Peggy Noonan

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.

Why has the JetBlue flight attendant story captured everyone’s imagination? Because the whole country wants to take the emergency chute.

You know the story: A steward named Steven Slater, after a difficult flight, apparently got fed up, grabbed the intercom, cursed out passengers, and made a speedy and unauthorized exit, activating and sliding down the emergency chute, some say with a beer in each hand. Then he drove home. He says passengers were unruly; two Wall Street Journal reporters, Tamer El-Ghobashy and Sean Gardiner, tracked down passengers who said he was unruly.

However it turns out, the story struck a chord and hit a nerve. MySpace and Facebook pages sprang up, t-shirt makers peddled T-shirts saying “Quit Your Job With Style” on one side and “I’m With Slater” on the other. On one of the Slater pages on Facebook a thread asked “What job should Steve do next?” and ironic answers flooded in: “talk show host,” “anger management counselor,” “air traffic controller.” A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll suggested Mr. Slater’s act reflected broad public anger, and pundits seized it as a political story: “JetBlue nation” will throw the bums out in November.

But it doesn’t strike me as a political story. I think it’s a cultural story. American culture is, one way or another, business culture, and our business is service. Once we were a great industrial nation. Now we are a service economy. Which means we are forced to interact with each other, every day, in person and by phone and email. And it’s making us all a little mad.

I’m not sure we’ve fully noted the social implications of the shift from industry to service. We used to make machines! And steel! But now we’re always in touch, in negotiation. We interact so much, we wear each other down. We wear away the superego and get straight to the id, and what we see isn’t pretty.

Here’s why. At the same time we were shifting, in the past 30 years, to the more personal economy of service, we were witnessing and took part in a revolution in manners. We tore them down as too fancy, or sexist, or ageist, or revealing of class biases. Just when we needed more than ever the formality and agreed-upon rules of manners to act as guard rails, we threw them aside. And now no one knows how to act anymore.

The result is that everyone is getting on everyone’s nerves. We’re all snapping the bins shut on each other’s heads. Everyone wants to tell the boss to take this job and shove it. Everyone wants to take a good, hard, last look at the customer and take the chute.

Some extremely small examples from my own experiences the past few weeks. I see something in the window of a store, walk in planning to daydream and scan the merchandise. The minute I walk in the door, the onslaught begins—the salespeople with their fierce, insistent smiles. “How are you today?” They are taught that if they engage, they will make a sale. But no one taught them to take a courteous tone. “What are you looking for today?” I can’t go that quickly from my thoughts to her reality, if that’s the word. “Are you looking for anything?”

I’m looking for the exit. I’m looking for the chute.

I wrote of the same experience a few years ago and got a letter from a saleswoman in a big department store. She said, I paraphrase: “You misunderstand, it’s not that we haven’t been taught how to behave, it’s that we have. We are trained to make and maintain eye contact, we are taught to intrude, we are instructed to act in a way that people used to recognize as rude behavior.”

Thank you, service economy.

This week there was the woman on Madison Avenue holding that dread thing, the clipboard. They want you to sign something in favor of a cause, or sign up for something. She was a big girl, 6 feet tall, with 10 arms. She saw me coming 15 feet away and placed herself in the middle of the sidewalk so I’d have to speak or go around her. “How are you today?” she barked, demanded. It was embarrassing not to reply and made me feel vaguely guilty, which is the way they want you to feel so you’ll give up and engage. As I passed I smiled and wordlessly shook my head. She did a mock eye rolling. “Oh. Sorry!”

She was not, I think, unaware of her aggression. She just wasn’t embarrassed by it.

In a hospital waiting room this week, there was a woman at the desk with 13 cowed patients sitting in rows of plastic chairs along the wall, I among them. She was on the desk by herself, and was very busy. She was also not in a good mood, clipped to the point of curt, unwilling to give people a sense of when she might turn to their requests. She gave everyone Dead Face. Dead Face is expressionless, impassive, immovable. You cannot push around Dead Face. She will lose your records. We bowed to Dead Face. She’s in the service economy too.

Longtime readers know how I feel about air-security theater, but it’s gotten worse recently, and I mention it because this is the public service part of the service economy. Ten days ago in Washington, at Reagan National, I was put through the new machine, the X-ray thing that also seems to function as a mammogram—arms up, stand up straight. This was followed by the TSA agent who was inappropriately familiar as she patted me down.

When I’d first gone through the machine and then been manhandled, a month before, I was so taken aback that I blurted “Wow, that was embarrassing.” I said it softly, in a way that invited mild commiseration of the “I know, I’m sorry I have to do this” sort. Instead, with full Dead Face, the TSA woman said, “Have a nice day.” As I walked away I thought: She has been taught by consultants how to “handle” people like me. Her instructions are that if anyone accepts her ministrations with anything but passive surrender, she is to show she is impervious and keep the line moving. She is probably taught this in a class given by government contractors who are paid by taxpayers to handle taxpayers. Meaning I pay her to be rude to me.

“I pay them to be rude to me” is kind of an anthem of the service economy.

To an unusual degree now people now feel they have to protect themselves from each other. You have to put forward the rules of behavior, every day. When the person from the bank on the phone says, “Margaret, I’d like to talk to you about your account,” you have to say, “I’m sorry but I didn’t invite you to call me by my first name.” Or perhaps it’s, “I didn’t really want a freelance mammogram, and I’m not sure it’s right that you give me one,” or, “I have to tell you that it’s not polite to block my path and attempt to force a conversation.”

But such vigilance is tiresome. Most of us give up and accept the thousand daily breaches and violations.

In a service economy in the age of no manners, everyone gets on everyone’s nerves. Everyone wishes they could take the chute. Everyone understands someone who did.

It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year’s day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease. Something inside was telling us we were living through “not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms.”

The temperature in the world was very high. “At home certain trends—crime, cultural tension, some cultural Balkanization—will, we fear, continue; some will worsen. In my darker moments I have a bad hunch. The fraying of the bonds that keep us together, the strangeness and anomie of our popular culture, the increase in walled communities . . . the rising radicalism of the politically correct . . . the increased demand of all levels of government for the money of the people, the spotty success with which we are communicating to the young America’s reason for being and founding beliefs, the growth of cities where English is becoming the second language . . . these things may well come together at some point in our lifetimes and produce something painful indeed. I can imagine, for instance, in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union. Which would bring about, of course, a drama of Lincolnian darkness. . . . You will know that things have reached a bad pass when Newsweek and Time, if they still exist 15 years from now, do cover stories on a surprising, and disturbing trend: aging baby boomers leaving America, taking what savings they have to live the rest of their lives in places like Africa and Ireland.”

I thought of this again the other day when Drudge headlined increasing lines in London for Americans trading in their passports over tax issues, and the sale of Newsweek for $1.

Our problems as a nation have been growing on us for a long time. Their future growth, and the implications of that growth, could be predicted. But there is one thing that is both new since 1994 and huge. It took hold and settled in after the crash of 2008, but its causes were not limited to the crash.

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn’t do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won’t be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it’s kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn’t in our DNA. But it isn’t pessimism, really, it’s a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don’t act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past. I started noticing in the 1980s, the growing gulf between the country’s thought leaders, as they’re called—the political and media class, the universities—and those living what for lack of a better word we’ll call normal lives on the ground in America. The two groups were agitated by different things, concerned about different things, had different focuses, different world views.

But I’ve never seen the gap wider than it is now. I think it is a chasm. In Washington they don’t seem to be looking around and thinking, Hmmm, this nation is in trouble, it needs help. They’re thinking something else. I’m not sure they understand the American Dream itself needs a boost, needs encouragement and protection. They don’t seem to know or have a sense of the mood of the country.

And so they make their moves, manipulate this issue and that, and keep things at a high boil. And this at a time when people are already in about as much hot water as they can take.

To take just one example from the past 10 days, the federal government continues its standoff with the state of Arizona over how to handle illegal immigration. The point of view of our thought leaders is, in general, that borders that are essentially open are good, or not so bad. The point of view of those on the ground who are anxious about our nation’s future, however, is different, more like: “We live in a welfare state and we’ve just expanded health care. Unemployment’s up. Could we sort of calm down, stop illegal immigration, and absorb what we’ve got?” No is, in essence, the answer.

An irony here is that if we stopped the illegal flow and removed the sense of emergency it generates, comprehensive reform would, in time, follow. Because we’re not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We’re not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what’s in our nature?) As years passed, those here would be absorbed, and everyone in the country would come to see the benefit of integrating them fully into the tax system. So it’s ironic that our leaders don’t do what in the end would get them what they say they want, which is comprehensive reform.

When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

Back when the rather radical and ill-thought-through movement known as the John Birch Society—they thought, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was perhaps a communist—was still famous and controversial, conservative Ronald Reagan was running for office. A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so they would support him. This set off Drudgelike sirens among journalists: Aha! Reagan unmasked as a radical! Why else would radicals support him? So they rushed to demand that he respond to this embarrassment.

Well, he said pleasantly, they said they support me, I didn’t say I support them.

He said it mildly, as if the reporters had misunderstood the story. This left them scratching their heads, and the story went away, as stories do. But his feint worked because it was grounded in truth. Reagan was neither extreme nor a Bircher, but there were areas in which he agreed with the Birchers, such as the threat of communism. He also had to function as a practical politician: He wasn’t going to tell them to take their votes elsewhere. So he made it clear they were for him, while suggesting they’d bowed to his views, not he to theirs.

This might be a good template for how Republicans approach the Tea Party as 2010 approaches. No, the Tea Party is not the John Birch Society. To note one difference, it does not coalesce around the idea of conspiracy so much as antipathy—to the increasing size, role and demands of government. As this is in line with general Republican thinking and philosophy, Republican candidates should happily accept its support while sticking to their own views and stands, whatever they are. Reagan didn’t say he was so grateful for Bircher support that on reflection Dwight Eisenhower really was a communist. He just nodded and kept walking.

For those candidates who are themselves Tea Party, and who identify more with a rebellion than an organization, some advice: Get conservative, quick. Which is another way of saying: Get serious. Conservatives are not fringe and haven’t been accused of being fringe since they got themselves a president, in 1980. He cared about reality, about the facts of the world, and bothered to know them. He bothered to think about them. He respected process, or rather respected the reality of it and learned to master it.

He also tried to put his arms around those who disagreed with him; he loved his foes into submission by showing regard for them. “Come walk with me,” he said, in 1984. And they did. And they got a new name, Reagan Democrats. Some of them wear it proudly, still. Here’s something that sounds corny but is true: Only love makes great political movements. Movements based on resentment, anger and public rage always fade, they rise and fall, they never stay. If you came to play, get serious.

Members of the Tea Party are not going to vote Democratic, and the Democrats have figured this out. Someone noted on cable the other day that only months ago many Democrats still hoped they might benefit to some degree from the Tea Party’s populist spirit, and attempted a certain tentative sympathy. True, but they did it like anthropologists discovering a new tribe in Borneo: “Come. No hurt. Be friend.” Now, seeing the Tea Party is not gettable or co-optable, the Democrats are attempting to demonize them, and use them to demonize the GOP.

Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.

Your average viewer will see this not as information but as theater, like Demon Sheep, and of course propaganda, though some will perk up at abolishing the agencies. But the ad signals a central Democratic argument for the fall, which The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder summed up as “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy.”

It’s a sign of Democratic panic that a week ago they were saying what was wrong with the GOP was they have no plan, while now what’s wrong is that they do have one.

The problem for the Democrats, however, is not a new Contract With America, or the Tea Party. Their problem is Chris Christie.

National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”

That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. He is famously blunt and doesn’t speak in those talking points that make you wonder, “Should I kill myself now with rude stabs to the chest, or should I just jump screaming from the window?”

On “Morning Joe” this week he said, “There were a lot of hard cuts and difficult things to do in there, but fact of the matter is we’re trying to treat people like adults. They know that we’re in awful shape, and they know that no one else is around anymore to pay for the problems that won’t hurt them.”

What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.”

On public schools: Teachers complain when they’re getting “4% and 5% salary increases a year in a 0% inflation world. They get free health benefits from the day they’re hired for their entire family until the day they die. They believe they are entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who’ve lost their homes, had their hours cut back. And all we ask them to do is freeze their salary for one year and pay 1.5% of their salary for their health benefits. . . . As much as I love teachers, everyone’s got to be a part of the sacrifice.”

Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. Governors have budgets for which they’re held accountable, so he had to move. But Mr. Christie’s way is also closer than most national Republicans have come—or Democrats will come—to satisfying the public desire that someone step forward, define the problem, apply common sense, devise a way through, do what’s needed.

He’s going to break through in a big way. The answer to our political problems lies in clarity, competence and courage, not a visit to crazy town. And he knows how to put out his hand. “As much as I love teachers.” That’s good.

She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn’t pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod.

And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility of redemption.

Here’s a way to get some good. This September, when school begins, we should make the speech required viewing in the nation’s high schools. It packs quite a lesson within quite a story.

You know the essential facts. On March 27, Ms. Sherrod, 62, Georgia director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, spoke at an NAACP meeting in Coffee County, Ga. She was dressed in a dark suit with ivory lapels and cuffs, and the impression she gives in the video is of a person of authority. She came across like a person who has lived a life, not a media knock-off of a life but a real one.

And this is what she said. Forty-five years before, to the day, her father’s funeral was held. He had been murdered by a white man in Baker County, Ga. These were still the bad old days; lynchings had taken place in her lifetime. The man who murdered her father “was never punished,” even though there were three eyewitnesses. The grand jury refused to indict.

All this was told not in a tone of rage or self-pity but of simple remembered sadness: “My father was a farmer, and growing up on the farm my dream was to get as far away from the farm and Baker County as I could get.” She worked “picking cotton, picking cucumbers, shaking peanuts. . . . Doing all that work on the farm, it will make you get an education.” She wanted to escape. “The older folks know what I’m talking about.”

Go North, she thought. She’d seen black people return from vacations up North: “You know how they came back talking, and came back looking.” The audience laughed. “I learned later some of those cars they drove home were rented.” The audience laughed louder.

She was 17 when her father was killed, in 1965. After that, one night, a cross was burned on their lawn. Her mother had a gun, and black men from throughout the county came and surrounded the white men who surrounded the house. Shirley was terrified and hid in a back room, praying. That night something changed. “I made the decision that I would stay and work.”

She wouldn’t leave the South but change it. Here she addressed the youthful members of her audience: “Young people, I want you to know when you are true to what God wants you to do, the path just opens up, and things just come to you. God is good, I can tell you that.”

But when she made her decision, “I was making that commitment to black people only.” She didn’t care about whites.

Almost a quarter-century ago, she was working for a farmers aid group when she was asked to help a couple named Roger and Eloise Spooner. They were losing their farm, and they were white.

Mr. Spooner made a poor impression. He “took a long time talking.” She thought he was trying to establish a superior intelligence. “What he didn’t know while he was talking all that time . . . was I was trying to decide just how much help I was gonna give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland.” So she did enough to meet her responsibilities, but no more. She took him to “a white lawyer,” figuring “that his own kind will take care of him.”

The lawyer took the farmer’s money and, she said, did little else. She assumed things had been taken care of. But in May, 1987, Mr. Spooner received a foreclosure notice and he called her, frantic. His house was to be sold a week later on the courthouse steps, and no motion had been filed to stop it.

They all met. The lawyer suggested the farmer retire. “I said, ‘I can’t believe you said that.'”

Indignant, she set herself to save the Spooners’ farm. “That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those who have,” not white versus black. “It opened my eyes.” She worked the phones, reached out to those who could help, talked to more lawyers, called officials.

And she saved that farm.

“Working with him,” said Ms. Sherrod, “made me see . . . that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t.” It’s helping the frightened and powerless. “And they could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic.”

She said that 45 years ago she couldn’t say what she will say tonight: “I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, ‘If we had tried to live with hate in my heart, we probably be dead now.'” She said it was “sad” that the room was not “full of whites and blacks.” She quoted Toni Morrison: We have to get to a point where “race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

There is beauty in the speech, and bravery too. It was brave because her subject wasn’t the nation’s failures and your failures but her failures. The beauty is that is deals with the great subject of our lives: how to be better, how to make the world better. It’s not a perfect speech—she’s tendentious in her support for health care and takes cheap shots at Republicans. And it’s not the poor versus the rich, it’s the powerful helping the powerless. But it’s good.

You know what happened this week. Someone cut the 45-minute speech down to less than two minutes, to the part in which she talked about not wanting to help white people. Andrew Breitbart ran it on one of his websites and made Ms. Sherrod look like a race-game-playing government bully.

It was trumpeted all over conservative media. The Obama administration panicked and forced her to resign. She wasn’t even given a chance to explain.

And then the Spooners stepped in, and this time they saved her. Is Ms. Sherrod a racist, they were asked. “No way in the world,” said Roger Spooner. “She stuck with us.” Eloise: “She helped us, so we’re helping her.”

Then people started bothering to watch and read the whole speech.

So what are the lessons?

That we’re all too quick to judge. That we don’t even let the evidence of our eyes stop us in our rush to judgment. You can’t see and hear Ms. Sherrod and fail to understand that she’s a thoughtful, serious person.

That we are not skeptical enough of what new media can cook up in its little devil’s den. That anyone can be the victim of a high-tech lynching, and that because of this we have to be careful, slow down, look deeper. We live in a time when what you say is taped, and those tapes can be cut, and the cuts can be ruinous, and if you think it only happens to the rich and famous, think again. It’s coming to a theater near you.

And for students? What can they learn? How about: Individuals can change, just like nations. They can get better, if they want to be.

What’s more important than that? What do students need to hear more?

It really can be a teachable moment. It can.

We start with the president’s dreadful numbers. People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we’re like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs. But polls offer the only hard quick data there is, and when the temperature-taking consistently shows a worsening condition—the fever is not breaking but rising—you have to admit a sickness. And so the polls, the most striking of which this week was CBS’s, which says only 13% of Americans feel President Obama’s economic plans have helped them. After all the money he and Congress have spent, you’d think it would be twice that.

Oh, let’s not do polls, they all say what they said months ago: Mr. Obama is down. Here I write not of something people dislike—the administration and, by the way, the Republicans—but of something I think they want, may even deep down long for. By they I mean me. But I don’t think I’m alone.

All right, you know what I think people miss when they look at Washington and our political leadership? They miss old and august. They miss wise and weathered. They miss the presence of bruised and battered veterans of life who’ve absorbed its facts and lived to tell the tale.

This is a nation—a world—badly in need of adult supervision. In the 50th anniversary commentary this week of Harper Lee’s masterpiece, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” a book long derided as middlebrow by middlebrows, no one fully noted the centrality, the cosmic force, that propelled the book, and that is the idea of the father. Of the human longing to be safe and watched over by one stronger. And so we have the wise and grounded Atticus Finch, who understands the world and pursues justice anyway, and who can be relied upon. “He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” That’s the last sentence. Ms. Lee was some kind of genius to throw the ball that soft, and that hard.

Mr. Obama is young, 48, as is British Prime Minister David Cameron (43), with whom he meets next week, and as were Bill Clinton (46 on Inauguration Day) and the somewhat older but still distressingly young George W. Bush, sworn in at 54. Mr. Cameron’s partner in governance, Nicholas Clegg, is also 43. Stephen Harper of Canada is 51, Nicolas Sarkozy of France a youthful 55.

Youth is supposed to bring vigor and vision. In general, however, I think we find in our modern political figures that what it really brings is need—for greatness, to be transformative, to leave a legacy. Such clamorous needs! How very boring they are, how puny and small, but how huge in their consequences.

What Mr. Obama needed the past 18 months was a wise man—more on that later—to offer counsel and perspective, a guy who just by walking into the room brings historical context. “Mr. President, the whole nation’s worried about this thing and you’re worried about that thing. They’re thinking money, and you’re thinking health care. Stop that, focus like a laser beam on the economy.” “My friend, you’re gonna get a win on this stimulus thing in the House, and you’re gonna do it without one Republican vote. That’s gonna make you feel good—flexing the muscle. But it’s gonna hurt you long-term. You need bipartisan cover or people will think you’re radical. Whatever you gotta do to get some Republicans on board you do it, bow to what they need. Don’t worry about your left, where they gonna go? Left attacks you, center’ll like you more.”

I know, “the wise men” are dead. Vietnam killed them. They were the last casualties, pushed off the roof with the helicopters. Their counsel on Vietnam was not good. But we learned the wrong lesson. We should have learned, “Wise men can be wrong, listen close and weigh all data.” Instead we learned, “Never listen to wise men,” and “Only the young and sparkling, not enthralled by the past, can lead us.”

We like youth because we liked John F. Kennedy, 43 when he was inaugurated. That’s when the presidential youth cult began. But he himself often relied on the old. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, the only world leader Kennedy turned to almost daily and confided in was Britain’s 68-year-old prime minister, Harold Macmillan, a veteran of World War I who’d seen the end of empires. President Kennedy had 11 months before he lost the counsel of his father, debilitated by a stroke. Macmillan was a father figure, and a good one—wry, pragmatic, sly when necessary, alive to human sentiment. When asked by ferocious young conservatives why he couldn’t get tough with the coal miners, he explained he’d been in the trenches with them, gone over the top with them. Margaret Thatcher came along soon enough with the needed toughness. It all worked out. Anyway, JFK knew to look to the deeply experienced and mature, which was important for him because he wasn’t the former or always the latter.

But here’s the thing. You have to look hard for wise men. They’re not all over the place anymore. There’s kind of an emerging mentoring gap going on in America right now. You can see it in a generalized absence of the wise old politician/lawyer/leader/editor who helps the young along, who teaches them the ropes and ways and traditions of a craft.

You walk into the offices of a great corporation now, look around and think: Where are the grown-ups?

The grown-ups took the buyout. The grown-ups were laid off. The grown-ups are not there. A few weeks ago in Connecticut there was a dinner to mark the retirement of the heads of a half dozen local hospitals. They did a video. It turned out most of them, unknown to their coworkers, were military veterans. This was the Vietnam generation leaving the room after effortful, successful careers. They were such smart guys! They knew so much. I wanted to say, Don’t go! “Shane, come back, Shane.” Stay by the bedside, Atticus. See us through this thing.

On Wall Street the concept of the statesman—the wealthy man who after a storied career enters public service and takes tough, risky stands on public policy issues—seems largely a thing of the past. In journalism the effects of cutbacks and lack of mentoring are showing their face, and will continue to. Maybe we’ll see it most dramatically when the lone person on the overnight news desk, aged 28, in a cavernous room with marks on the industrial carpet from where the desks used to be, gets the first word of the next, possibly successful terror event. On the Internet, you read the fierce posts of political and ideological writers and wonder, Why do so many young bloggers sound like hyenas laughing in the dark? Maybe it’s because there’s no old hand at the next desk to turn and say, “Son, being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life.”

Back to the political scene. Who might benefit from a real, if not consciously felt, longing for the old, tried and true? Not a Facebook jockey twittering from deepest cyberspace. A frank, unshowy Sen. Tom Coburn? Gov. Haley Barbour, an old-style, gray-haired, shrewd-eyed southerner? Maybe Mitch Daniels, who is, as they say, an old person’s idea of a young man. He has the style of a lovely normal boring person. Boring: that looks so good right now. Old, that looks so fresh, so new.

Much has happened in the dense and shifting political landscape of the past 18 months—the quick breakdown along partisan lines in Congress; continuing arguments over spending, the economy and immigration; the big Republican wins in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts; the Gulf oil spill; falling poll numbers for the president and his party.

But the biggest political moment, the one that carried the deepest implications, came exactly one year ago, in July and August of 2009, in the town hall rebellion. Looking back, that was a turning point in both parties’ fortunes. That is when the first resistance to Washington’s plans on health care became manifest, and it’s when a more generalized resistance rose and spread.

President Obama and his party in Congress had, during their first months in power, done the one thing they could not afford to do politically, and that was arouse and unite their opposition. The conservative movement and Republican Party had been left fractured and broken by the end of the Bush years. Now, suddenly, they had something to fight against together. Social conservatives hated the social provisions, liberty-minded conservatives the state control, economic conservatives the spending. Health care brought them together. The center, which had gone for Mr. Obama in 2008, joined them.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats saw it coming. But it was a seminal moment, and whatever is coming in November, it started there.

It was a largely self-generated uprising, and it was marked, wherever it happened, in San Diego or St. Louis, by certain common elements. The visiting senator or representative, gone home to visit the voters, always seemed shocked at the size of the audience and the depth of his constituents’ anger. There was usually a voter making a videotape in the back of the hall. There were almost always spirited speeches from voters. There was never, or not once that I saw, a strong and informed response from the congressman. In one way it was like the Iranian revolution: Most people got the earliest and fullest reports of what was happening on the Internet, through YouTube. Voters would take shaky videos on their cellphones and post them when they got home. Suddenly, over a matter of weeks, you could type in “town hall” and you’d get hundreds, and finally thousands, of choices.

The politicians, every one of them, seemed taken aback—shaken and unprepared. They tried various strategies—mollify the crowd, or try to explain to them how complex governing is. Sen. Arlen Specter tried that in early August 2009, in an appearance with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Faced with fierce criticism of the health-care bill as it then stood, Mr. Specter explained that see here, it’s a thousand-page bill and sometimes Congress must make judgements “very fast.” The crowd exploded in jeers.

When Rep. Russ Carnahan held a town hall meeting at a community college in Missouri on July 20, he tried patiently to explain that ObamaCare not only would be deficit-neutral, it would save money. They didn’t shout him down, they laughed. When Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared before a town hall meeting in Jefferson County, Mo., on Aug. 11, she responded to the crowd with words that sum up the moment: “I don’t get it. . . . I honestly don’t get it. . . . You don’t trust me?” “No!” the crowd roared.

When Rep. Brian Baird went before his constituents in Clark County, Wash., on Aug. 18, he was met by this speech from a young man in the audience: “I heard you say that you are going to let us keep our health insurance. Well thank you! It’s not your right to decide whether I keep my current plan or not, that’s my decision.” The constituent got cheers.

It was a real pushback, and it was fueled by indignation. The attitude was: “We have terrible worries—unemployment, the cost of government, its demands, our ability to compete and win in the world. You are focused on your thing, but we are focused on these things.”

The videos, still on YouTube, can be pretty stirring. There’s a real “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” feel about them. It was not only Democrats but Republicans too who felt the heat, and were surprised by it.

The president, of course, got his victory on health care. But a funny thing is, normally the press and the public judge a president’s effectiveness in large part by legislative victories—whether he has “the ability to get his program through Congress.” Winning brings winning, which increases popularity. Mr. Obama won on more than health care; he won on the stimulus package and the Detroit bailout. And yet his poll numbers continue to float downward. He is not more loved with victory. To an unusual and maybe unprecedented degree his victories seem like victories for him, and for his party, and for his agenda, but they haven’t settled in as broad triumphs that illustrate power and competence.

In the past an LBJ showed his mastery by taming and controlling Congress. Mr. Obama’s ability to work closely with the Democrats does not seem like evidence of mastery. The biggest single phrase you hear about him now, and it isn’t coming from pundits and being repeated, it is bubbling up from normal people and being seized by pundits, is the idea that he is in over his head, and out of his depth. And this while he keeps winning.

Nor is the left happy with him. In The Nation this week, Eric Alterman writes that most progressives agree “the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.” No public option on health care, and labor unions, “among his most fervent and dedicated foot soldiers,” see card check as “deader than Jimmy Hoffa.” Is it possible the president “fooled gullible progressives during the election into believing he was a left-liberal partisan when in fact he is much closer to a conservative corporate shill”? Progressives, including two Mr. Alterman knows “who sport Nobel Prizes on their shelves” now feel this way.

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Meanwhile some Republicans are feeling triumphalist, but it may be premature. At the moment they are beating up Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for his comments on Afghanistan. What was wrong with what Mr. Steele said was obvious: Afghanistan was not Mr. Obama’s war of choice but a nine-year-old war the president has so far continued. But Afghanistan, like Iraq, is the meal he was served, not the meal he chose.

Far worse than Mr. Steele’s muddling of the facts is that he spoke in a way that suggested the war could be used as a political tool against the administration. He was approaching a grave matter—war—in a merely partisan and political manner. How cheap and hackish.

The Republicans still need to show that they are worthy of the electoral bounty that is likely to come their way. Are they ready to govern, or only to win? Part of being worthy is showing yourself capable of having serious and truly open debate. What, in the post-9/11 world, should be our overarching foreign policy? What is it we’re trying to accomplish? How should we try to get it done? What is the way out of our economic disaster? What must we do, how must we do it?

It’s hard for those who do politics as a profession not to get lost in the day-to-day, but if they don’t start thinking big and encouraging debate, they’re going to blow it, too. And they’ll find out at a town hall meeting in 2013. Or earlier.