Peggy Noonan

It was 1976 and I was interviewing Democratic presidential candidates as they came through Boston for the Massachusetts primary. One of them was Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who came into our radio studios with a small entourage. The Washington state Democrat talked about his issues, mostly national defense. He was an intelligent and accomplished man, a serious one, but that day he was very dull. He just repeated what he always said. This was in the early days of soundbites, when candidates had first twigged on to the fact that whatever they said, in speech or interview, TV and radio producers were going to cut it down into a 14-second snip, so they might as well dictate the soundbites themselves.

Whenever I hear broadcast journalists complain about candidates’ prefabricated talking points I think: Don’t only blame them, you did it too, they’re just trying to fit their candidacy into your reality.

So Jackson was repeating the same things he said everywhere, and I, mesmerized, struck dumb by boredom, began to daydream. I noticed he had a scratch on his face. He’d cut himself shaving. I imagined him looking at his face in the mirror that morning, lathered up, wielding a straight razor and thinking, “I’m the man who should be president.” What a funny thing to think, I thought. Hey, that might be an interesting question.

So I asked him why he wanted to be the leader of the free world, as we used to say and no longer do. Why would he want to command the U.S. nuclear arsenal, why should the weight of so much potential history be on his shoulders? I think I asked it badly. There was silence when I finished.

He blinked, startled. “I’m not crazy, you know!”

I said I didn’t mean to suggest he was, only that it took a certain interesting, even outlandish confidence to think you should be president.

He nodded, and began again to repeat his rote stand on the issues.

Only now do I realize I had a story: Presidential Candidate Insists He’s Not Mad!

But lately I think maybe they all are.

The recent spate of political books says they are. In “Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, almost all of the 2008 candidates appear to be truly barking mad.

“Game Change” came out two months ago, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It is written and reported by rigorous and believable reporters who are professionals. They didn’t make it up. They know the rules. Their prose is sometimes bodice-ripping and over the top, sometimes thumpingly clichéd, but no one to my knowledge has come forward to say, “I didn’t say that!” or, “That’s a lie!”

And really one wishes they had.

Not only do staffers turn on candidates in this book, but candidates turn on staffers. At times you get the impression people were wearing wires. But the overwhelming fact the book communicates is that our candidates for president are emotionally volatile, extreme personalities. They spend a lot of time being enraged. They don’t trust those around them. They desperately want power and want to be celebrated, but they don’t know what they want to do with power beyond wield it, and they seem incapable of reflection about why they need to be admired. Most seriously, they show little interest in, or even awareness of, the central crises of their time.

Hillary Clinton, made wild by her snake-bit campaign, has temper tantrums, fires staffers, weeps, rehires them. “Let’s talk turkey,” she says to one. “Let’s talk ham. Let’s talk tortillas.” She considered her husband’s administration “soft.” Her presidential operation would be staffed by the “hardheaded and hard boiled” who “embraced her conception of politics as total war.” When she won the New Hampshire primary, she declared in a victory speech, “I come tonight with a very, very full heart. . . . I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.” Minutes later, with a “puffed out chest,” she high-fives her staffers and explains her victory: “I get really tough when people f— with me.” When offered the vice presidential nomination, she is ambivalent. “I’ve already done that job,” she told her pollster, Mark Penn. She had already been vice president, in her husband’s presidency.

John McCain, too, is extreme. At one point he screams 12 f-words in a 13-word sentence. He is speaking to his wife. In a key pre-2008 planning session, everything is discussed—operations, organization, budgets, office space, proposed logo and state-by-state strategy—everything except the meaning or purpose of Mr. McCain’s run. He presides looking “vaguely bored,” his detachment “striking but not entirely unusual.” During the financial crash, he boldly suspends his campaign and calls for a White House meeting with the leadership of both parties. When called on to speak, he has, actually, nothing to say. In the harried days after Sarah Palin is chosen, she turns to a McCain aide with an urgent question: “My brand is hair up, isn’t it?” During debate prep, Mrs. Palin shuts down, “chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor . . . lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor.” Mr. McCain’s four top aides hold a conference call to discuss whether she is “mentally unstable.”

Barack Obama, who interestingly gets the best treatment in the book—protect those sources!—is not immune. He is smart, “and he not only knew it but wanted to make sure that everyone else knew it.” In meetings with aides, he controlled the conversation by interrupting whoever was talking. He is boastful, gaudily confident. Before his 2004 convention speech, a reporter asked him if he was nervous: “I’m LeBron, baby,” he answers. “I got some game.”

Messrs. Heilleman and Halperin speak of what they call postmodern politics as “a meat grinder/flesh incinerator.” It is that. Perhaps now only the deeply strange apply for entrance.

*   *   *

A companion volume, “The Politician,” is not a history but a memoir about working for John Edwards, of whom nothing can be said that does not feel like pile-on. Author Andrew Young seems to be trying to be truthful within the limits of his ability to observe and understand, which appear to be real limits. His centerpiece is the Rielle Hunter scandal, but more interesting is the sheer, extraterrestrial weirdness of John Edwards’s mental processes. On the morning of 9/11, in the midst of Washington’s chaos, Young runs into Mr. Edwards leaving the Dirksen Senate Office Building. He calls the capitol police to find out where to take the senator. “They were overwhelmed,” writes Mr. Young. Yes, they would be. He is told only senators “in the direct line of succession” get Secret Service protection. Mr. Edwards, when told this, is “angered” and drives home to be with his family. At an early campaign meeting, he gives a set speech to potential supporters. One, political veteran Erskine Bowles, asks Edwards why he should vote for him, what makes him qualified.

“The room fell silent.” The senator “struggled to answer.” “I realized,” says Mr. Young, that in all the hours of talk, no one had said anything about what an Edwards presidency would mean for America.”

It would mean we had a president with shiny hair.

The shallowness, the lack of seriousness of modern presidential candidates is almost unbelievable. It is also a mystery: How could this be? If today a candidate told me he was not crazy, I will go with it, for it would be news.

It is now exactly a year since President Obama unveiled his health care push and his decision to devote his inaugural year to it—his branding year, his first, vivid year.

What a disaster it has been.

At best it was a waste of history’s time, a struggle that will not in the end yield something big and helpful but will in fact make future progress more difficult. At worst it may prove to have fatally undermined a new presidency at a time when America desperately needs a successful one.

In terms of policy, his essential mistake was to choose health-care expansion over health-care reform. This at the exact moment voters were growing more anxious about the cost and reach of government. The practical mistake was that he did not include or envelop congressional Republicans from the outset, but handed the bill’s creation over to a Democratic Congress that was becoming a runaway train. This at the exact moment Americans were coming to be concerned that Washington was broken, incapable of progress, frozen in partisanship.

His political mistakes were myriad and perhaps can be reduced to this:

There are all sorts of harm a new president can do to his presidency. Right now, part of the job of a new president in a hypermediaized environment is harm avoidance. This sounds defensive, and is at odds with the wisdom that presidents in times of crisis must boldly go forth and break through. But it all depends on what you’re being bold about. Why, in 2009, create a new crisis over an important but secondary issue when we already have the Great Recession and two wars? Prudence and soundness of judgment are more greatly needed at the moment.

New presidents should never, ever, court any problem that isn’t already banging at the door. They should never summon trouble. Mr. Obama did, boldly, perhaps even madly. And this is perhaps the oddest thing about No Drama Obama: In his first year as president he created unneeded political drama, and wound up seen by many Americans not as the hero but the villain.

In Washington among sympathetic political hands (actually, most of them sound formerly sympathetic) you hear the word “intervention,” as in: “So-and-so tried an intervention with the president and it didn’t work.” So-and-so tried to tell him he’s in trouble with the public and must moderate, recalibrate, back off from health care. The end of the story is always that so-and-so got nowhere. David Gergen a few weeks ago told the Financial Times the administration puts him in mind of the old joke: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

Sometimes when I look at the past three chief executives, I wonder if we were witnessing not three presidencies but three psychodramas played out on an intensely public stage.

What accounts for Mr. Obama’s confidence and certainty?

Well, if you were a young progressive who’d won the presidency by a comfortable margin in a center-right country, you just might think you were a genius. You might not be surprised to find yourself surrounded by a cultish admiration: “They see him as a fabled figure,” said a frequent White House visitor of some on the president’s staff.

You might think the great strength you demonstrated during the campaign—an ability to stay in the game you’re playing and not the game someone else is playing, an ability to proceed undistracted by the crises or the machinations of your opponents, but to just keep playing your slow and steady game—is a strength suitable to your presidency. If you choose to play health care, that’s the game you play, straight through, no jeers from the crowd distracting you.

If you were a young progressive who’d won the presidency against the odds, you probably wouldn’t see yourself as someone who lucked out, with the stars perfectly aligned for a liberal victory. And you might forget we are more or less and functionally a 50-50 country, and that you have to keep your finger very much on the pulse of the people if you’re to survive and prosper.

And now here are two growing problems for Mr. Obama.

The first hasn’t become apparent yet, but I suspect will be presenting itself, and soon. In order to sharpen the air of crisis he seems to think he needed to get his health-care legislation passed, in order to continue the air of crisis that might justify expanding government and sustaining its costs, and in order, always, to remind voters of George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has harped on what a horror the economy is. How great our challenges, how wicked our businessmen, how dim our future.

This is a delicate business. You can’t be all rosy glow, you have to be candid. But attitude and mood matter. America has reached the point, a year and a half into the crisis, when frankly it needs some cheerleading. It can’t always be mourning in America. We need some inspiration from the top, need someone who can speak with authority of what is working and can be made to work, of what is good and cause for pride. We are still employing 130 million people, and America is still competitive in the world, with innovative business leaders and practices.

The president can’t be a hope purveyor while he’s a doom merchant, and he appears to believe he has to be a doom merchant to justify ramming through his legislation. This particular legislation is not worth that particular price.

All this contributes to a second problem, which is a growing credibility gap. In his speech Wednesday, demanding an “up or down” vote, the president seemed convinced and committed—but nothing he said sounded true. His bill will “bring down the cost of health care for millions,” it is “fully paid for,” it will lower the long term deficit by a trillion dollars.

Does anyone believe this? Does anyone who knows the ways of government, the compulsions of Congress, and how history has played out in the past, believe this? Even a little? Rep. Bart Stupak said Thursday that he and several of his fellow Democrats won’t vote for the Senate version of the bill because it says right there on page 2,069 that the federal government would directly subsidize abortions. The bill’s proponents say this isn’t so. It would be a relief to have a president who could weigh in believably and make clear what his own bill says. But he seems to devote more words to obscuring than clarifying.

The only thing that might make his assertions sound believable now is if a group of congressional Republicans were standing next to him on the podium and putting forward a bill right along with him. Which, obviously, won’t happen, for three reasons. First, they enjoy his discomfort. Second, they believe the bill is not worth saving, that at this point no matter what it contains—and at this point most people can no longer retain in their heads what it contains—it has been fatally tainted by the past year of mistakes and inadequacies.

And the third reason is that the past decade has taught them what a disaster looks like, and they’ve lost their taste for standing next to one.

Boy, that didn’t work.

Nothing in the health-care summit promised greater progress or movement. Positions started out hardened, and likely ended so. Good faith and generosity did not flourish. Some people said some smart things. The Republicans seemed fortified not with Ovaltine but, in some cases, Espresso. No normal human watching the debate could determine with complete confidence who was being forthcoming about the meaning of this facet of the Senate bill or that subclause in Section D. And so the viewers probably judged things along party lines. “You can’t trust politicians.” “At least Democrats care.”

It’s already de rigueur to say no normal humans were watching, but on a snowy day on the Eastern Seaboard, with a maturing population, in a nation of TV watchers, and on a subject that for a year has aroused passions, plenty of normal people would have been watching.

Which is not, I think, good news for the president. Mr. Obama will not have helped himself by his manner. The summit highlighted, even showcased, something unappealing and unhelpful there, a tendency to attempt to show dominance and command by patronizing, even subtly bullying, even trimming. All people in public life have moments like this—most people do, in whatever walk—but you’re not supposed to have them when you’re trying to sway minds, reach out and build support.

Which left me doubting that was what he was actually trying to do.

The way the meeting was arranged, the president was the teacher, the lecturer. Arrayed before him were the bright if occasionally unruly students. He was keen to establish that it was his meeting—he decides who speaks next and who should wrap up, he decides what is and is not “a legitimate point.” He was Mr. President, they were John and Lamar. He wielded a shiny pen like an anchorman eager to show depth and ease. He even said, “There was an imbalance in the opening statements because—I’m the president.” Yowza. Grace shows strength, accommodation shows security. This showed—well, not strength. When Rep. Eric Cantor attempted to make a sharp point, the president took the camera off him by calling for his aides and conferring with them as Mr. Cantor spoke.

The president has entered a boorish phase.

This is not a good sign for his program, but tells us something about his likely next step.

The president opened his remarks saying he is concerned about deficits, and then turned to standard, heart-rending anecdotes about the sick and uninsured. If we do nothing, he said, costs will only get worse; moving now is not reckless but prudent. He put the congressmen on the defensive: We in government have the best health care in the world, why can’t everyone else? His mother’s last days were consumed by arguing with insurance companies. He cleverly brought up past statements by the Republicans present in which they criticized and called for change in the U.S. health care system. The past year of debate has descended into “a very ideological battle” in which “Politics wound up . . . trumping common sense.” But there’s still time to reason together. Let’s focus on what we agree on.

One thing about Mr. Obama is that he is in many ways an unusually true-to-form political figure. Nothing forces him off his subject. Opposition doesn’t deflect him. He also, as he demonstrated in the 2008 debates, likes to speak long to take the oxygen out of the room, to tire his opponents and leave them having to decide which of his many statements to address first.

After he spoke, the great question was: Would the Republicans come alive? Would they make coherent arguments? The choice of Sen. Lamar Alexander as the first GOP spokesman was smart. In a folksy, easygoing manner he told the president the American people do not support his bill. We think we have good ideas to reduce health care costs, he said. He offered a heart-rending anecdote of his own. He said we have to put the current bills on the shelf and start new, “with a clean sheet.” He outlined issues of potential agreement. When Mr. Obama spoke, the Republicans looked at him. When Mr. Alexander spoke, the president watched, stony-faced, and took notes.

Mr. Alexander acknowledged what I’ve called the Comprehensiveness Blight, the tendency of Congress to put together thousand-page omnibus bills that the public refuses to back because they don’t trust Congress not to hide self-serving mischief within them. Mr. Alexander called for smaller, shorter, clearer bills that tackle discrete problems. At this point the president was wearing a face that was no doubt meant to look thoughtful, but actually looked hostile.

It is hard in politics to control the face.

Mr. Alexander ended by asking the president to renounce the idea of banging his bill through the Senate with 51 votes. “It’s not appropriate” to rewrite the rules of 17% of the US economy through what is called “reconciliation.” Don’t go “jamming it through.” “Let’s start over.”

Mr. Alexander was a good GOP spokesman because there is a certain credibility to his bipartisan approach. When I asked him a few days before the summit if Washington was broken, he was keen to speak of working successfully with Democrats on energy and education. “There’s plenty of opportunities to get results,” he said, and he seemed to mean it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was fascinating, though not because of what she said. She has high energy, an air of pleasure in her life, and always looks like a lady, putting in the time and effort it takes for a busy woman to be chic and attractive. She is like someone who walks into politics each day as if she wants to physically adorn it. This I take to be a patriotic act. Her remarks were dull and witless. Nothing she said was the fruit of fresh thought. She offered cornball, off-point clichés about the kitchen table: “We don’t have time to start over!” “I’ve seen grown men cry.” It was a speech that could have been given at a Democratic party fund-raiser, and no doubt has been. What runs her and keeps her from embarrassment is the lovely, unquestioned conviction that she is right and that’s that. There are politicians whose strengths come from their limits. Her limit is that she cannot, ever, see truth on the other side. The steel of her certitude becomes her strength. It allows her to squash opponents legislatively like little bugs.

It was interesting that while Sen. Alexander spoke to the room and not the cameras, she spoke to the cameras and not the room.

Which seemed to say it all.

The whole point of the summit, I believe, was for the Democrats, to win whatever support remains for the bill they will attempt to ram home in the Congress, and for the Republicans to prove they are not the party of “no” but a party of serious ideas and intentions.

It was a talking-point festival. Nobody moved the needle. The Democrats emoted, making appeals to the sentiment. The Republicans analyzed, sometimes indignantly, but their statements often seemed disconnected, as if their plans lack a framework that coheres.

At odds with his party’s health-care style was the president, who has the certitude but not the passions of an ideologue.

What the meeting made clear is what the Democrats are going to do—not step back and save the moderates of their party but attempt to bully a bill through the Congress.

This is boorish of them, and they’ll suffer for it.

President Obama’s decision to appoint Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to his bipartisan commission on government spending is politically shrewd and, in terms of policy, potentially helpful.

It is shrewd in that he is doing what he has been urged to do, which is bring in wise men. Here are two respected Beltway veterans, one from each party. It shows the president willing to do what he said he’d do when he ran, which is listen to other voices. The announcement subtly underscores the trope “The system is broken and progress through normal channels is impossible,” which is the one Democrats prefer to “Boy did we mess up the past year and make things worse.” And the commission gets some pressure off the president. Every time he’s knocked for spending, he can say “I agree, it’s terrible. Help me tell the commission!”

It’s potentially helpful in that good ideas may come of it, some rough and realistic Washington consensus encouraged.

Is it too late? Maybe. Even six months ago, when the president’s growing problems with the public were becoming apparent, the commission and its top appointees might have been received as fresh and hopeful—the adults have arrived, the system can be made to work. Republicans would have felt forced to be part of it, or seen the gain in partnership. Now it looks more as if the president is trying to save his own political life. Timing is everything.

But this is an interesting time. It’s easy to say that concern about federal spending is old, because it is. It’s at least as old as Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But the national anxiety about spending that we’re experiencing now, and that is showing up in the polls, is new. The past eight years have concentrated the American mind. George W. Bush’s spending, the crash and Barack Obama’s spending have frightened people. It’s not just “cranky right-wingers” who are concerned. If it were, the president would not have appointed his commission. Its creation acknowledges that independents are anxious, the center is alarmed—the whole country is. The people are ahead of their representatives in Washington, who are stuck in the ick of old ways.

Conservatives all my adulthood have said the American people were, on the issue of spending, the frog in the pot of water: The rising heat lulled him, and when the water came full boil, he wouldn’t be able to jump out.

But that is the great achievement, if you will, of the past few years. The frog is coming awake at just the last moment. He is jumping out of the water.

People are freshly aware and concerned about the real-world implications of a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit, of a $14 trillion debt. It will rob America of its economic power, and eventually even of its ability to defend itself. Militaries cost money. And if other countries own our debt, don’t they in some new way own us? If China holds enough of your paper, does it also own some of your foreign policy? Do we want to find out? And there are the moral implications of the debt, which have so roused the tea-party movement: The old vote themselves benefits that their children will have to pay for. What kind of a people do that?

It has been two or three years since I have heard a Republican or conservative say deficits don’t matter. Huge ones do, period. As for Democrats and new spending, the air is, for now, out of the balloon.

A question among Republicans is whether to back, as a party, Rep. Paul Ryan’s road map, his far-reaching and creative attempt to cut the deficit and the debt. The Congressional Budget Office says its numbers add up: It would, actually, remove the deficit in the long term. But the Ryan plan is, inevitably, as complicated as the entitlements it seeks to reform, involving vouchers and tax credits, cost controls and privatization. It is always possible that this is right for the moment, for the new antispending era. But the party itself has some other jobs right now, and one of them is to encourage the circumstances that will make real change possible. Here the abstract collides with the particular.

In the long run the Republicans have to do two things, and one they probably cannot do alone, or rather probably cannot do without holding the presidency, and a gifted president he would have to be. They have to prepare the ground for an American decision—a decision by a solid majority of America’s adults—that they can faithfully back specific cuts in federal spending: that they can trust the cuts will be made fairly, that we will all be treated equally, that no finagling pols will sneak in “protection” for this pet interest group or that power lobby, that we are in this together as a nation and can make progress together as a nation.

This is a huge job, and may ultimately require one strong and believable voice.

Second the Republicans should tread delicately while moving forward seriously. Voters are feeling as never before in recent political history the vulnerability of their individual positions. There is no reason to believe they are interested in highly complicated and technical reforms, the kind that go under the heading “homework.” As in: “I know my future security depends on understanding this thing and having a responsible view, but I cannot make it out. My whole life is homework. I cannot do more.”

We are not a nation of accountants, however much our government tries to turn us into one.

Margaret Thatcher once told me what she learned from the poll-tax protests that prompted her downfall. She said she learned in a deeper way how anxious people are, how understandably questioning and even suspicious they are of governmental reforms and changes: “They’re frightened, you see.” None of us feel we have a wide enough margin for error.

Americans lack trust that government will act in good faith, which is part of why they’re anxious. They look at every bill, proposal and idea with an eye to hidden horrors.

The good news is the new consensus that America must move forward in a new way to get spending under control. The bad news is we don’t trust Washington to do it. And in the end, only Washington can.

Paul Ryan is doing exactly what a representative who’s actually serious should do—putting forward innovative and honest ideas for long-term solutions. He should continue going to the people with it, making his case and seeing how they respond, from the Tennessee Tea Party to the Bergen County, N.J., Republican Club. Maybe a movement will start, maybe not. But it’s a good conversation to be having.

The GOP itself should be going forward with its philosophy, with the things it’s long stood for and, in some cases, newly rediscovered, and painting the broader picture of the implications of endless, compulsive high spending. Those lawmakers who have a good reputation in this area—Sen. Tom Coburn is one—should be moved forward more prominently. Congressmen who focus on earmarks, on controllable spending, are doing something wise. They are trying to demonstrate that those who can be trusted with small things—cutting back what can be removed now—can be trusted with larger things.

There is, I think, an amazing political fact right now that is hiding in plain sight and is rich with implications. It was there in President Obama’s Jan. 25, pre-State of the Union interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who was pressing him about his political predicaments. “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he said. “And I—and I believe that.”

Now this is the sort of thing presidents say, and often believe they believe, but at the end of the day they all want two terms. Except that Mr. Obama shows every sign of meaning it, and if he does, it explains a lot about his recent decisions and actions.

A week after the Sawyer interview, the president had a stunning and revealing exchange with Sen. Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat likely to lose her 2010 re-election campaign. He was meeting with Senate Democrats to urge them to continue with his legislative agenda. Mrs. Lincoln took the opportunity to beseech him to change it. She urged him to distance his administration from “people who want extremes,” and to find “common ground” with Republicans in producing legislation that would give those in business the “certainty” they need to create jobs.

While answering, Mr. Obama raised his voice slightly and quickened his cadence. “If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place.” He continued: “If our response ends up being, you know . . . we don’t want to stir things up here,” then “I don’t know why people would say, ‘Boy, we really want to make sure those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.’”

When I saw the videotape later, I wondered how the senator, now down by as much as 23 points in her bid for re-election, felt. Actually I wanted to ask, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane, one of the few journalists to note the exchange, said he found it revealing in two ways: First, the president equates becoming more centrist with becoming more like George W. Bush, and second, he apparently sees movement to the center as a political loser.

These are two surprising things to think, and they have contributed to our astonishing political moment, in which a popular young president who won by 9.5 million votes 15 months ago has seen support for his programs slip to the point that a Gallup poll this week found him running even with a nameless Republican in 2012.

His reaction to all this is striking. He doesn’t seem a man at sea who’s flailing and trying to grab any deck chair that floats by. He seems a man who is certain he is right, in the long term if not in the day-to-day. And if the cost of being right is a single term, then so be it. Which, again, is not how presidents usually think. And not how legislators, who live to be re-elected, want the president of their party to think.

This touches on the still-essential question that historians will write books about: How did the president lose the room? How did he lose popularity?

The leftward edge of the left says he did it by being too accommodating, by trying for a bipartisanship that doesn’t exist. The rightward edge of the right says he did it by revealing his essentially socialistic agenda. The center has said, in polls and at the polls, that it didn’t like his administration’s first-year obsession with a health-care bill that was huge, costly and impenetrably complicated, and would be run by those people who gave you the DMV and the post office.

The political class this week blamed it on the Chicago Mafia, the longtime Obama friends and associates who surround him in the Oval Office. But even that doesn’t explain it. What did they do wrong? And why do people think Mr. Obama’s advisers are different from Mr. Obama?

Washington’s pundits have begun announcing that the White House is better at campaigning than at governing, but that was obvious last summer. The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It’s how they defeated Hillary Clinton—by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr. Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W. Bush.

But now it is 2010, and Mr. Bush is gone. Mr. Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life.

But there’s something else that has led Mr. Obama to his falling poll numbers. When FDR followed the disaster that was Herbert Hoover, he took a new and different path. The government would now hold a new place in the daily American reality. When Ronald Reagan followed the disaster that was Jimmy Carter, he took a new and different path. The federal government would be pushed back from its intrusions on Americans. But when Barack Obama took over after the disaster that was George W. Bush, he did not, in terms of the most pressing domestic issue after unemployment, take a new and different path. He spent, just like Mr. Bush, only even more. It was as if he were saying, “You think Bush broke the bank? I’ll show you what a broken bank looks like.” This isn’t a departure, it’s a doubling down.

One can argue that in some areas Mr. Obama had little choice—an economy in collapse, a desperate attempt to prop it up. But he initiated plenty of spending that involved plenty of choice, and that garnered little centrist support.

Do the Democrats have hope? Oh, yes. Many Republicans spent the past year watching the president self-destruct, and not getting in the way while he did. A lot of Democrats will spend the next year hoping the Republicans self-destruct by overplaying their hand, by coming up with their own legislation and policy ideas that leave the center, and the middle class, anxious.

Republicans have a recent history of overplaying their hand when up against Democrats with difficulties. It can be hard in policy decisions to determine the difference between what is brave and what is foolhardy, what is desirable and what is possible, especially in a time such as this, when few feel secure. If the Republicans begin to jabber about the abstract and theoretical, they will find the public has little appetite for it. If they amuse themselves with speculation about the potential popularity of “playing the war card,” they will find out that war, actually, is not as popular as they think, and is not, actually, a card.

Democrats in Congress, on the other hand, may choose this spring to save themselves by revolting—not only against the Republicans, but against the possible one-termer who jeopardizes their positions.

There’s renewed interest in Question Time, or rather in the idea of trying to import in some fashion the British parliamentary institution whereby the prime minister appears each Wednesday in the House of Commons in order to take questions and debate. The idea of an American version came up after the president’s meeting last week with House Republicans, which was notable in that it was televised, mildly informative, and did no harm.

If you’ve watched Question Time over the years on C-Span, you know it is high political theatre. “Will the prime minister admit the National Health System as presently constituted is bankrupting the nation, indifferent to the needy, and, as the failure it is, represents a vast, unmet promise the minister’s party cynically forgot the minute it took power?” Hear hear! Grrrr! Shut up you palsied sot! Followed by, “How very refreshing and even touching it is to see the member from Manchester’s newfound concern for, or even awareness of, the poor.” Hear! Answer the question! Shut up, you mincing prat!

The American version might not translate so well. The Brits have a certain tradition of elegance in debate, and enjoy insulting each other. American politicians are more conflicted about obvious aggression, not about feeling it but showing it—it might not play well!—and so they tend to go under or over the line. “You lie!” “Yeah? Well you’re blankin’ developmentally challenged!” We will miss Fritz Hollings, the former Democratic senator who once said to then-Sen. John Glenn, in a presidential primary debate, “But what have you done in the world?”

If an American version could take place regularly, outside Congress and on neutral territory, as the gangs say in “West Side Story,” there could be benefits. It would momentarily force members and the president to focus together on what’s actually happening this week, and, more important, it might force members of Congress to be more familiar with the bills they support. They might actually have to know what’s in them and show a grasp of details. This might tend to produce fewer omnibus bills. “You expect me to know and talk about what’s in that? It’s 2,000 pages! Cut it down to 20 and give it a new name.”

So an American Question Time might be nice. But it’s not what’s needed.

*   *   *

I don’t know the precise word for what’s needed, but it has a context.

Both our political parties continue, even though they know they shouldn’t, even though they’re each composed of individuals many of whom actually know what time it is, even though they know we are in an extraordinary if extended moment, an ongoing calamity connected to our economic future, our nation’s standing in the world, our strength and our safety—even though they know all this, they continue to go through the daily motions, fund raising, vote counting, making ads with demon sheep, blasting out the latest gaffe of the other team. Our political professionals cheapen everything they touch because they are burying themselves in daily urgencies in order to dodge and avoid the big picture.

Here’s the big picture, or rather part of it. It was Tuesday afternoon in Washington, a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Chairman Dianne Feinstein threw the leaders of America’s intelligence agencies a question: “What is the likelihood of another terrorist-attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months, high or low?”

The director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, replied, “An attempted attack, the likelihood is certain I would say.”

“I would agree,” said CIA Director Leon Panetta.

FBI Director Robert Mueller also agreed.

We all saw the sound bite on the news. It flashed on the screen as you ran to catch your flight, or walked by the TV in your home. It’s hardly the first time government leaders have made such a prediction. They issue studies and papers saying things like this a lot. A deeply, darkly cynical person might wonder if they make such statements so they can say, when it happens, that they told us, it’s not their fault, they warned us. And if it doesn’t, they must have done something right.

No one seeing the Feinstein hearing thought, “That’s not true, what alarmists.” Everyone knows it’s true. People more likely thought, “I wonder where I’ll be when I hear the news. I wonder if I or mine will be the news, among those in the mall, at the show, in the building or the plane.”

America doesn’t need to be told that something bad will happen. America needs to be told what is being done, what will be done and what can be done, how together we’ll get through it, what information and attitude to take into the future. They don’t need to be made anxious, they need to be recruited into a common endeavor.

Instead both parties, understandably and yet wickedly, destructively, irresponsibly, use the nation’s safety as another issue on which to protect their political position.

At the Feinstein hearings, the head of the FBI said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underwear bomber in a federal prison outside Detroit, is offering new information to investigators. Politico soon had a story by Mike Allen and Kasie Hunt saying a “law-enforcement source” told them, “The information has been active, useful, and we have been following up. The intelligence is not stale.”

Assuming this is true, is it good that Abdulmutallab’s friends back in Yemen, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Dubai, London and Houston, all of which he reportedly visited in the years leading up to his terror attempt, be told this? Is it good they be informed he is likely giving them up? Does it help us to warn them?

The claim of Abdulmutallab’s post-Miranda talkativeness followed Republican accusations that the administration has been lax, lumbering and unfocused in its attitude toward terrorism. And this criticism is not illegitimate. The administration seems lately to acknowledge the reality of the war on terror in the abstract, but to be consistently surprised by it, or unwilling to acknowledge it, in the particular.

But the tendency of both parties to default to politics when they think about terrorism—“You’re weak,” “No, you’re bellicose,” “You’re avoiding reality to advance some dreamy geopolitical vision,” “You’re exploiting reality to make cheap points”—cannot be heartening to the public.

I think sometimes of the suburbs around Washington, which are planted thick with knowledgable veterans of government—old national-security and foreign-policy hands, patriots of both parties who’ve served within government, in and out of the military. How painful it must be for them to watch all this, knowing what they know and understanding that political party, at a time like this, means nothing. There is so much experience to share, and so much wisdom, from both parties. I wish those old hands had more say.

The biggest historic gain of this administration may turn out to be that Democrats in the White House experienced leadership in the age of terror, came to have responsibility in a struggle that needs and will need our focus. It wasn’t good that half the country thought jihadism was some little Republican obsession.

But both parties should sober up. The day after the next bad thing, we will all come together, because that is what we do. Republicans and Democrats will work together, for a while.

It would be better to do it now. It is their job to do it now.

When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you’re always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it’s awkward. The vice president and the speaker have been instructed by media professionals not to let their eyes do what they want to do, which is survey the doings in the chamber. Instead they must stare unwaveringly at the back of the president’s head. This is so that they appear to be fascinated by what he’s saying, as if he’s so interesting that they can’t take their eyes off him. It’s also so that you, the viewer, don’t become distracted by wondering whom they’re looking at in the audience.

It’s uncomfortable for them, and boring. You, as a member of the TV audience, get to watch the president. The speaker and the vice president get to think, “Huh, he’s getting a little gray in the back.” The reason Nancy Pelosi often seems a little dart-eyed in these circumstances is that she’s always trying to get a look at the chamber when she thinks the camera isn’t on her. Joe Biden seems happy to be the fascinated person with crinkly eyes and shining teeth. But for Mrs. Pelosi it’s a challenge. This is her chamber, all her people are here, and she wants to be looking at John Boehner’s face and Harry Reid’s and see who’s cheering and who’s wearing what.

But the three-shot the other night was also the president’s problem. It underscored that he gave the first year of his presidency to the Democrats of Congress, that they wrote the costly and unpopular health-care and spending bills.

James Baker, that shrewd and knowing man, never, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, allowed his president to muck about with congressmen, including those of his own party. A president has stature and must be held apart from Congress critters. He can meet with them privately, in the Oval Office. There, once, a Republican senator who’d announced opposition to a bill important to the president tried to claim his overall loyalty: “Mr. President, you know I’d jump out of a plane for you if you asked, but—“

“Jump,” said Reagan. The senator, caught, gave in.

That’s how you treat them. You don’t let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don’t let them call the big shots.

*   *   *

President Obama’s speech was not a pivot, a lunge or a plunge. It was a little of this and a little of that, a groping toward a place where the president might successfully stand. It was well written and performed with élan. The president will get some bounce from it, and the bounce will go away. Speeches are not magic, and this one did not rescue him from his political predicament, but it did allow him to live to fight another day. In that narrow way it was a success. But divisions may already have hardened. In our current media and political environment, it is a terrible thing to make a bad impression in your first year.

There were strong moments. Of what he frankly called the “bank bailout,” he observed: “I hated it. You hated it.” His unfancy language was always the most interesting: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit.” The president conceded, with striking brevity, having made mistakes, but defensively misstated the criticism that had been leveled his way. He said he was accused of being “too ambitious.” In fact he’d been accused of being off point, unresponsive and ideological.

They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it the “New Foundation.” They sneaked it in rather tentatively, probably not sure it would take off. It won’t. Such labels work when they clearly capture something that is already clear. “The New Deal” captured FDR’s historic shift to an increased governmental presence in individual American lives. It was a new deal. “The New Frontier”—we are a young and vibrant nation still, and adventures await us in space and elsewhere. It was a mood, not a program, but a mood well captured.

“The New Foundation” is solid and workmanlike, but it attempts to put form and order to a governing philosophy that is still too herky-jerky to be summed up.

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

The people are good but need guidance—from Washington. The middle class is anxious, and its fears can be soothed—by Washington. Washington can “make sure consumers . . . have the information they need to make financial decisions.” Washington must “make investments,” “create” jobs, increase “production” and “efficiency.”

At the same time Washington is a place “where every day is Election Day,” where all is a “perpetual campaign” and the great sport is to “embarrass your opponents” and lob “schoolyard taunts.”

Why would anyone have faith in that thing to help anyone do anything?

The president did not speak of health care until a half hour in. “As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed.” Then, “If anyone has a better idea, let me know.” Those bland little sentences hidden in plain sight heralded an epic fact: The battle over the president’s health-care plan is over, and the plan will not be imposed on the country. Waxing boring on the virtues of the bill was a rhetorical way to obscure the fact that it is dead. To say, “I’m licked and it’s done” would have been damagingly memorable. Instead he blithely vowed to move forward, and moved on. The bill will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed soufflé in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house. Now and then the president will speak of it to rouse his base and remind them of his efforts.

All this got hidden in the speech. In unconscious emulation it even got hidden in this column.

*   *   *

As the TV cameras panned the chamber, I saw a friendly acquaintance of the president, a Republican who bears him no animus. Why, I asked him later, did the president not move decisively to the political center?

Because he is more “intellectually honest” than that, he said. “I don’t think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he’s not a pragmatist, he’s an ideologue. He’s a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity.”

The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. “To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats” in terms of spending. “Almost.”

“I hope we have big changes in 2010,” the friend said. Only significant loss will force the president to focus on spending. “To heal our country we need to get the arrogance out of the White House and the elitists out of the Congress. We need tough love. We need a real adult in the White House because we don’t have adults in the Congress.”

What does the Massachusetts election mean? It means America is in play again. The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.

America never stops moving now.

Massachusetts said, “Yes, we want change, but the change we want is not the change that has been delivered by the Democratic administration and the Democratic Congress. So we will turn elsewhere.”

We are in a postromantic political era. They hire you and fire you, nothing personal. Family connection, personal charm, old traditions, fealty to party, all are nice and have their place, but right now we are immersed in crisis, and we vote on policies that affect our lives.

It is not the end of something so much as the beginning of something. Ted Kennedy took his era with him. But what has begun is something new and potentially promising.

President Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points on Nov. 4, 2008. Fifteen months later, on Jan. 19, 2010, the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration, his party’s candidate lost Massachusetts by five points. That’s a 31-point shift. Mr. Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008. A year later, on Nov. 2, 2009, his party’s candidate for governor lost by 18 points—a 25 point shift. Mr. Obama won New Jersey in 2008 by 16 points. In 2009 his party’s incumbent governor lost re-election by four points—a 20-point shift.

In each race, the president’s party lost independent voters, who in 2008 voted like Democrats and in 2010 voted like Republicans.

Is it a backlash? It seems cooler than that, a considered and considerable rejection that appears to be signaling a conservative resurgence based on issues and policies, most obviously opposition to increased government spending, fear of higher taxes, and rejection of the idea that expansion of government can or will solve our economic challenges.

And it’s taking place within a particular context.

Speaking broadly: In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look. If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the bed, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.

In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, “Uh-oh, he’s a Nut!”

Which meant they were left with the Creeps.

But the Republican candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, and now Scott Brown in Massachusetts, did something amazing. They played the part of the Creep very badly! They put themselves forward as serious about spending, as independent, not narrowly partisan. Mr. Brown rarely mentioned he was a Republican, and didn’t even mention the party in his victory speech. Importantly, their concerns were on the same page as the voters’. They focused on the relationship between spending and taxing, worried about debt and deficits, were moderate in their approach to social issues. They didn’t have wedge issues, they had issues.

The contest between the Nuts and the Creeps may be ending. The Nuts just got handed three big losses, and will have to have a meeting in Washington to discuss whether they’ve gotten too nutty. But the Creeps have kind of had their meetings—in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts. And what seems to be emerging from that is a new and nonsnarling Republicanism. It may be true—and they will demonstrate in time if it is true—that they have learned from past defeats, absorbed the lessons, reconsidered the meaning of politics. Maybe in time it will be said of this generation of Republicans what André Malraux said to Whittaker Chambers after reading his memoir, “Witness”: “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

For Mr. Brown now, everything depends on execution. He made the Olympics. Now he has to do the swan dive, with a billion people watching. And then he has to do it again.
More Peggy Noonan

He needs to serve the country the way he campaigned for votes—earnest, open, not beholden to interest or party. And he needs to avoid the Descent of the Congressional Vampires, who’ll attempt to claim his victory as their own and suck from his neck until he’s a pale and lifeless husk. Not to understate. But they’ll want him fund-raising and speaking all over the country, not knowing or perhaps caring that the best work he can do for his party is succeeding in the eyes of his constituents, who couldn’t care less about the fortunes of the GOP. He needs to avoid the vampires in the nicest possible way. Maybe he should carry a little cross deep inside his breast pocket so they retreat without knowing why: “I tried to get him to Boca for the donor retreat but some invisible force stopped me! I ran backwards and slipped on the shiny marble floor! Mah hip is out! “

In a telephone conversation Wednesday night, Mr. Brown spoke of what’s ahead. The conversation turned to the movie “The Candidate,” to the moment Robert Redford wins the election and takes a top strategist aside to ask: “What do we do now?”

Mr. Brown laughed: “I know what I want to do: Go down there and be a good person, a good and competent senator. I have huge shoes to fill, the legacy is just overwhelming. I’m a consensus builder. . . . I can disagree in the daytime and have a coffee or beer later on. Everyone’s welcome to their opinion.”

He said he thought the president “inherited a lot of problems,” that “he’s doing a great job with North Korea, a nice job with Afghanistan.” A centerpiece of Mr. Brown’s campaign was opposition to the president’s health-care plan, but he stressed that he opposes high spending wherever it comes from. “I’ve criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There’s plenty of blame to go around. The question is how to solve problems. It’s not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That’s how we’re gonna do it, not by enlarging government.”

The next morning he took the 7 a.m. shuttle from Boston to Washington for his first trip to the Capitol. On the plane, after they took off, the pilot came on and said, “Senator Brown is on board, on his way to Washington.” The plane erupted in applause.

That’s a good way to begin. It reminded me of 12 months before, on the shuttle to Washington, with a plane full of people on their way to the inauguration of Barack Obama. The pilot spoke of it, and the plane erupted in cheers.

That feels like another era. Because America keeps moving, the plates keep shifting, and execution is everything. Everything.

The first thing I learned in journalism is that every story has a name. At WEEI News Radio in Boston, the editor would label each story with one word, called a “slug,” and assign a writer to write it for air. This week’s devastating earthquake would be slugged “Haiti.” A story about a gruesome murder might be “Nightmare.”

We’re at the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the slug, the word that captures its essence, is “Disconnect.”

This is, still, a surprising word to use about the canny operatives who so perfectly judged the public mood in 2008. But they haven’t connected since.

There is a disconnect, a detachment, a distance between the president’s preoccupations and the concerns of the people. There’s a disconnect between his policy proposals and the people’s sense, as expressed in polls, of what the immediate problems are.

I’m not referring to what is being called the president’s rhetorical disconnect. In this criticism, he is not emotional enough when he speaks, he doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, he is aloof, like a lab technician observing the movements within a petri dish called America. It may be true that this doesn’t help him, but so what? In a successful presidency, his cool demeanor would be called an interesting facet, not a problem. And we don’t really need presidents to move us, when you think about it. We need them to lead, and in the right direction.

Nor am I referring to an iconic disconnect. In this criticism, the president refuses to or is unable to act as a paternal figure. “A president is a father,” say these critics. “He must comfort us.” But, actually, your father is your father. Voters didn’t hire Mr. Obama to play the old dad in the MGM movie. In any case he always seemed like the bright older brother, not the father. At the end of the day you, being a grown-up, don’t need him to be your daddy, do you?

You want a competent chief executive with a deep and shrewd sense of the people. Americans want him to be on the same page as they are. But he’s on a different page, and he may in fact be reading a different book. Thus the latest Quinnipiac poll, which puts his approval/disapproval at a descending 45% to 45%. Pure hunch: The approval number is probably slightly high because people don’t want to disapprove of their new president—the stakes are so high!—and don’t like telling pollsters they disapprove of him.

The real story is that his rhetorical and iconic detachment are harped on because they reflect a deeper disconnect, the truly problematic one, and that is over policy. It doesn’t really matter how he sounds. It matters, in a time of crisis, what he does. That’s where the lack of connection comes in.

The people are here, and he is there. The popularity of his health care plan is very low, at 35% support. Someone on television the other day noted it is as low as George Bush’s popularity ratings in 2008.

Yet—and this is the key part—the president does not seem to see or hear. He does not respond. He is not supple, able to hear reservations and see opposition and change tack. He has a grim determination to bull this thing through. He negotiates each day with Congress, not with the people. But the people hate Congress! Has he not noticed?

The people have come alive on the issue of spending—it’s too high, it threatens us! He spends more. Everywhere I go, I hear talk of “hidden taxes” and a certainty that state and federal levies will go up, putting a squeeze on a middle and upper middle classes that have been squeezed like oranges and are beginning to see themselves as tired old rinds. Mr. Obama seems at best disconnected from this anxiety.

The disconnect harms him politically, but more important it suggests a deepening gulf between the people and their government, which only adds to growling, chafing national discontent. It also put the president in the position, only one year in, only 12 months into a brand-new glistening presidency, of seeming like the same old same old. There’s something tired in all this disconnect, something old-fashioned, something sclerotic and 1970’s about it.

And of course the public is reacting. All politicians are canaries in coal mines, they’re always the first to feel the political atmosphere. It was significant when the Democrats lost the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey two months ago. It is significant that a handful of House and Senate Democrats have decided not to run this year. And it is deeply significant that a Republican state senator in Massachusetts, Scott Brown, may topple the Democratic nominee to fill Ted Kennedy’s former seat, Martha Coakley. In a way, the Republicans have already won—it’s a real race, it’s close, and in “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts”!

Mr. Brown’s whole story right now is not about disconnect but connect. Massachusetts has an 8.8% unemployment rate, and graduates of the commonwealth’s great universities can’t find work. An old Boston Republican hand said of the race, “It’s 100% percent about policies—health care, taxes, what’s the plan on the economy?” Mr. Brown charges that Ms. Coakley’s support for cap and trade and health care will amount to $2 trillion in taxes in the next five years.

Ms. Coakley has the advantage—Massachusetts is the heart of blue-state America—but in a way her advantage is her curse. Because she is the candidate of a party that for 40 years has been used to winning, reigning and winning again, she looks like the same old same old, a standard old-line liberal, the frontwoman for a machine, a yes woman for the Obama-Pelosi era.

It is interesting that Ms. Coakley, too, has been told by pundits the past week that her problem is that she’s not emotional enough. She should show passion and fire! She should cry like Hillary!

This comes not only from pundits but normal people, and if you contemplate the meaning it is, weirdly: You’re not good enough at manipulating us! We want more theatrics!

Both national parties are trying to pour in money and resources, but the most obnoxious intrusion must have been the fund-raising letter this week from New York’s Sen. Charles Schumer, who tried to rouse the troops by calling Mr. Brown a “far-right teabagger.” Does that kind of thing even work anymore? Doesn’t name calling put off anyone not already predisposed to agree with it?

In a time when the people of Massachusetts have real concerns about their ability to make a living, stuff like the Schumer letter is just more evidence of a party’s disconnect.

*   *   *

Politics is about policy. It’s not about who’s emotional and who cries or makes you cry. It’s not about big political parties and the victories they need in order to rule. It’s not about going on some ideological toot, which is what the health-care bill is, hoping the people will someday see and appreciate your higher wisdom.

In a way, Mr. Obama’s disconnection is a sign of the times. We are living in the age of breakup, with so many of the ties that held us together loosening and fraying. If the president wants to lead toward something better, he should try listening. If you can’t connect through the words you speak, at least you can do it through your ability to hear.

Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.

If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, “You didn’t even waste our time successfully.”

What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008—expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009—more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line—and didn’t notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.

In a way Mr. Obama made the same mistake President Bush did on immigration, producing a big, mammoth, comprehensive bill when the public mood was for small, discrete steps in what might reasonably seem the right direction.

The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that—and the victory of it—last winter.

Instead, they were greedy for glory.

It was not worth it—not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public’s concerns and the administration’s are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security.

Those were not only the two topics on the public’s mind the past 10 months, they were precisely the issues that presented themselves in screaming headlines at the end of the year: unemployment and the national-security breakdowns that led to the Christmas bomb plot and, earlier, the Fort Hood massacre. “That’s two strikes,” said the president’s national security adviser, James Jones, to USA Today’s Susan Page. Left unsaid: Three and you’re out.

Just as bad, or worse, the president’s focus on health care allowed the public to infer that his mind was not focused on our security. He’d frittered his attention on issues that were secondary and tertiary—climate change, health care—while al Qaeda moved, and the system stuttered. A lack of focus breeds bureaucratic complacency, complacency gives rise to slovenliness, slovenliness results in what was said in the report issued Thursday: that, faced with clear evidence of coming danger, the government failed, as they’re saying on TV, to “connect the dots.” Dots? They were boulders.

*   *   *

I am wondering if the Obama administration thinks it vaguely dishonorable to be popular. If you mention to Obama staffers that they really have to be concerned about the polls, they look at you with a certain . . . not disdain but patience, as if you don’t understand the purpose of politics. That purpose, they believe, is to move the governed toward greater justice. Just so, but in democracy you do this by garnering and galvanizing public support. But they think it’s weaselly to be well thought of.

In politics you must tend to the garden. The garden is the constituency, in Mr. Obama’s case the country. No great endeavor is possible without its backing. In a modern presidency especially you have to know this, because there will be times when history throws you a crisis, and to address it you may have to do an unpopular thing. A president in those circumstances must use all the goodwill he’s built up over the months and years to get through that moment and survive doing what he thinks is right. Mr. Obama acts as if he doesn’t know this. He hasn’t built up popularity to use on a rainy day. If he had, he’d be getting through the Christmas plot drama better than he is

The Obama people have taken to pointing out how their guy doesn’t govern by the polls. This is all too believable. The Bush people, too, used to bang away about how he didn’t govern by the polls. They both added unneeded stress to the past 10 years, and it is understandable if many of us now think, “Oh for a president who’d govern by the polls.”

If Mr. Obama is extremely lucky—and we’re not sure he’s a lucky man anymore—he will get a Republican Congress in 2010, and they will do for him what Newt Gingrich did for Bill Clinton: right his ship, give him a foil, guide him while allowing him to look as if he’s resisting, bend him while allowing him to look strong.

*   *   *

Which gets us to the Republicans. The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ‘08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious.

I spoke a few weeks ago with a respected Republican congressman who told me with some excitement of a bill he’s put forward to address the growth of entitlements and long-term government spending. We only have three or four years to get it right, he said. He made a strong case. I asked if his party was doing anything to get behind the bill, and he got the blanched look people get when they’re trying to keep their faces from betraying anything. Not really, he said. Then he shrugged. “They’re waiting for the Democrats to destroy themselves.”

This isn’t news, really, but it was startling to hear a successful Republican political practitioner say it.

Republican political professionals in Washington assume a coming victory. They do not see that 2010 could be a catastrophic victory for them. If they seize back power without clear purpose, if they are not serious, if they do the lazy and cynical thing by just sitting back and letting the Democrats lose, three bad things will happen. They will contribute to the air of cynicism in which our citizens marinate. Their lack of seriousness will be discerned by the Republican base, whose enthusiasm and generosity will be blunted. And the Republicans themselves will be left unable to lead when their time comes, because operating cynically will allow the public to view them cynically, which will lessen the chance they will be able to do anything constructive.

In this sense, the cynical view—we can sit back and wait—is naive. The idealistic view—we must stand for things and move on them now—is shrewder.

Political professionals are pugilistic, and often see politics in terms of fight movies: “Rocky,” “Raging Bull.” They should be thinking now of a different one, of Tom Hanks at the end of “Saving Private Ryan.” “Earn this,” he said to the man whose life he’d helped save.

Earn this. Be worthy of it. Be serious.