two-person race. Meaning a lot of Republicans got to think, “Hmm, Palin or Romney—a trip to Crazytown or the man of sober mien.” That did not hurt him.

The financial reporting period ends June 30. Mr. Romney’s focused like a laser on getting the kind of numbers that will demoralize rivals and impress the media. Money leads to money. At a Manhattan fund raiser this week, an organizer said they raised about $200,000, not bad for an hour at the end of a long day of fund raising. The roughly 70 attendees were mostly men in suits. There was no vibration of “I’d walk on burning coals for this guy.” More an air of “This is a sound choice.” On the other hand, no one was distractedly checking his BlackBerry in the back of the room, as I saw once at a Giuliani event in 2008. He was talking, they were scrolling. That’s what we call “a sign.”

Mr. Romney’s emergence means a new phase in the primary contest begins. So some quick observations on the front runner. We’ll begin with shallowness and try to work our way up.

All candidates for president are network or local. Romney is a network anchorman—sleek, put together, the right hair, a look of dignity. He’s like Brian Williams. Some candidates are local anchormen—they’re working hard, they’re pros, but they lack the patina, the national sense. Reagan, Clinton, Obama—they were network. This has to do not only with persona, but with a perceived broadness of issues and competencies. It’s not decisive, and it can change—Harry Truman was local, and became network. But it probably helps Mr. Romney that he’s network.

His seamless happiness can be grating. People like to root for the little guy, and he’s never been the little guy. His family has never in his lifetime known financial ill fortune, and his personal wealth is of the self-made kind, the most grating because it means you can’t even patronize him. He has in him that way of people who are chipper about each day in large part because each day has been very nice to them. This makes some people want to punch him in the nose. I said once he’s like an account executive on “Mad Men,” stepping from the shower and asking George the valet to bring him the blue shirt with the white collar. But this year he looks slightly older, maybe wiser, maybe a little more frayed than in 2008. Which is good. Since 2008 everyone else is more frayed, too.

In ‘08, Romney’s brand was at odds with his stand. He looked and had the feel of a well-born Eastern moderate Republican. But he positioned and portrayed himself as grass-roots tea party. It was jarring, didn’t seem to fit, and contributed to the impression that he was an attractive lump of poll-tested packaging. He’s trying to get around this in two ways. First, he’s attempting to focus on economic issues, on which he has personal and professional credibility. Second, he’s trying to demonstrate authenticity by sticking to some stands unpopular with the base—global warming, health care.

The common wisdom has been that health care is the huge weak spot in his candidacy. Maybe, but maybe not. The base hates ObamaCare, as we know, and Mr. Romney devised a similar plan as governor of Massachusetts. But he can talk earnestly about it on the hustings until voters’ eyes glaze over and they plead to change the subject, which he will. And there are a lot of other subjects. If he gets through the primaries, his position on health care will become a plus: The Democrats this year will try to paint the Republican candidate as radical on health spending. It would be harder to do that to Mr. Romney.

Has enough time passed since his famous flip-flops on issues like abortion to make them old news? Four years ago it colored his candidacy. We’ll find out if people decide it’s yesterday’s story, and give him a second look.

The real problem for Romney is: Does he mean it? Is he serious when he takes a stand? Has he thought it through or merely adopted it? And there is of course religion. In a silly and baiting interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, Mr. Romney swatted away an insistence that he delve into Mormonism and, by implication, defend it. It was like seeing some Brit in 1960 trying to make John F. Kennedy explain and defend Catholicism. It’s not something we do in America. Because we still have a little class.

When Mr. Romney’s father, George, ran for the GOP nomination in 1968, his religion was not an issue. Forty years later, when his son first ran, it was. Has America grown more illiberal? Maybe not. In 1968, evangelical Christians voted in Democratic primaries, because they tended to be Democrats. By 1980, all that was changing: evangelicals went Republican with Reagan and never came back.

Catholics do not tend to take a harsh view of Mormonism, nor do mainstream Protestants. It is evangelical Christians who are most inclined not to approve. In a general election this would not make much difference: Evangelicals will not vote for Obama. But in the GOP primaries it could still hurt Mr. Romney. No one knows, because no one knows what kind of year this is. Maybe evangelicals will have seen enough of him not to mind; maybe the Obama presidency convinced them it’s not so important.

My own read is standard Catholic. Mormons have been, on balance, a deeply constructive force in American life, and it is absurd and ignorant not to support a political figure only because you do not prefer or identify with the theology of his church.

Really, grow up. Enough.

The debate in Washington is serious as a heart attack: whether the United States should raise its debt ceiling so it can borrow more money to stay afloat. The statutory ceiling on our national debt—our legal borrowing limit—is $14.3 trillion. That limit was reached, according to the Treasury Department, on May 16. Treasury says it can make do until early August, when the ceiling must be raised by $2.4 trillion.

Congressional Republicans have made their stand clear: They will agree to raise the limit only if it is accompanied by spending cuts or reforms.

The Democrats want to raise the ceiling, period.

The Republicans are being hard-line because of the base, and the base is hard-line for two reasons. First, we are in an unprecedented debt crisis. Second, the past 40 years have taught them that if dramatic action is not taken to stanch spending, Congress will spend more. Something is needed to shock the system.

If Republicans can get the White House to cut where the money is—Medicare—then Medicare, and all controversy over the Ryan plan, will be taken off the table as an issue in the 2012 election. This would not be good for Democrats. Democrats in turn would likely make some cuts in spending if Republicans agree to some tax increases. But that would take a great Republican issue off the table.

This week the House voted 318-97 against raising the ceiling without cutting. The president and a group of House Republicans met this week to talk about the apparent impasse. There is a chance they won’t come to any agreement by August.

If no agreement is reached, what happens? Nobody knows, because it’s never happened before. But economists warn: The dollar could crash, interest rates spike, equity markets melt. Foreign investors would lose confidence that America is worth risking their money and that Washington is able to face and handle a crisis.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder has noted in these pages that the bills for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and interest on the national debt amount to about two-thirds of all federal outlays. “At some point [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers’ pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government?”

All of this sounds fairly catastrophic, especially considering this week’s evidence that America’s economic recovery is stalled. Housing prices are down, job creation weak, manufacturing growth slowed, factory activity down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 280 points on Wednesday.

So this would seem to be a bad time to be playing chicken.

Democrats think if push comes to shove and an agreement is not reached, public opinion will go against the Republicans. This may be true. Republicans think if agreement is not reached, responsibility will redound on the president. They may be true too.

But again, this isn’t a good time to play Let’s Find Out.

Democrats are right that the debt ceiling must be raised. Republicans are right that the decision to raise the debt ceiling must be accompanied by reforms or cuts to spending that equal or exceed the amount of the raise, $2.4 trillion. Here’s why.

Default is unthinkable. We are the United States of America, and we pay our bills.

Raising the ceiling without attempting to control spending is a depressing and wearying thought. It will avert crisis, yes, but there would be no gain in it beyond that. It would demonstrate to the world that we are not capable of taking necessary steps to dig our way out of the spending mess. It would mean things just continue as they are.

But cutting and reforming—showing we can make tough decisions in a crisis—will reassure the world, and our creditors. It will increase faith in the United States, and increase an American sense of well being: “We can do this, we can make it better.” It would be very good to leave the world saying, “My God, the Americans are still competent.”

Washington should forget taxes for now—fight that out later. The polls are all over the place, and no feasible amount of new revenue is going to make a difference. Cutting is what matters. And the president could play it so that he doesn’t lose. A crisis would have been averted—on his watch. He could claim to have been conciliatory, looking out for the national interest. The left won’t like it, but the center will. And he will have shown he can work closely and in good faith with Republicans, who control the House.

On that, a word. Talks on the debt ceiling will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it’s always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can’t fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn’t bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism—“Come on guys, we have to save this thing”—ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South. He was surrounded by them, and he wasn’t by nature an ideologue.

He absorbed not the biases of his region but of his generation and his education (Ivy League). He had ambition: Liberalism was rising and he’d rise with it. And on the signal issues of his youth, Vietnam and race, he thought the Democrats of the 1970s were right. But that didn’t mean he didn’t understand and feel some sympathy for conservatives, and as a political practitioner he had a certain sympathy for the predicaments of his fellow pols. That’s why he could play ball with Newt Gingrich and the class of 1994: because he didn’t quite hate everything they stood for. He had a saving ambivalence.

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish.

He doesn’t know how to confuse his foes with “outreach,” with phone calls, jokes, affection. He doesn’t leave them saying, as Reagan did, “I just can’t help it, I like the guy.” And because he can’t confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.

This isn’t good, and has had an impact on the president’s contacts with Republicans. And it’s added an edge to an emerging campaign theme among them. Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce’s observation that all presidents have a sentence: “He fought to hold the union together and end slavery.” “He brought America through economic collapse and a world war.” You didn’t have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn’t understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren’t his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.

We’re at a funny place. The American establishment has finally come around, in unison, to admitting that America is in crisis, that our debt actually threatens our ability to endure, that if we don’t make progress on this, we are going to near our endpoint as a nation. I am struck very recently by the number of leaders in American business, politics and journalism who now get a certain faraway look at the end of an evening or a meal and say, “It’s worse than people think, you know.” The debt crisis in Europe is not easing but worsening, the U.S. bond markets could bail tomorrow, the culture of Washington will kill any serious attempts at reform . . .

The American establishment, on both sides of the political divide, is admitting as never before that we are in an existential challenge. And this is progress. It was not always so! It wasn’t so two years ago.

That’s one takeaway from this week’s Peterson Foundation fiscal summit in Washington. Bill Clinton spoke of “permanent structural deficits” and warned that “arithmetic still matters.” We must focus on entitlement spending, he said, “for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: That’s where the money is.” Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Mark Warner: “Congress is Thelma and Louise in that car headed for the cliff.” Obama administration economic adviser Gene Sperling—more on him in a minute—called for “serious discussion” of the specifics of a debt-reducing plan.

Republicans were on the same page. No one said, “We can grow our way out of this thing,” or “The negative effects of chronic debt are exaggerated, let’s look at the positive side.” They would have been laughed out of the room.

The people, of course, saw the crisis coming before most politicians did, and every elected official in Washington is now quick to preface interviews with, “The people were ahead of us on this.” They say this with an air of discovery, the little Sherlocks. The people were ahead of them. Public concern began to deepen in the polls after the introduction of the new spending bills that followed the crash of 2008. Voter concern was made vivid in the 2009 and 2010 elections, when centrists voted like old-style Republicans who worried about red ink.

Elected officials began to get the message. Now they’ve got it. Our spending and debt are—and it is interesting that this is the first great buzzword of the new decade—“unsustainable.”

But here’s how we’re in a funny place. The great question now is whether the people who alerted the establishment to the crisis will trust that establishment to deal with it. The people have been like Paul Revere riding through the night warning, “The bankruptcy is coming!” It’s unclear whether they’ll now trust the politicians to take the right action.

There are many reasons the public might resist Washington’s prescriptions, and we know what they are. There are data demonstrating that people like government programs but not government costs. Many people feel they’ve personally played by all the rules and will reject any specific cuts or taxes that will put new burdens on them.

There’s also this. The very politicians who are trying to get us out of the mess are the politicians who got us into the mess. Why would anyone trust them? As Alan Simpson admitted, for generations politicians “were told to go to Washington and bring home the bacon. Go get the money!” Now they must change: “You can’t bring home the bacon anymore, because the pig is dead.”

Some of the politicians talking about how to stop the spending crisis are the same politicians who, for many years, said there was no crisis. They’re like forest creatures who denied there was a fire when everyone else could smell the smoke and hear the crackle. Then the flames roar in, and the politicians say, “Follow me, I know the path out of the blaze!” It will be hard for them to win the trust that will get the American people to back a path out and through.

Rep. Paul Ryan was at the summit, soldiering on. His main problem on Medicare is that people fear the complexities and demands of a new delivery system.

People who draw up legislation, people capable of mastering the facts of the huge and complicated federal budget, often think other people are just like them. It’s almost sweet. But normal people don’t wear green eyeshades. Republicans think people will say, when presented with new options for coverage, “Oh good, another way to express my freedom! I can study health insurance now and get a policy that will benefit not only me but our long-term solvency!” But normal people are more likely to sit slouched at the kitchen table with their head in their hands. “Oh no, another big decision, another headache, 50 calls to an insurance company, another go-round with the passive-aggressive phone answerer who, even though she’s never met me, calls me Freddy as she puts me on hold.”

Republicans believe government gives insufficient respect to the ability of people to decide things for themselves, and that’s true. But it’s also true that normal humans don’t relish making informed decisions about things they’re not sure of, and that carry big personal implications.

Here’s the great thing about Medicare: You turn 65 and it’s there. They give you a card and the nurse takes it.

Supporters of Mr. Ryan’s Medicare plan must talk very specifically about how this would all work, and why it would make your life better, not worse. They also have to make two things clearer. One is that if nothing is done to change Medicare, the system will collapse. You’ll give the card to the nurse and she’ll laugh: “We don’t take that anymore.” This already happens in doctors offices. Without reform it will happen more often.

Democrats, on the other hand, should be forced to answer a question. If you oppose the highly specific Ryan plan, fine, but tell us your specific proposal. How will you save Medicare? Will you let it die?

If Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling’s presentation at the summit was indicative of White House strategy, then we’re in trouble. Because that strategy comes down to windy and manipulative statements about how “we’re all in this together” but GOP proposals “will lead to millions of children . . . losing their coverage.” He added: “We are not criticizing their plan, we are explaining it.”

It is a long time since I’ve seen such transparent demagoguery, such determined dodging. It’s obvious the White House political plan for 2012 is this: The Democrats will call for fiscal discipline and offer no specifics or good-faith starting points. They will leave the Republicans to be specific, and then let them be hanged with their candor. Democrats will speak not of what they’ll do but only of what they would never do, such as throw grandma out in the snow. In honeyed tones, Mr. Sperling said both parties should “hold hands and jump together,” like Butch and Sundance. But it was clear Sundance was going to stop at the edge of the cliff and hope Butch gets broken on the rocks.