Peggy Noonan

‘The people have spoken, the bastards.” That would be how Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill are feeling. The last two years of their leadership have been rebuffed. The question for the Democratic Party: Was it worth it? Was it worth following the president and the speaker in their mad pursuit of liberal legislation the country would not, could not, like? And what will you do now? Which path will you take?

The Republicans saw their own establishment firmly, sharply put down. The question for them: What will you do to show yourselves worthy of the bounty?

The Republicans won big, but both parties return to Washington chastened. Good.

Two small points on the election’s atmospherics that carry implications for the future. The first is that negative ads became boring, unpersuasive. Forty years ago they were new, exciting in a sort of prurient way. Now voters take for granted that politicians are no good, and such ads are just more polluted water going over the waterfall. The biggest long-term loser: liberalism. If all pols are sleazoid crooks, then why would people want to give them more governmental power to order our lives? The implicit message of two generations of negative ads: Vote conservative, limit the reach of the thieves.

The second, not much noticed, is that all candidates must assume now that they are being taped, wherever they are, including private conversations. Sharron Angle was taped in a private meeting with a potential supporter, who leaked it to the press, to her embarrassment. The taper/leaker was a sleaze and a weasel—a sleazel—but candidates can no longer ever assume they are speaking in confidence; they have to assume even aides and supporters are wired. (Go reread “Game Change” and wonder if some of the conversations reported there were taped.) The zone of privacy just got smaller, and the possibility of blackmail, a perennial unseen force in politics, wider. Prediction: this fact will, at some point in 2012, cause an uproar.

On to the aftermath of the election. On Wednesday President Obama gave a news conference to share his thoughts. Viewers would have found it disappointing if there had been any viewers. The president is speaking, in effect, to an empty room. From my notes five minutes in: “This wet blanket, this occupier of the least interesting corner of the faculty lounge, this joy-free zone, this inert gas.” By the end I was certain he will never produce a successful stimulus because he is a human depression.

Actually I thought the worst thing you can say about a president: that he won’t even make a good former president.

His detachment is so great, it is even from himself. As he spoke, he seemed to be narrating from a remove. It was like hearing the audiobook of Volume I of his presidential memoirs. “Obama was frustrated. He honestly didn’t understand what the country was doing. It was as if they had compulsive hand-washing disorder. In ’08 they washed off Bush. Now they’re washing off Obama. There he is, swirling down the drain! It’s all too dramatic, too polar. The morning after the election it occurred to him: maybe he should take strong action. Maybe he should fire America! They did well in 2008, but since then they’ve been slipping. They weren’t giving him the followership he needed. But that wouldn’t work, they’d only complain. He had to keep his cool. His aides kept telling him, ‘Show humility.’ But they never told him what humility looked like. What was he supposed to do, burst into tears and say hit me? Not knowing how to feel humility or therefore show humility he decided to announce humility: He found the election ‘humbling,’ he said.”

What Democrats have to learn from this election: Cut loose from that. Join with Republicans where you can, create legislation together, send the bill to the White House, see what happens. Even as the Republicans have succeeded in getting out from under George W. Bush, this is your chance to get out from under Mr. Obama, and possibly prosper in 2012 whatever happens to him.

What the tea party, by which I mean members and sympathizers, has to learn from 2010 is this: Not only the message is important but the messenger.

Even in a perfect political environment, those candidates who were conservative but seemed strange, or unprofessional, or not fully qualified, or like empty bags skittering along the street, did not fare well. The tea party provided the fire and passion of the election, and helped produce major wins—Marco Rubio by 19 points! But in the future the tea party is going to have to ask itself: is this candidate electable? Will he pass muster with those who may not themselves be deeply political but who hold certain expectations as to the dignity and stature required of those who hold office?

This is the key question the tea party will face in 2012. And it will be hard to answer it, because the tea party doesn’t have leaders or conventions, so the answer will have to bubble up from a thousand groups, from 10,000leaders.

Electable doesn’t mean not-conservative. Electable means mature, accomplished, stable—and able to persuade.

Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, “an actor.” She was defending her form of policical celebrity—reality show, “Dancing With the Stars,” etc. This is how she did it: “Wasn’t Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn’t he in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor.”

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I’ll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not “He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,” though that is true. The point is that Reagan’s career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn’t in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn’t in search of fame; he’d already lived a life, he was already well known, he’d accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can’t just bully them, you can’t just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

Americans don’t want, as their representatives, people who seem empty or crazy. They’ll vote no on that.

It’s not just the message, it’s the messenger.

Well, I think we know where this one’s going. The polls came like waves this week. Independents breaking hard for the GOP, those making under $50,000 going Republican, the party has a 20% lead among college graduates. Gallup says 2010 is looking better than the year of the last great sweep, with 55% of respondents now saying they are Republican or lean Republican. It was 49% in 1994. RealClearPolitics has 222 House seats going to the Republicans, 175 to Democrats, and 38 toss-ups, of which 36 are currently held by the Democrats. The president’s approval numbers remain well below 50%, and Congress’s disapproval numbers above 70%.

Let’s say the polls are pretty correct. If they are, two big facts present themselves. One is that the Obama coalition broke under pressure. We’ll see if they regroup. America turns on a dime, we’re in a time of quick and constant change. But Barack Obama’s lines have been broken.

On the other side, not only is a big Republican wave coming, but a rough coalition seems to be forming. It is the coalition that did not come together in 2006 to save Congress for the GOP, and did not come together in ‘08 to elect John McCain. The tea party saved the Republican Party by, among other things, re-energizing it. But it’s also becoming clear the tea party did so without turning off the center.

This is news. Six months ago the common wisdom was that the tea party was going to scare independent voters and make them run screaming from the tent. “There was an awful man in an Uncle Sam hat and a woman talking about repealing some amendment. I can’t take it, Harry!”

But the center doesn’t appear to be scared. Maybe it doesn’t scare easy. Maybe getting scared is what happens next time, not this time. Or, my hunch, maybe the center, some of whose members have expressed a certain antipathy or standoffishness toward the tea party, simply doesn’t care that it feels a certain antipathy or standoffishness. Because such feelings are beside the point right now, a self-indulgence suited to less crisis-laden times. And we are in crisis. Our spending is ruinous, the demands of government are too great. It doesn’t matter if you like the style of those who want to turn it around, join them and try to turn it around. One of the things Rep. Paul Ryan says has seeped into the electorate: We have only a short time to fix things, we have to move now.

What’s rising now on the Republican side is big but not fully known and will evolve, will change itself and direct itself and maybe even settle some old issues as it goes forward in the next few years. It promises to be turbulent, and rich in meaning.

We’ll know in the early hours next Wednesday how it all turned out. But here is one way you’ll know it’s huge: Anna Little wins in New Jersey. If she wins it means the Republican wave swept all before it.

Not that she’s expected to. She’s running for Congress in the Jersey Shore’s Sixth Congressional District, which went for Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain 60% to 38%. She’s the Republican mayor of Highlands, population 5,000, up against incumbent Frank Pallone, an 11-term Democratic veteran who won in 2008 by 35 points. A Monmouth University poll has her down seven points. On the bright side, numbers guru Nate Silver just increased her chances of winning from 2% to 5%, and Charlie Cook changed the listing of the race from safe Democrat to likely Democrat.

Ms. Little takes it in stride. She says she’s not looking at Obama’s numbers. “I’m looking at Chris Christie’s numbers.” The Republican governor carried the district by 8% last November.

This week, at Pier Village in Long Branch, Ms. Little called a last-minute rally. Fifty or 60 people showed up, pretty good for a rainy Wednesday at 11 a.m. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele came through town to do the event with her. He represents the dreaded establishment, but they cheered him merrily.

Mr. Steele said, “Who you gonna fire?” The crowd yelled, “Nancy Pelosi!” “Who you gonna hire?” “Anna Little!”

When Ms. Little spoke the people in front had to lower their signs. She’s 4-foot-11½. She said, “It is my honor to be part of your grass-roots movement.” She said, “I’m gonna bring the Jersey shore to the Washington Beltway to straighten them out.” This got cheers. “A Jersey girl can take a California girl any day.” That got cheers too.

I talked to a Little supporter named Lois Pongo. The tea party and the Republican establishment are supposed to be at war, I said. No, she said, they’re working together. “We need to get into a place of cooperation. It can’t be we-they. The party has structure, knowledge, experience. The tea party has principles—not just the principles but the passion to restore our country.”

Ms. Little is confident of victory. She believes no one understands the mood of the voters this year: “No one’s noticed what’s going on.” The Democrats are “not in line with the people.” The No. 1 issues: jobs and the economy. After that, health care. “You have government and insurance companies together directing what kind of insurance must be purchased by an individual or employer.” Her opponent, as head of a House subcommittee on health care, was a major supporter of ObamaCare. It caused tumultuous town-hall meetings in August 2009.

“I stand for private-sector job creation and economic growth,” Ms. Little says. “Get government out of the way. Individual liberty and freedom. A right to life that includes the right to direct your health care.”

Her campaign is a shoestring operation. She’s got four pickup trucks that tour around with her signs. She calls it “The Lawrence Welk Caravan: Anna 1, Anna 2, Anna 3 and Anna 4.” By the end of the campaign, she says, she and her volunteers will have knocked on 100,000 doors. She puts the figure at 90,059 as of Tuesday night.

In January 2010, she says, local tea-party leaders came to her and asked her to run for Congress as an independent. She said no. “It’s hard for an independent to win. It solidifies the position of the incumbent.” They asked her to run as a Republican. She agreed. But what if party leaders don’t pick you, they asked. She said she’d run in the primary, “on behalf of the grass-roots.”

Republican leaders did not choose her. So she ran for the GOP nomination against their candidate, a wealthy party contributor who was part of the organization, glamorous to the point of Palinesque, and self-funding. Ms. Little, with no money, won by 84 votes of 13,524 cast.

How did she do it? “I went door to door,” she said.

She agrees there is no civil war in the party—yet. All people want are solutions to our problems. “They don’t care who does it. They are happy to be in the Republican Party as long as it does not compromise its principles. . . . They will hug me and kiss me now, but they’ll be on top of me when it comes time for me to vote and they will hold my feet to the fire.”

She was asked if they call her the Little Engine That Could. “No,” she said. “They call me the Little Engine That Will.”

Chile! Viva Chile! If I had your flag, I would wave it today from the roof of my building, and watch my New York neighbors smile, nod and wave as they walked by. What a thing Chile has done. They say on TV, “Chile needed this.” But the world needed it. And the world knew it: That’s why they watched, a billion of them, as the men came out of the mine.

Why did the world need it? Because the saving of those men gave us something we don’t see enough, a brilliant example of human excellence—of cohesion, of united and committed action, of planning and execution, of caring. They used the human brain and spirit to save life. All we get all day, every day is scandal. But this inspired.

Viva Chile. They left no man behind. That is what our U.S. Army Rangers say, and our Marines: We leave no man behind. It has a meaning, this military motto, this way of operating. It means you are not alone, you are part of something. Your brothers are with you, here they come. Chile, in leaving no man behind, in insisting that the San José mine was a disaster area but not a tomb, showed itself to be a huge example of that little thing that is at the core of every society: a fully functioning family. A cohering unit that can make its way through the world.

“Viva Chile.” That is what they all said, one way or another, as they came out of the capsule, which was nicknamed the Phoenix. They could have nicknamed it the Lazarus, for those risen from the dead. Each one of the miners, in the 10 weeks they spent a half-mile deep in the Atacama Desert, would have known the odds. For two weeks, nobody even knew they were alive. Then this week there they were, one by one, returning to the surface. They must have thought, “Chile, you did not forget us. Chile, you could have said ‘An accident, a tragedy, the men are dead, let the men die.’ But you did not let the men die.” What a thing to know about your country.

Viva Chile. So many speak of faith but those miners, they had faith. A miner’s relative, as the men began to come up: “It is a miracle from God.” A miner got out of the capsule and got on his knees in front of the nation, saying prayers you know he promised, at the bottom of the mine, he would say, crossing himself twice, and holding up his arms in gratitude, surrender and awe. A miner, after he walked out of the capsule, described his personal experience: “I met God. I met the devil. God won.”

So many nations and leaders have grown gifted at talk. Or at least they talk a lot. News talk, politics talk, spin talk, selling talk: There are nations, and we at our worst are sometimes among them, whose biggest export seems to be chatter. But Chile this week moved the world not by talking but by doing, not by mouthing sympathy for the miners, but by saving them. The whole country—the engineers and technicians, the president, the government, the rescue workers, other miners, medics—set itself to doing something hard, specific, physical, demanding of commitment, precision and expertise. And they did it. Homer Hickman, the coal miner’s son turned rocket engineer who was the subject of the 1999 film “October Sky,” said Wednesday on MSNBC that it was “like a NASA mission.” Organized, thought through, “staying on the time line, sequential thinking.” “This is pretty marvelous,” he said. “This is Chile’s moon landing,” said an NBC News reporter.

Technology was used capably, creatively, and as a force for good. It has not everywhere been used so successfully in the recent past, another reason the world needed to see this. Last summer Americans watched professionals and the government seem helpless to stop the Gulf oil spill, a disaster every bit as predictable as a mine cave-in. For months we watched on TV the spewing of the oil into the sea. In Chile, the opposite. They showed live video of the rescue workers down in the shaft, getting the miners into the Phoenix. Our video said: Something is wrong here. Theirs said: Something is working here.

A government of a mature and complex democracy proved itself capable and competent. This was heartening and surprising. Governments are charged with doing certain vital and necessary things, but they are overburdened, distracted, so we no longer expect them to do them well. President Sebastián Piñera, in office five months when the mine caved in, saw the situation for what it was. Thirty three men in a hole in the ground, in a mine that probably shouldn’t have been open. A disaster, a nation riveted.

What do you do? You throw yourself at the problem. You direct your government: This is the thing we do now. You say, “We will get the men.” You put your entire persona behind it, you put it all on the line, you gamble that your nation can do it. You trust your nation to do it. You do whatever possible to see your nation does it. And the day the rescues are to begin, you don’t show up and wring your hands so people can say “Ah, he knew it might not work, he was not unrealistic, he was telling us not to get our hopes up.” No, you stand there smiling with joy because you know it will work, you know your people will come through, you have utmost confidence. And so you go and radiate your joy from the first moment the rescue began and the first man came out straight through to the last man coming out. You stand. You stay.

It was the opposite of the governor of Louisiana during Katrina, projecting helplessness and loserdom, or the president flying over the storm, or the mayor holing up in a motel deciding this might be a good time for a breakdown. This was someone taking responsibility.

The event transcended class differences, social barriers, regional divides. The entire nation—rich, poor, all colors and ages—was united. Scientists and engineers gave everything to save men who’d lived rough, working-class lives. “Every one of them who came up was treated like the first one,” said a reporter on MSNBC.

What does it do to the children of a nation to see that? Everyone from Chile will be proud as they go through the world. “You saved the miners.” Chilean children will know, “We are the kind of people who get them out alive. We made up our mind to do it and we did.”

What a transformative event this is going to be for that nation.

*   *   *

A closing note, another contrast. President Obama this week told the New York Times, speaking of his first two years, that he realized too late “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” He’s helpless in the face of environmental impact statement law. But every law, even those, can be changed if you have the vision, will, instinct and guts to do it, if you start early, if you’re not distracted by other pursuits.

“Shovel ready.” Chile just proved, in the profoundest sense, it is exactly that. And in doing so, it moved the rough heart of the world.

If you write a column, you get a lot of email. Sometimes, especially in a political season, it’s possible to discern from it certain emerging themes—the comeback of old convictions, for instance, or the rise of new concerns. Let me tell you something I’m hearing, in different ways and different words. The coming rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America’s future. It’s also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.

This is part of what’s driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.

The most vivid illustration of the fear comes, actually, from another country, Greece, and is brilliantly limned by Michael Lewis in October’s Vanity Fair. In “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” he outlines Greece’s economic catastrophe. It is a bankrupt nation, its debt, or rather the amount of debt that has so far been unearthed and revealed, coming to “more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek.” Over decades the Greeks turned their government “into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums” and gave “as many citizens as possible a whack at it.” The average government job pays almost three times as much as the average private-sector job. The retirement age for “arduous” jobs, including hairdressers, radio announcers and musicians, is 55 for men and 50 for women. After that, a generous pension. The tax system has disintegrated. It is a welfare state with a cash economy.

Much of this is well known, though it is beautifully stated. But all of it, Mr. Lewis asserts, has badly damaged the Greek character. “It is simply assumed . . . that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. . . . Government officials are assumed to steal.” Tax fraud is rampant. Everyone cheats. “It’s become a cultural trait,” a tax collector tells him.

Mr. Lewis: “The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible.”

Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole.

And what I get from my mail is a kind of soft echo of this. America is not Greece and knows it’s not Greece, but there is a growing sense—I should say fear—that the weighty, mighty, imposing American government itself, whether it meant to or not, has for years been contributing to American behaviors that are neither culturally helpful nor, as we now all say, sustainable: a growing sense of entitlement, of dependency, of resentment and distrust, and an increasing suspicion that everyone else is gaming the system. “I got mine, you get yours.”

People, as we know, are imperfect. Governments, composed top to bottom of imperfect people wielding power, are very imperfect. There are of course a million examples, big and small, of how governments can damage the actual nature and character of the citizenry, and only because there was just a commercial on TV telling me to gamble will I mention the famous case of the state lotteries. Give government the right to reap revenues from the public desire to gamble, and you’ll soon have government doing something your humble local bookie never had the temerity to try: convince the people that gambling is a moral good. They promote it insistently on local television, undermining any remaining reserve among our citizens not to play the numbers, not to develop what can become an addiction. Our state government daily promotes what for 2,000 years was understood to be a vice. No bookie ever committed a crime that big.

Government not only can change the national character, it can bizarrely channel national energy. And this is another theme in my mailbox, the rebellion against what government increasingly forces us to become: a nation of accountants.

No matter what level of life in which you operate, you are likely overwhelmed by forms, by a blizzard of regulations, rules, new laws. This is not new, it’s just always getting worse. Priests are forced to be accountants now, and army officers, and dentists. The single most onerous part of ObamaCare is the tax change whereby spending $600 on goods or services will require a 1099 form. Economists will tell you of the financial cost of this, but I would argue that Paperwork Nation is utterly at odds with the American character.

Because Americans weren’t born to be accountants. It’s not in our DNA! We’re supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant—to be romantic about it, and why not—to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren’t meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren’t meant to wear green eyeshades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!

There is I think a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn’t a new rebellion—it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism—but it’s rising again.

For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, “the elites,” especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules, and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn’t have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.

Washington is now to some degree the focus of the same sort of profound resentment that Hollywood liberals inspired when they really mattered, or seemed really powerful. For decades they made films that were not helpful to our culture or society, that were full of violence and sick imagery. But they often brought their own children up more or less protected from the effects of the culture they created. Private schools, nannies, therapists, tutors. They bought their way out of the cultural mayhem to which they’d contributed. Their children were fine. Yours were on their own.

This is part of why people dislike “the elites” and why “the elites,” especially in Washington, must in turn be responsive, come awake, start to notice. People don’t like it when they fear you are subtly, day by day, year by year, changing the personality and character of their nation. They think, “You are ruining our country and insulating yourselves from the ruin. We hate you.” And this is understandable, yes?

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., I found a note prominently displayed in my hotel room warning of the possibility of “extreme weather” including “tornadic activity.” The clunky euphemism was no doubt meant to soften or obscure what they were obliged to communicate: There may be a tornado, look out.

That’s what’s going on nationally. Tornadoes are tearing up the political landscape.

Everyone talks about the tensions between the Republican establishment, such as it is, and the tea-party-leaning parts of its base. But are you looking at what’s happening with the Democrats?

Tensions between President Obama and his supporters tore into the open this week as never before, signifying a real and developing fracturing of his party. Mr. Obama, in an interview in Rolling Stone, aimed fire at those abandoning him: “It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election.” The Democratic base “sitting on their hands complaining” is “just irresponsible. . . . We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard—that’s what I said during the campaign. . . . But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

At first I thought this was another example of the president’s now-habitual political ineptness, his off-key-ness. You don’t diss people into voting for you, you can’t lecture them into love. The response from the left was fierce, unapologetic—and accusatory. Mr. Obama had let them down, he’d taken half measures. “Stop living in that bubble,” shot back an activist on cable. But Jane Hamsher of the leftist blog Firedoglake saw method, not madness. She described the president’s remarks as “hippie punching” and laid them to cynical strategy: “It’s about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election.” She said Mr. Obama’s comments themselves could “depress turnout.”

Take the blame? Disastrous? Setting up a narrative?

This isn’t the language of disagreement, the classic to-and-fro between a restive base and politicians who make compromises. This is the language of estrangement. It is the language of alienation.

There is a war beginning in the Democratic Party, and the president has lost control of his base.

The Democratic leadership in the House appears to have lost another kind of control, fleeing Washington without passing a federal budget or extending even part of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are due to expire on Jan. 1. Democrats hold a solid majority in the House. They have a hitherto-powerful speaker. And the decision to adjourn passed by only a single vote—that of Nancy Pelosi, who saw 39 Democrats join the Republicans in dissenting.

The Democratic Party right now is showing signs of coming apart under the pressure of the election and two years of an unpopular presidency. But it’s not a split in two, with the left versus the establishment. It’s more like a splintering, with left-leaning activists distancing themselves from the party’s politicians, and moderate politicians distancing themselves from Mr. Obama.

And part of what’s driving it is what is driving the evolution of the Republican Party. The Internet changed everything. Everyone has facts now, knows who voted how and why. New thought leaders spring up and lead in new directions. Total transparency leads to party fracturing. Information dings unity. We are in new territory.

Another tornado: The president’s influential counselor, David Axelrod, attempted this week to insinuate into the election what Democrats used to deride as “wedge issues.” In an interview he said abortion will “certainly be an issue,” for Democrats. It will be raised “across the country.”

This suggests a certain desperation. Whatever stand you take on the social issues, you have to be blind to think they will make a big difference this year. The issue this year is the size, role, weight and demands of government, and the public sense that its members selfishly look to their own needs and not those of the country. A GOP congressman told me this week that he very much disagrees with the characterization of tea party and Republican voters as enraged or livid. They are scared, he said. He has never, in two decades in politics, heard so many people tell him they are “scared,” frightened for their own futures and for the future of their country.

No one will get revved in the way Mr. Axelrod hopes who isn’t already a reliable Democratic vote. His raising of a wedge issue speaks not only of a certain cynicism but of what appears to be an endemic White House cluelessness.

Yet another tornado: The Democrats have begun what Grover Norquist predicted a month ago. They saved their money for the end of the campaign and have begun running negative ads. They are not speaking in support of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are avoiding the subject of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are focusing instead on accusations of personal scandal. Both parties have done this in the past, to their mutual shame. But this year, with some exceptions and for obvious reasons, it appears to be largely a Democratic game. At this point in history, with America teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, negative advertising is even more destructive, more actually wicked, than it was in the past.

Negative advertising tears everything down. It contributes to the cynicism of the populace, especially the young. It undermines the faith in government Democrats are always asking us to have, by undermining respect for those who govern, or who seek to. It wears everyone down. And in the long term, though this can never be quantified, it keeps from electoral politics untold numbers of citizens who could bring their gifts and guts to helping solve our problems. I will never forget the visionary real-world entrepreneur who sighed, when I once urged him to enter politics, “I’ve lived an imperfect life. They’d kill me.”

But let’s go to what is traditionally the only way journalists and political professionals judge such ads: Do they work? In the past they have. But here’s a hunch: This year they will not be so effective.

The primary reason is the severity of the moment. But another is that negative ads worked so well in the past. For a generation, the American people have been told their politicians are lowlifes. You know what they now think of them? They think they’re lowlifes! People don’t really expect high character from their political figures anymore. “Congressman Smith cheated on his wife.” That’s her problem. Cut my taxes.

Good practical advice on all this comes from Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who met this week in New York with conservative activists, journalists and historians. Our country is in real peril, he said, we have a short time to do big things to get it right. Republicans “need to campaign to govern, not merely to win.” If Democrats are “the worst, the most malevolent” in their campaigning, “don’t match ‘em, let ‘em.” Be better. Be serious about the issues at a serious time.

What appears to be coming is a Republican rout. The main reason is the growing connection between public desire on various issues and Republican stands on those issues. But another is what is happening among Democrats—the rise of a spirit of destruction, and the increasing fact of fractured unity.

All anyone in America who cares about politics was talking about this week was the searing encounter that captured, in a way that hasn’t been done before, the essence of the political moment we’re in. When 2010 is reviewed, it will be the clip producers pick to illustrate the president’s disastrous fall.

It is Monday, Sept. 20, the middle of the day, in Washington. CNBC is holding a town hall for the president. A woman stands—handsome, dignified, black, a person with presence. She looks as if she may be what she turns out to be, an Obama supporter who in 2008 put up street signs, passed out literature and tried to win over co-workers. As she later told the Washington Post, “I was thinking that the people who were against him and didn’t believe in his agenda were completely insane.”

The president looked relieved when she stood. Perhaps he thought she might lob a sympathetic question that would allow him to hit a reply out of the park. Instead, and in the nicest possible way, Velma Hart lobbed a hand grenade.

“I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m an American veteran, and I’m one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are.” She said, “The financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family.” She said, “My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed.”

What a testimony. And this is the president’s base. He got that look public figures adopt when they know they just took one right in the chops on national TV and cannot show their dismay. He could have responded with an engagement and conviction equal to the moment. But this was our president—calm, detached, even-keeled to the point of insensate. He offered a recital of his administration’s achievements: tuition assistance, health care. It seemed so off point. Like his first two years.

But it was the word Mrs. Hart used that captured everything: “exhausted.” From what I see, that’s how a lot of Democrats feel. They’ve turned silent, too, like people who witnessed a car crash and can’t talk anymore about the reasons for the accident or how many were injured.

This election is more and more shaping up into a contest between the Exhausted and the Enraged.

In a contest like that, who wins? That’s like asking, “Who would win a sporting event between the depressed and the anxious?” The anxious are wide awake. The wide awake win.

But Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee suggests I have the wrong word for the Republican base. The word, she says, is not enraged but “livid.”

The three-term Republican deputy whip has been campaigning in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. We spoke by phone about what she is seeing, and she sounded like the exact opposite of exhausted.

There are two major developments, she says, that are new this year and insufficiently noted, but they’re going to shape election outcomes in 2010 and beyond.

First, Washington is being revealed in a new way.

The American people now know, “with real sophistication,” everything that happens in the capital. “I find a much more knowledgeable electorate, and it is a real-time response,” Ms. Blackburn says. “We hear about it even as the vote is taking place.”

Voters come to rallies carrying research—“things they pulled off the Internet, forwarded emails,” copies of bills, roll-call votes. The Internet isn’t just a tool for organization and fund-raising. It has given citizens access to information they never had before. “The more they know,” Ms. Blackburn observes, “the less they like Washington.”

Second is the rise of women as a force. They “are the drivers in this election cycle,” Ms. Blackburn says. “Something is going on.” At tea party events the past 18 months, she started to notice “60% of the crowd is women.”

She tells of a political rally that drew thousands in Nashville, at the State Capitol plaza. She had brought her year-old grandson. When the mic was handed to her, she was holding him. “I said, ‘How many of you are grandmothers?’ The hands! That was the moment I realized that the majority of the people at the political events now are women. I saw this in town halls in ‘09—it was women showing up at my listening events, it was women talking about health care.”

Why would more women be focusing more intently on politics this year than before?

Ms. Blackburn hypothesizes: “Women are always focusing on a generation or two down the road. Women make the education and health-care decisions for their families, for their kids, their spouse, their parents. And so they have become more politically involved. They are worried about will people have enough money, how are they going to pay the bills, the tuition, get the kids through school and college.”

Ms. Blackburn suggested, further in the conversation, that government’s reach into the personal lives of families, including new health-care rules and the prospect of higher taxes, plus the rise in public information on how Washington works and what it does, had prompted mothers to rebel.

The media called 1994 “the year of the angry white male.” That was the year of the Republican wave that yielded a GOP House for the first time in 40 years. “I look at this year as the Rage of the Bill-Paying Moms,” Ms. Blackburn says. “They are saying ‘How dare you, in your arrogance, cap the opportunities my child will have? You’ll burden them with so much debt they won’t be able to buy a house—all because you can’t balance the budget.’”

How does 2010 compare with 1994 in terms of historical significance? Ms. Blackburn says there’s an unnoted story there, too. Whereas 1994 was historic as a party victory, a shift in political power, this year feels more organic, more from-the-ground, and potentially deeper. She believes 2010 will mark “a philosophical shift,” the beginning of a change in national thinking regarding the role of the individual and the government.

This “will be remembered as the year the American people said no” to the status quo. The people “do not trust” those who make the decisions far away. They want to restore balance.

What is the mainstream media getting wrong about this election, and what is it getting right? The media, Ms. Blackburn says, do not fully appreciate “how livid people are with Washington.” They see the anger but don’t understand its implications. “They’re getting right that people want change, but they’re wrong about what that change is going to be.” The media, she said, “are going to be amazed when Carly Fiorina and Sharron Angle win.”

The mainstream media famously like the horse race—red is up, blue is down; Smith is in, Jones is out. But if Ms. Blackburn is right, the election, and its meaning, will be more interesting than the old, classic jockeying. And the outcomes won’t be controlled by the good ol’ boys but by those she calls “the great new gals.”

This fact marks our political age: The pendulum is swinging faster and in shorter arcs than it ever has in our lifetimes. Few foresaw the earthquake of 2008 in 2006. No board-certified political professional predicted, on Election Day 2008, what happened in 2009-10 (New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts) and has been happening, and will happen, since then. It all moves so quickly now, it all turns on a dime.

But at this moment we are witnessing a shift that will likely have some enduring political impact. Another way of saying that: The past few years, a lot of people in politics have wondered about the possibility of a third party. Would it be possible to organize one? While they were wondering, a virtual third party was being born. And nobody organized it.

Here is Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the Tea Party’s innovative, broad-based network: “In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists,” there is no chain of command, no hierarchy. Individuals “move the movement.” Popular issues gain traction and are emphasized, unpopular ones die. “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on such a large scale.” Here are pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in the Washington Examiner: “The Tea Party has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in American political history.” “It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties.” “Over half of the electorate now say they favor the Tea Party movement, around 35 percent say they support the movement, 20 to 25 percent self-identify as members of the movement.”

So far, the Tea Party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is “the reason we even have the Tea Party movement,” shot back columnist and Tea Party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that “ran up deficits” and gave us “open borders” and “Medicare Part D and busted budgets.”

Everyone has an explanation for the Tea Party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They’re “angry.” They’re “antiestablishment,” “populist,” “anti-elite.” All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, “They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed.”

I see two central reasons for the Tea Party’s rise. The first is the yardstick, and the second is the clock. First, the yardstick. Imagine that over at the at the 36-inch end you’ve got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you’ve got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they’re dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It’s always grown! It’s as if something inexorable in our political reality, with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academe, has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!” But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They’d like 8. Instead it’s 28.

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”

What they want is representatives who’ll begin the negotiations at 18 inches and tug the final bill toward 5 inches. And they believe Tea Party candidates will do that.

The second thing is the clock. Here is a great virtue of the Tea Party: They know what time it is. It’s getting late. If we don’t get the size and cost of government in line now, we won’t be able to. We’re teetering on the brink of some vast, dark new world—states and cities on the brink of bankruptcy, the federal government too. The issue isn’t “big spending” anymore. It’s ruinous spending that they fear will end America as we know it, as they promised it to their children.

So there’s a sense that dramatic action is needed, and a sense of profound urgency. Add drama to urgency and you get the victory of a Tea Party-backed candidate.

That is the context. Local Tea Parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It’s more detached than that. They don’t say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction.

Nobody knows how all this will play out, but we are seeing is something big—something homegrown, broad-based and independent. In part it is a rising up of those who truly believe America is imperiled and truly mean to save her. The dangers, both present and potential, are obvious. A movement like this can help a nation by helping to correct it, or it can descend into a corrosive populism that celebrates unknowingness as authenticity, that confuses showiness with seriousness and vulgarity with true conviction. Parts could become swept by a desire just to tear down, to destroy. But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They’ve lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if Tea Party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.

One difference so far between the Tea Party and the great wave of conservatives that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 is that latter was a true coalition—not only North and South, East and West but right-wingers, intellectuals who were former leftists, and former Democrats. When they won presidential landslides in 1980, ’84 and ’88, they brought the center with them. That in the end is how you win. Will the center join arms or work with the Tea Party? That’s a great question of 2012.

Eight weeks out and you don’t have to be a political professional to feel what’s in the air: The Republicans have a big win coming.

The question in the House races is: Will they get to 218? Will Republicans pick up the 39 seats they need to win control of the 435-member chamber?

Another way of asking: Is this 1994 again?

That year the Republicans swept the House races, picking up 52 seats and getting, for the first time in 40 years, a Republican majority and a Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich. Even then-Speaker Tom Foley (D., Wash.), lost his seat that year. (Speaker Nancy Pelosi is famously in no danger—she won her seat with 72 % of the vote in 2008—but it probably means something that she appears to have gone missing from the national scene. CBS, in March, had her at 11% approval among registered voters.)

A Gallup survey of registered voters this week had Republicans beating Democrats in a generic ballot by 10 points, 51% to 41%. In the 68-year history of that poll, the GOP had never led by more than five points. RealClearPolitics has Republicans ahead in 206 races and Democrats ahead in 194, with 35 too close to call. The Cook Political Report puts 68 Democratic House seats “at substantial risk,” while judging less than a dozen GOP seats to be in real trouble. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made news a few weeks ago by conceding the obvious: that the Republicans could take the House. Top Democrats have told the same to Politico.

The news is so good it’s prompting mutterings on the right: The liberal media are trumpeting the inevitable GOP triumph to make the base complacent and the party peak early. Anything but a Democratic debacle will be spun as proof that Obama’s support, while soft, endures. “The Republicans had a typical off-year chance to win back power and failed. The reason? Voters just don’t trust them.”

The Democrats are not without resources. The first is money, and the second is troops. The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. notes that in many of the closest races this year the Democrats have more cash on hand, and in 20 of those races “the Democrat has at least a four-to-one cash advantage over the Republican candidate.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says it has nearly $17 million more to spend on key House races than its GOP counterpart. Then there are the unions: “The AFL-CIO says it will spend more than $40 million to back candidates and mobilize residents of union-member households to vote in November, overwhelmingly in support of Democrats.”

What’s going to happen? I put the question to one of the architects of the 1994 Republican win, the conservative activist Grover Norquist, a contributor to the Contract with America, member of the Gingrich kitchen cabinet, and founder, 25 years ago, of Americans for Tax Reform. In conversations over those years, I’ve found him to be among the most insightful political observers in Washington.

So, is this 1994 again?

“It could be, and it looks like it,” he said. He noted that Republicans in 1994 were not polling this well and this strongly this early.

There are parallels, he said, between ‘94 and ‘10. One is determination. The Republican Party establishment sets its mind specifically to winning back the House in ‘94—“before that, it had seemed impossible”—and is doing so again. Both 1994 and 2010 were preceded by striking off-year GOP victories in New Jersey and Virginia, which signaled a coming Republican wave. In 1994 the Republican theme “was not just ‘Vote against Clintonism,’ it was ‘Vote for the Contract with America.’” The Republicans are putting together a 2010 contract and plan to unveil it in late September, as they did in ‘94. The first contract, says Mr. Norquist, was “not a campaign tool but a governing tool.” He remembered data that said before the ‘94 election, less than 20% of voters had heard of it. But after the election the media made the contract famous. “It was a great gift to the Republicans,” he said, because it forced them into a semblance of unity by making them focus on a specific agenda.

But there are differences between 1994 and 2010. For one, this time around “the Democrats can see what’s coming.” They didn’t see the Republican wave rising in 1994 until it was too late. “When you see something coming a mile away, you can build a ditch to keep it away.” Democrats, he says, have put aside a lot of money for negative ads in the last days of the campaign. “For a year, Democratic strategists said ‘We’ll pass health care, they’ll love us.’ ‘Recovery summer, they’ll love us.’ ‘We’ll run against Wall Street, they’ll love us.’” These “narratives” failed. “The one thing they have left is: ‘We will put together a lot of cash and run a lot of negatives ads showing why it’s not policy that counts, it’s that the Republican candidate had a DUI 10 years ago.’”

Another difference between ‘94 and ‘10: “There wasn’t a Tea Party movement in ‘94.” There was a Perot movement, which was “much less visible and organized.” Ross Perot backed the Republican House effort in 1994. “This time we have a thousand mini-Perots”—Tea Party leaders—“who are against the Democrats and for the Republicans.” Their rallies, Mr. Norquist says, are gaining strength.

Republicans, he argues, must determine to stay focused, and not become distracted by issues that are not central to the campaign. “There’s the danger of getting sidetracked by shiny things,” he says, citing Arizona’s immigration law, or “the mosque in Manhattan.” These issues do not win new votes, “they only please voters you already have.” Mr. Norquist says: “Harry Reid is stapled at the forehead and the hip to Obama, and it’s hurting him. But Gingrich says the most important issue of the day is the mosque, and Reid gets new life out of it: ‘I strongly differ with the president’s statement on the mosque!’ It gives Democrats the chance to say, ‘I’m not like Obama!’”

Another distraction: “All the time and effort turned into rehabilitating George W. Bush. His former aides are out there arguing about who should get credit for the surge. What? . . . For those who believe Bush was doing something useful and central to jam it into the middle of this election—we lost the past two elections because independents didn’t like Bush!” The rehabilitation effort loses potential votes, wins no new ones, and distracts from central themes. Mr. Norquist offers a prediction: “Watch CBS try to get Bush family and friends to do interviews to insert Bush back into the campaign the weekend before the election.”

What should Republicans focus on? “Spending per se is a palpable issue. The central question is not only taxes or the deficit, it’s spending, and you can see this in polls. . . . There is not a Democrat who can say, ‘I was not part of the spending explosion that threatens you and your country.’ It’s the one thing they can’t defend themselves against. They don’t want to stop spending.”

What about high spending by Republicans in the House, in the Senate, and in the White House? That’s true, he says, but big spenders have been getting “pre-purged” in the primaries. Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski “said she’s bringing home the pork. Well, she lost.”

Mr. Norquist sums the matter up: “The big issue, and people know this, is the explosion of federal spending that is damaging our economy and threatening our future.”

All presidents take vacations, and all are criticized for it. It’s never the right place, the right time. Ronald Reagan went to the ranch, George W. Bush to Crawford, both got knocked. Bill Clinton even poll-tested a vacation site and still was criticized. But Martha’s Vineyard—elite, upscale—can’t have done President Obama any good, especially following the first lady’s foray in Spain. The general feeling this week was summed up by David Letterman: “He’ll have plenty of time for vacations when his one term is up. Plenty of time.”

The president’s position is not good. The past few months have been one long loss of ground. His numbers have dipped well below 50%. Top Democrats tell Politico the House is probably lost and the Senate is in jeopardy. “Recovery summer” is coming to look like “mission accomplished.” The president is losing the center.

And on top of that, he is still a mystery to a lot of people.

Actually, what is confounding is that he seems more a mystery to people now than he did when they elected him president.

The president is overexposed, yet on some level the picture is blurry. He’s in your face on TV, but you still don’t fully get him. People categorize him in political terms: “He’s a socialist,” “He’s a pragmatic progressive.” But beyond that disagreement, things get murky. When you think about his domestic political decisions, it’s hard to tell if he’s playing a higher game or a clueless game. Is he playing three-dimensional chess, or is he simply out of his depth?

Underscoring the unknowns is the continuing question about him and those around him: How did they read the public mood so well before the presidency and so poorly after? In his first 19 months on the job, the president has often focused on issues that were not the top priority of the American people. He was thinking about one thing—health care—when they were thinking about others—the general economy, deficits. He’s on one subject, they’re on another. He has been contradictory: I’m for the mosque, I didn’t say I’m for the mosque. He’s detached from the Gulf oil spill, he’s all about the oil spill.

All of this strikes people, understandably, as perplexing. “I don’t get what he’s doing.” Which becomes, in time, “I don’t get who he is.” In an atmosphere of such questioning they’ll consider any and all possibilities, including, apparently, that he is a Muslim. Which, according to a recent Pew poll, 18% think he is. That is up from 11% in February 2009.

Liberals and the left are indignant about this, and angry. For a week all you heard from cable anchors was “PEOPLE think OBAMA is a MUSLIM. It’s in the POLLS. How do you EXPLAIN it?” Every time I heard it, I’d think: Maybe it’s because you keep screaming it.

Some of the reason for the relatively high number of people who believe he holds to one faith when in fact he has always said he holds to another, is the steady drumbeat of the voices arrayed against Mr. Obama, that are arrayed against any modern president, and will be against the next one too. But surely some of it is that a lot of people are just trying to figure him out. In that atmosphere they’ll consider everything.

When the American people have looked at the presidents of the past few decades they could always sort of say, “I know that guy.” Bill Clinton: Southern governor. Good ol’ boy, drawlin’, flirtin’, got himself a Fulbright. “I know that guy.” George W. Bush: Texan, little rough around the edges, good family, youthful high jinks, stopped drinking, got serious. “I know that guy.” Ronald Reagan was harder to peg, but you still knew him: small-town Midwesterner, moved on and up, serious about politics, humorous, patriotic. “I know that guy.” Barack Obama? Sleek, cerebral, detached, an academic from Chicago by way of Hawaii and Indonesia. “You know what? I don’t know that guy!”

He doesn’t fit any categories. He won in 2008 by 9.5 million votes anyway because he was a break with Mr. Bush, and people assumed they’d get to know him. But his more unusual political decisions, and the sometimes contradictory and confusing nature of his leadership, haven’t ameliorated or done away with his unusualness. They’ve heightened it.

The fact that the public doesn’t fully understand or have a clear fix on the president leads to many criticisms of his leadership. One is that a leader must show and express the emotions of the people, and he’s not very good at it. But I doubt people want a president who goes around emoting, and in any case it’s not his job. What people really want, in part, is someone who understands their basic assumptions because, actually, he shares them. It’s not “Show us you care!” it’s “Be a guy I know. Be someone I get!”

The president is a person who knows how to focus and seems to have a talent for it. But again, his focus is on other things. When a president and a nation are focused together on the same things, the possibility of progress is increased. When they are focused on different things, there is more discord and tension. Mr. Obama’s supporters like to compare him with Reagan: 18 months in he had difficulties in the polls too, and a recession. But Reagan was focused on what the American people were focused on: the economy, the size and role of government, the challenge of the Soviet Union. And on the eternal No. 1 issue, the economy, Reagan had a plan that seemed to make sense, in rough terms to try to cut spending and taxes, and force out inflation. People were willing to give it a try. Mr. Obama’s plan, to a lot of people, does not make sense, or does not seem fully pertinent, or well executed.

Mr. Obama seems to be a very independent person, like someone who more or less brought himself up, a child with wandering parents, and grandparents who seem to have been highly individualistic. He is focused on what individually interests him. He relies most on his own thinking. He focused on health care, seeing the higher logic. The people focused on something else. But he’s always had faith in his ability to think it through.

Now he’s hit a roadblock, and in November’s elections he will hit another, bigger one. One wonders if he will come to reconsider his heavy reliance on his own thoughts. His predecessor did not brag about his résumé and teased himself about his lack of giant intellect, but he had utmost faith in his gut. By 2006, when he had realized he had reason to doubt even that, he flailed. The presidency has a way of winnowing you down.

The great question is what happens after November. The hope of the White House, which knows it is about to take a drubbing, is probably this: that the Republicans in Congress will devolve into a freak show, overplay their hand, lose their focus, be a little too colorful. If that meme emerges—and the media will be looking for it—the Republicans may wind up giving the president the positive definition he lacks. They could save him. The White House must be hoping that a year from now, people will start looking at the president and saying “Hey, I do know that guy. He’s the moderate.”

It’s high summer and we’re all out there seeing each other. We’re not hidden away in our homes and offices as we are in winter’s cold. We’re part of a crowd—on the street, in the park, on the boardwalk, on the top deck of the ferry to Saltaire. And we can see in some new or clearer ways how technology is changing us.

For one thing, it is changing our posture. People who used to walk along the avenues of New York staring alertly ahead, or looking up, now walk along with their heads down, shoulders slumped, checking their email and text messages. They’re not watching where they’re going, and frequently bump into each other. I’m told this is called a BlackBerry jam.

A lot of people seem here but not here. They’re pecking away on a piece of plastic; they’ve withdrawn from the immediate reality around them and set up temporary camp in a reality that exists in their heads. It involves their own music, their own conversation, whether written or oral. This contributes to the new obliviousness, to the young woman who steps off the curb unaware the police car with blaring siren is barreling down the street.

In the street café, as soon as they’ve ordered, people scroll down for their email. Everyone who constantly checks is looking for different things. They are looking for connection, information. They are attempting to alleviate anxiety: “If I know what’s going on I can master it.” They are making plans. But mostly, one way or another, I think they are looking for a love pellet. I thought of you. How are you? This will make you laugh. Don’t break this chain. FYI, because you’re part of the team, the endeavor, the group, my life. Meet your new nephew—here’s the sonogram. You will like this YouTube clip. You will like this joke. You are alive.

We are surrounded by screens. Much of their impact is benign, but not all. This summer I turned a number of times—every time I did, a chapter seemed to speak specifically to something on my mind—to the calm and profound “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” by William Powers. It is a book whose subject is how to build a good life in the digital age.

Mr. Powers is not against the screens around us. We use digital devices “to nurture relationships, to feed our emotional, social, and spiritual hungers, to think creatively and express ourselves.” At their best they produce moments that make life worth living. “If you’ve written an e-mail straight from the heart, watched a video that you couldn’t stop thinking about, or read an online essay that changed how you think about the world, you know this is true.” But he has real reservations about what digital devices are at their worst—an addiction to distraction, a way not of connecting but disconnecting.

In a chapter on Seneca, he finds timeless advice.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born at the time of Christ in Cordoba, Spain, an outpost of the Roman Empire. His father was an official in the Roman government, and Seneca followed his footsteps, becoming a Roman senator and, later, advisor to Nero in the early (and more successful) days of his reign. Seneca was a gifted manager and bureaucrat, but he is remembered today because he was an inveterate letter writer, and his correspondence contained thoughts, insights and convictions that revealed him to be a serious philosopher.

Seneca thought the great job of philosophy was to offer people practical advice on how to live more deeply and constructively. He came of age in a time of tumult; the Rome he lived in was being transformed by a new connectedness. An empire that stretched over millions of square miles was being connected by new roads, a civil service, an extensive postal system. And there was the rise of written communication. Writing, says Mr. Powers, was a huge part of the everyday lives of literate Romans: “Postal deliveries were important events, as urgently monitored as e-mail is today.” Seneca himself wrote of his neighbors hurrying “from all directions” to meet the latest mail boats from Egypt.

As written language began to drive things, Mr. Powers says, “the busy Roman was constantly navigating crowds—not just the physical ones that filled the streets and amphitheaters but the virtual crowd of the larger empire and the torrents of information it produced.”

Seneca, at the center of it all, struggled with the information glut, and with something else. He became acutely conscious of “the danger of allowing others—not just friends and colleagues but the masses—to exert too much influence on one’s thinking.” The more connected a society becomes, the greater the chance an individual can become a creature, or even slave, of that connectedness.

“You ask me what you should consider it particularly important to avoid,” one of Seneca’s letters begins. “My answer is this: a mass crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself without risk. . . . I never come back home with quite the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace.”

Seneca’s advice: Cultivate self-sufficiency and autonomy. Trust your own instincts and ideas. You can thrive in the crowd if you are not dependent on it.

But this is not easy.

Everyone Seneca knew was busy and important, rushing about with what he called “the restless energy of the hunted mind.” Some traveled to flee their worries and burdens but found, as the old joke says, “No matter where I go, there I am.” Stress is portable. Seneca: “The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.”

Even in Seneca’s time, Mr. Powers notes, “the busy, crowd-induced state of mind had gone mobile.” “Today we ask, ‘Does this hotel have Wi-Fi?’”

And there was the way people consumed information. The empire was awash in texts. “Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that’s available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way.” People, Seneca observed, grazed and skimmed, absorbing information “in the mere passing.” But it is better to know one great thinker deeply than dozens superficially.

Seneca, Mr. Powers observes, could have been writing in this century, “when it’s hard to think of anything that isn’t done in ‘mere passing,’ and much of life is beginning to resemble a plant that never puts down roots.”

There are two paths. One is to surrender, to allow the crowd to lead you around by the nose and your experience to become ever more shallow. The other is to step back and pare down. “Measure your life,” advises Seneca, “it just does not have room for so much.”

Beware, in Mr. Powers’s words, “self-created bustle.” Stop checking your inbox 10 times a day, or an hour. Once will do. Concentrate on your higher, more serious purpose, enrich your own experience. Don’t be a slave to technology.

Which is good mid-August wisdom for us all. Focus on central things, quiet the mind, unplug a little, or a lot. And watch out for those crowds, both the ones that cause BlackBerry jams and the ones that unsettle, that attempt to stampede you into going along, or following. Step back, or aside. Think what you think, not what they think. Everyone is trying to push. Don’t be pushed.