Peggy Noonan

The great second wave of church scandals appears this week to be settling down. In the Vatican they’re likely thinking “the worst is over” and “we’ve weathered the storm.” Is that good? Not to this Catholic. The more relaxed the institution, the less likely it will reform.

Let’s look at the first wave. Eight years ago, on April 19, 2002, I wrote in these pages of the American church scandal, calling it calamitous, a threat to the standing and reputation of the entire church. Sexual abuse by priests “was the heart of the scandal, but at the same time only the start of the scandal”: the rest was what might be called the racketeering dimension. Lawsuits had been brought charging that the church as an institution acted to cover up criminal behavior by misleading, lying and withholding facts. The most celebrated cases in 2002 were in Boston, where a judge had forced the release of 11,000 pages of church documents showing the abusive actions of priests and detailing then-Archbishop Bernard F. Law’s attempts to hide the crimes. The Boston scandal generated hundreds of lawsuits, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and judgments, and included famous and blood-chilling cases—the repeat sexual abuser Father John Geoghan, who molested scores of boys and girls and was repeatedly transferred, was assigned to a parish in Waltham where he became too familiar with children in a public pool; Cardinal Law claimed he was probably “proselytizing.”

In the piece I criticized Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, who had suggested to the Washington Post that the scandal was media-driven, that journalists are having “a heyday.” Then came the it-wasn’t-so-bad defense: The bishop of Joliet, Ill., Joseph Imesch, said that while priests who sexually abuse children should lose their jobs, priests who sexually abuse adolescents and teenagers have a “quirk” and can be treated and continue as priests.

Really, he called it a quirk.

Does any of this, the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, sound familiar? Isn’t it what we’ve been hearing the past few weeks?

At the end of the piece I called on the pope, John Paul II, to begin to show the seriousness of the church’s efforts to admit, heal and repair by taking the miter from Cardinal Law’s head and the ring from his finger and retiring him: “Send a message to those in the church who need to hear it, that covering up, going along, and paying off victims is over. That careerism is over, and Christianity is back.”

The piece didn’t go over well in the American church, or the Vatican. One interesting response came from Cardinal Law himself, whom I ran into a year later in Rome. “We don’t need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time,” he said. “We need loyalty when the church is going through a tough time.”

I’d suggested in the piece that the rarefied lives cardinals led had contributed to an inability to understand the struggles of others and the pain of those abused, and soon Cardinal Law and I were talking about his mansion outside Boston. He asked me how it would look if he’d refused to live there. I told him it would look good, but more to the point, the church was going to lose the cardinal’s mansion to trial lawyers, and it should sell it first and put the money in schools.

Soon enough the mansion was gone, sold to pay the plaintiffs. Cardinal Law’s successor, Archbishop Sean O’Malley, lives in an apartment in Boston’s South End.

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter once called Cardinal Law “the poster boy” of the American scandal. He has also became the poster boy for the church’s problems in handling the scandal. And that has to do with its old-boy network, with the continued dominance of those who grew up in the old way.

In December 2002, Cardinal Law left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony in what the state’s attorney general, Thomas Reilly, called a massive coverup of child abuse. The cardinal made his way to Rome, where he resigned, and where he stayed with Archbishop James Harvey, a close friend and, as head of the pontifical household, the most powerful American in the Vatican. Within a year Archbishop Harvey, too, was implicated in the scandal: The Dallas Morning News reported the Vatican had promoted a priest through its diplomatic corps even though it had received persistent, high-level warnings that he had sexually abused a young girl. The warnings had gone to Archbishop Harvey.

Cardinal Law received one of the best sinecures in Rome, as head of the Basilica of Saint Maria Maggiore and a member of the Vatican office tasked with appointing new bishops and correcting misconduct.

These stories are common in the church. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, was a primary protector of the now disgraced Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, described by a heroic uncoverer of the scandals, Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, as “a morphine addict who sexually abused at least twenty . . . seminarians.”

I know this from having seen it: Many—not all, but many—of the men who staff the highest levels of the Vatican have been part of the very scandal they are now charged with repairing. They are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.

In a way, the Vatican lives outside time and space. The verities it speaks of and stands for are timeless and transcendent. For those who work there, bishops and cardinals, it can become its own reality. And when those inside fight for what they think is the life of the institution, they feel fully justified in fighting any way they please. They can do this because, as they rationalize it, they are not fighting only for themselves—it’s not selfish, their fight—but to protect the greatest institution in the history of the world.

But in the past few decades, they not only fought persons—“If you were loyal you’d be silent”—they fought information.

What they don’t fully understand right now—what they can’t fully wrap their heads around—is that the information won.

The information came in through the cracks, it came in waves, in newspaper front pages, in books, in news beamed to every satellite dish in Europe and America. The information could not be controlled or stopped. The information was that something very sick was going on in the heart of the church.

Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

The old Vatican needs new blood.

They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: “Hey, wait a minute!”

If the media and the victims don’t keep the pressure on, the old ways will continue. As for Cardinal Law, he should not be where he is, nor mitred nor ringed.

Like all Americans, I continue to seek to understand exactly what moods, facts, assumptions, dynamics, agendas and structures underlay and made possible the crash and the Great Recession.

We do this so that we will be able to bring our gained wisdom into the future and keep another crash from happening, should we ever have another bubble to precede it. We also do it so that we know who to hate.

That’s why this week’s Financial Industry Inquiry Commission hearings were so exciting, such a public service. The testimony of Charles Prince, former CEO of Citigroup, a too-big-to-fail bank that received $45 billion in bailouts and $300 billion in taxpayer guarantees, was riveting. You’ve seen it on the news, but if you were watching it live on C-Span, the stark power of his brutal candor was breathtaking. This, as you know, is what he said:

“Let’s be real. This is what happened the past 10 years. You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses. You got to run around and crow about how under your watch everyone became a homeowner. You shook down the taxpayer and hoped for the best.

“Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats: ‘Look what I give you!’ Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans: ‘I’m a homeowner, I’ve got a stake, don’t raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!’ And Wall Street? We went to town, baby. We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay their mortgage. As if we cared. We invented financial instruments so complicated no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.

“You’re finaglers and we’re finaglers. I play for dollars, you play for votes. In our own ways we’re all thieves. We would be called desperadoes if we weren’t so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness. If there were any justice, we’d be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks. Only we’d both make sure we missed, wouldn’t we?”

OK, Charles Prince didn’t say that. Just wanted to get your blood going. Mr. Prince would never say something so dramatic and intemperate. I made it up. It wasn’t on the news because it didn’t happen.

It would be kind of a breath of fresh air though, wouldn’t it?

In fact, the hearings weren’t dramatic but a tepid affair, gentle and genteel. The commission members—economists, lawyers, former officeholders—actually made me miss congressmen, who can at least be relied on to emote and act out the indignation of the citizenry as they understand the citizenry. As an investigative style this isn’t pretty and usually isn’t even sincere, but it can jar witnesses into revealing, either deliberately or by accident, who they really are and what they really think.

At this week’s hearings, the questioners often spoke the impenetrable financial language of the witnesses. The leveraged capital arbitrage of the lowest CDOs were subject to the supersenior subprime exposure, as opposed to the triple-A seniors, right? The witnesses—former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on Wednesday, Mr. Prince and former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup Chairman Robert Rubin on Thursday—were, in their testimony, obviously anxious not to be the evening’s soundbite. Nobody wants to be the face of a bailout. This is where famous and important people being grilled hide now: in boringness, in an opacity of language so thick that following them is actually impossible. The testimony reminded me of an observation in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” his study of what happened on Wall Street and why:

“Language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. . . . The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors—or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind—but tranches. The bottom tranche—the risky ground floor—was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine . . . which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium.” In short, “The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.”

Which is what the hearings were like.

By Thursday afternoon I couldn’t figure out why they’d been held. They couldn’t have been aimed at informing the citizenry. Even the tone was strange, marked by a kind of weird delicacy, a daintiness of approach, a courtesy so elaborate I thought at some points commission members were spoofing each other. “Thank you so much for appearing,” “I’m so grateful for that insight.” Guys, there’s a war on.

I want to pick out some memorable moments, but I can’t really quote them because they resist quotation.

So I’ll translate.

On Wednesday, Mr. Greenspan said it’s easy to look back and see your mistakes, but what is to be gained by endless self-examination? It’s tempting to be self-critical, but self-criticism can become self-indulgence. Systems are complex; human decision-making is shaped by the endless fact of human fallibility. I didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation.

On Thursday Chairman Phil Angelides to Messrs. Prince and Rubin: I like you, do you like me? But we don’t like undersecuritized trilevel tranches, do we?

At one point commissioner Bill Thomas, a Republican former congressman from California, almost got an intelligent question out. It started as: How did you guys get to the top and run the show and not know what was going on below you? But Mr. Thomas got stuck in the muck of synthetic product securitized assets and then lost his thread, to the extent he had a thread. He began to ask Mr. Prince about his famous dancing quote: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance,” Mr. Prince had said in 2007. But Mr. Thomas asked his question so meekly—it was an “alleged quote” and maybe it was misunderstood by the press, which is always misunderstanding things. Then Mr. Thomas suddenly wasn’t asking that, but asking if it would be nice if in the future bankers “have a structure,” a stronger federal regulatory structure, though we probably shouldn’t have one if we don’t need it, but maybe we do, to sort of stop people like you, not that people like you should be stopped in any way.

Mr. Prince seized on this to say the dancing quote was taken out of context: He’d been talking about liquidity. Ah. Well, that takes the sting out of that one.

From a commission member: The American people have experienced a 30% fall in housing values. Do you know why?

Mr. Prince: Yes, we haven’t had such a decline “since the Great Depression.” The reason is before the crash there was “a bubble.” There was too much “easy money.” Then the bubble popped.

Thank you, Sherlock.

The takeaway, as they say, of the whole event, was more or less this:

Citigroup testifiers: We didn’t do anything particularly wrong, and what happened is all so sad, isn’t it? Sad, subprimed and tranched.

Commission: Yes, all so sad and tragic. Somebody’s head should roll. I like your tie.

Can’t we do better than this?

There is an interesting and very modern thing that often happens when individuals join and rise within mighty and venerable institutions. They come to think of the institution as invulnerable—to think that there is nothing they can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment they’re part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn’t require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it’s so strong, and has lasted so long.

And so people become blithely damaging. It happened the past decade on Wall Street, where those who said they loved what the street stood for, what it symbolized in American life, took actions that in the end tore it down, tore it to pieces. They loved Wall Street and killed it. It happens with legislators in Washington who’ve grown to old and middle age in the most powerful country in the world, and who can’t get it through their heads that the actions they’ve taken, most obviously in the area of spending, not only might deeply damage America but actually do it in.

And it happened in the Catholic Church, where hundreds of priests and bishops thought they could do anything, any amount of damage to the church, and it would be fine. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” That is Mathew 16:18, of course, Christ’s great promise to his church. Catholics in the pews have been repeating it a lot lately as they—we—absorb the latest round of scandal stories. “The old church will survive.” But we see more clearly than church leaders the damage the scandals have done.

It is damage that will last at least a generation. It is an actual catastrophe, a rolling catastrophe that became public first in the United States, now in Europe. It has lowered the standing, reputation and authority of the church. This will have implications down the road.

In both the U.S. and Europe, the scandal was dug up and made famous by the press. This has aroused resentment among church leaders, who this week accused journalists of spreading “gossip,” of going into “attack mode” and showing “bias.”

But this is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant. All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press—the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe—has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn’t be saying j’accuse but thank you.

Without this pressure—without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts—the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer.

In fact, the press came late to the story. The mainstream media almost had to be dragged to it. It was there waiting to be told at least by the 1990s, but broadcast news shows and big newspapers weren’t keen to go after it. It would take months or years to report and consume huge amounts of labor, time and money—endless digging through court records, locating victims and victimizers, getting people who don’t want to talk to talk. And after all that, the payoff could be predicted: You’d get slammed by the church as biased, criticized by sincerely disbelieving churchgoers, and maybe get a boycott from a few million Catholics. No one wanted that.

An irony: Non-Catholic members of the media were, in my observation, the least likely to want to go after the story, because they didn’t want to look like they were Catholic-bashing. An irony within the irony: some journalists didn’t think to go after the story because they really didn’t much like the Catholic Church. Because of this bias, they didn’t see the story as a story. They thought this was how the church always operated. It didn’t register with them that it was a scandal. They didn’t know it was news.

It was the Boston Globe that broke the dam, winning a justly deserved Pulitzer for public service.

Some blame the scandals on Pope Benedict XVI. But Joseph Ratzinger is the man who, weeks before his accession to the papacy five years ago, spoke blisteringly on Good Friday of the “filth” in the church. Days later on the streets of Rome, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported, Cardinal Ratzinger bumped into a curial monsignor who chided him for his sharp words. The cardinal replied, “You weren’t born yesterday, you understand what I’m talking about, you know what it means. We priests. We priests!” The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict’s role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the church’s first real progress toward coming to grips with it.

As for his predecessor, John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals—I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy—one fact seems to me pre-eminent. For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable—literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered. He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church. John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the church’s recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don’t act like that, it’s not imaginable. And he’d seen it before, only now it wasn’t Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media.

Only they weren’t lies.

There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and, literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews—the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they’re stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.

So where are we? In a dangerous place, actually.

Politics is a rough arena, and understandably so, for our politicians tell us more and more how to order our lives. Naturally there will be resistance, and strong opposition. We have a long history of hurly-burly debate, and we all know examples the past 200 years of terrible things said and done. Capitol tour guides enjoy showing the stain on the marble steps supposedly left by the blood of Sen. Charles Sumner, beaten half to death on the floor of the senate in 1856 by Rep. Preston Brooks, who wielded a thick gold-tipped cane. So we’ve had our moments.

But it’s a mistake not to see something new, something raw and bitter and dangerous, in the particular moment we’re in.

Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, this week announced that 10 congressional Democrats have recently been menaced and threatened with violence, and that they found it necessary to meet with the FBI and Capitol Police. A congressman apparently said a casket had been left near his home; a congresswoman reportedly said she was worried for the safety of her children.

This is all completely believable.

Democratic officials are right to call attention to what they believe is a growing threat. It is a truly terrible thing. But it would be deeply unhelpful for the Democrats to use this story as a mere political opportunity, as a way to undermine opposition to ObamaCare by painting opponents as dangerous and unhinged. That would only inflame the country, and in any case is not true. The truth is this sickness works both ways.

There probably isn’t a Republican leader who has not the past few years been menaced, and in exactly the same ways as the Democrats. Thursday I asked a staffer for a congressman who is a significant and respected opponent of the health-care bill if he had ever been threatened. Yes indeed. “Over the years and as recently as yesterday,” both the congressman and his staff “have received countless threats—both threats of violence and of death. These come in the form of letters, faxes, emails, phone calls, and voice-mail messages. We’ve had the front window smashed in at one of our district offices. Rather than call TV crews or the Washington Post, we report threats to the proper authorities, and move on. We’d take issue with the recent narrative that conservatives are disproportionately hostile, prone to violence or whatever message the left is pushing these days. They have anecdotes, we have anecdotes.”

Even columnists and pundits have anecdotes. Just about everyone in public life on whatever level gets threats now.

Here’s the tenor and tone of the moment:

Under the news story on Mr. Hoyer’s statement on the Yahoo! news site on Thursday, there was a lengthy comment thread, with more than 800 people offering their thoughts. “An American Hitler might be in the making who would purge the leftists,” said one, who of course didn’t use his or her name. “Republicans are criminals and terrorists,” said another. “Republicans . . . are thugs, scoundrels and rascals.” And: “What did they expect when they . . . went against the American people and are FORCING this bill on us.” “It’s what happens before the revolution . . . people are frustrated over not being heard . . . let the battle begin.”

Here, edited for a family newspaper, are some of the recorded telephone messages left on the answering machine of Rep. Bart Stupak. These are messages left by individuals who appear to be pro-life activists—that is, people who have put themselves on the line to support generous and compassionate treatment of the unborn.

“I hope you bleed out your ___, get cancer and die.” “You will rue the day. . . . I hope you’re haunted the rest of your living day. . . . We think you’re a devil. . . . The country loathes you.” “You are one big piece of human ____. There are people across the country who wish you ill, and all of those thoughts projected on you will materialize into something that’s not very good for you. Go to hell, you piece of ____.”

These are people whose professed mission it is to save children. Whatever else these particular individuals are, they are people whose nerves have been rubbed raw.

Responsible leaders on all levels of American life ought to stop, breathe in, and see the level of anger and agitation that’s rippling through the country. Both sides should try to cool it, or something bad is going to happen. In fact I am struck now by how, when I worry aloud about this and say to a conservative or a liberal, a Republican or a Democrat, that I fear something bad is going to happen, no one disagrees. No one says, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.” They say—again, left right and center: “I’m afraid of that too.”

What I keep thinking of is a beehive. A modern, high tech, highly politicized democracy is a busy beehive, and sometimes the bees are angry, and sometimes someone comes by and sticks a big sharp stick in the hive. The biggest thing Washington should do right now is stop it, stop poking the stick.

The beehive was already angry about a million things a year ago, and most of those things, obviously, were not the fault of the administration. People are angry at their economic vulnerability. They are angry at the deterioration of our culture, angry at our nation’s deteriorating position in the world, at our debts and deficits, our spending and taxing, our threatened security in a world of weapons of mass destruction. Their anger is stoked by cynical politicians and radio ranters and people who come home at night, have a few drinks, and spew out their rage on the comment thread. It’s a world full of people always cocking the gun and ready to say, if things turn bad, “But I didn’t tell anyone to shoot!”

And yes, this mood, this anger, has only been made worse by this yearlong, enervating, exhausting, enraging fight over health care. The administration is full of people who are so bright, and led by one who is very bright, and yet they have a signal failure: They do not know what time it is. They cannot see how high the temperature is. They cannot for the life of them understand that they raise it.

What we need now in our leaders is the knowledge that there is so much that is tearing us apart as a nation and that the great project now is to keep us together, to hold us together as much as possible, because future trends will be to come apart, and for many reasons. To come apart because we’re no longer held close and firmly by the old glue of appreciation for a common heritage, history and culture; to come apart because we’re a country that increasingly feels there are people in the cart and people pulling the cart, and the latter are increasingly overwhelmed and fearful; coming apart because we’re now in at least our second generation of young, lost, unguided children with no fully functioning parent in their lives, kids being raised by a microwave and a TV set. All of these things weigh and grate.

They are all, of course, too big and complicated to be adequately dealt with in a year or even a decade. But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he’s having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he’s been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend.

How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid’s stuff.

You could see the startled looks on the faces of reporters as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who had the grace to look embarrassed, made the announcement on Thursday afternoon. The president “regrets the delay”—the trip is rescheduled for June—but “passage of the health insurance reform is of paramount importance.” Indonesia must be glad to know it’s not.

The reporters didn’t even provoke or needle in their questions. They seemed hushed. They looked like people who were absorbing the information that we all seem to be absorbing, which is that the wheels seem to be coming off this thing, the administration is wobbling—so early, so painfully and dangerously soon.

Thursday’s decision followed the most revealing and important broadcast interview of Barack Obama ever. It revealed his primary weakness in speaking of health care, which is a tendency to dodge, obfuscate and mislead. He grows testy when challenged. It revealed what the president doesn’t want revealed, which is that he doesn’t want to reveal much about his plan. This furtiveness is not helpful in a time of high public anxiety. At any rate, the interview was what such interviews rarely are, a public service. That it occurred at a high-stakes time, with so much on the line, only made it more electric.

I’m speaking of the interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.” Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

That having been said, the Baier interview was something, and right from the beginning. Mr. Baier’s first question was whether the president supports the so-called Slaughter rule, alternatively known as “deem and pass,” which would avoid a straight up-or-down House vote on the Senate bill. (Tunku Varadarajan in the Daily Beast cleverly notes that it sounds like “demon pass,” which it does. Maybe that’s the juncture we’re at.) Mr. Obama, in his response, made the usual case for ObamaCare. Mr. Baier pressed him. The president said, “The vote that’s taken in the House will be a vote for health-care reform.” We shouldn’t, he added, concern ourselves with “the procedural issues.”

Further in, Mr. Baier: “So you support the deem-and-pass rule?” From the president, obfuscation. But he did mention something new: “They may have to sequence the votes.” The bill’s opponents would be well advised to look into that one.

Mr. Baier again: So you’ll go deem-and-pass and you don’t know exactly what will be in the bill?

Mr. Obama’s response: “By the time the vote has taken place, not only will I know what’s in it, you’ll know what’s in it, because it’s going to be posted and everybody’s going to be able to evaluate it on the merits.”

That’s news in two ways. That it will be posted—one assumes the president means on the Internet and not nailed to a telephone pole—should suggest it will be posted for a while, more than a few hours or days. So American will finally get a look at it. And the president was conceding that no, he doesn’t know what’s in the bill right now. It is still amazing that one year into the debate this could be true.

Mr. Baier pressed on the public’s right to know what is in the bill. We have been debating the bill for a year, the president responded: “The notion that this has been not transparent, that people don’t know what’s in the bill, everybody knows what’s in the bill. I sat for seven hours with—.”

Mr. Baier interrupts: “Mr. President, you couldn’t tell me what the special deals are that are in or not today.”

Mr. Obama: “I just told you what was in and what was not in.”

Mr. Baier: “Is Connecticut in?” He was referring to the blandishments—polite word—meant to buy the votes of particular senators.

Mr. Obama: “Connecticut—what are you specifically referring to?”

Mr. Baier: “The $100 million for the hospital? Is Montana in for the asbestos program? Is—you know, listen, there are people—this is real money, people are worried about this stuff.”

Mr. Obama: “And as I said before, this—the final provisions are going to be posted for many days before this thing passes.”

Mr. Baier pressed the president on his statement as a candidate for the presidency that a 50-plus-one governing mentality is inherently divisive. “You can’t govern” that way, Sen. Obama had said. Is the president governing that way now? Mr. Obama did not really answer.

Throughout, Mr. Baier pressed the president. Some thought this bordered on impertinence. I did not. Mr. Obama now routinely filibusters in interviews. He has his message, and he presses it forward smoothly, adroitly. He buries you in words. Are you worried what failure of the bill will do to you? I’m worried about what the status quo will do to the families that are uninsured. . .

Mr. Baier forced him off his well-worn grooves. He did it by stopping long answers with short questions, by cutting off and redirecting. In this he was like a low-speed bumper car. In the end the interview seemed to me a public service because everyone in America right now wants to see the president forced off his grooves and into candor on an issue that involves 17% of the economy. Again, the stakes are high. So Mr. Baier’s style seemed—this is admittedly subjective—not rude but within the bounds, and not driven by the antic spirit that sometimes overtakes reporters. He seemed to be trying to get new information. He seemed to be attempting to better inform the public.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He’s the president, this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing.

And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn’t worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass.

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.