Peggy Noonan

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.

The accomplished and sophisticated attorney was asked what attitude he was bringing to the new year. “Stoicism and mindless optimism,” he laughed, which sounded just about right. He meant it, he said, about the stoicism. He had immersed himself in that rough old philosophy after 9/11, and had come to adopt it as his own. But he meant it about the optimism, too: You never know, things get better, begin with good cheer, maintain your equilibrium, don’t lose your peace.

We’re at the clean start of a new decade, and it wouldn’t be bad if the national watchwords were repair, rebuild and return, with an eye toward what is now our central project, though we haven’t fully noticed, and that is keeping our country together. So many forces exist to tear us apart. We have to do what we can to hold together in the long run.

We have been through a hard 10 years. They were not, as some have argued, the worst ever, or even the worst of the past century. The ’30s started with the Great Depression, featured the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and ended with World War II. That’s a bad decade for you. In the ’60s we saw our leaders assassinated, our great cities hit by riots, a war tear our country apart.

But the ’00s were hard, starting with a disputed presidential election, moving on to the shocked pain of 9/11, marked by an effort to absorb the fact that we had entered the age of terror, and ending with a historic, world-shaking economic crash.

Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: “They forgot the mission.” So many great American institutions—institutions that every day help hold us together—acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it’s the one you’re part of.

We saw an example this week with the federal government, which whatever else it does has a few very essential missions to perform that only it can perform, such as maintaining the national defense. Our federal government now does 10 million things, many of them not so well. Its attention is scattered. It loses sight of the essentials, which is part of the reason underpants bombers wind up on airplanes.

Wall Street the past 10 years truly and profoundly lost sight of its mission. It exists to be the citadel of American finance. Its job is to grow and invest and enrich, thereby making the jobs possible that help family exist.

Wall Street has a civic purpose. But it must always do its job with an eye to prudence, because a big part of its job is to provide a secure and grounded economic footing for the nation. But throughout the ’00s Wall Street’s leaders gave themselves over to one thing, and that was looking out, always, for No. 1. And they knew how to define No. 1. It wasn’t the country, and it wasn’t even the company. They’d crater companies, parachute out, and brag about it later.

If there was one damning and utterly illustrative quote that captured Wall Street in the past 10 years it was that of Charles Prince, CEO of Citigroup, in July 2007. Worrying investment trends were beginning to emerge, but why slow down? He told The New York Times, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” This from a banker, a leader, a citizen, a man responsible for a community.

Congress forgot the mission, or rather continued more than ever to seem to have forgotten the mission. They weren’t there to legislate with a long view, they were there to be re-elected and help the team, the red one or the blue one. This is not a new story, only a worsened one.

The Catholic Church, as great and constructive an institution as ever existed in our country, educating the children of immigrants and healing the weak in hospitals, also acted as if it had forgotten the mission. Their mission was to be Christ’s church in the world, to stand for the weak. Many fulfilled it, and still do, but the Boston Globe in 2003 revealed the extent to which church leaders allowed the abuse of the weak and needy, and then covered it up.

It was a decades-long story; it only became famous in the ‘00s. But it was in its way the most harmful forgetting of a mission of all, for it is the church that has historically given a first home to America’s immigrants, and made them Americans. Its reputation, its high standing, mattered to our country. Its loss of reputation damaged it. And it happened in part because priests and bishops forgot they were servants of a great institution, and came to think the great church existed to meet their needs.

A variation of this attitude continues in the public schools, where there are teachers who forget they have a mission—to teach and guide the young—and instead come to think the schools exist for them, to give them secure jobs and meet their needs.

Name the institution and you will probably see a diminished sense of mission, or one that has disappeared or is disappearing. Journalism too the past decade—longer—has had trouble remembering why it exists, which is to meet a real and crucial public need for reliable information about the world we live in. It’s the job of journalists to find the news, to get it in spite of the myriad forces arrayed against getting your hands on it, to report it clearly and honestly.

And as all these institutions forgot their mission, they entered the empire of spin. They turned more and more attention, resources and effort to the public perception of their institution, and not to the reality of it.

Everyone gave their efforts to how things seemed and not how they were. Press secretaries, press assistants, media managers, public relations experts—they abound more than ever in our business and public life. Half the people in Congress are people who one way or another are trying to “communicate” the member’s thinking. But he’s not really thinking, he’s positioning, and they’re not thinking either, they’re organizing and deploying focus-grouped phrases and turning them into talking points

So what to do? Here my friend the lawyer’s stoicism and mindless optimism might come in handy, for turning around institutions is a huge, long and uphill fight. It probably begins with taking the one thing we all hate to take in our society, and that is personal responsibility.

If you work in a great institution: Do you remember the mission? Do you remember why you went to work there, what you meant to do, what the institution meant to you when you viewed it from the outside, years ago, and hoped to become part of it?

And an optimistic idea, perhaps mindlessly so: It actually might help just a little to see national hearings aimed at summoning wisdom and sparking discussion on what has happened to, and can be done to help, our institutions. This wouldn’t turn anything around, but it could put a moment’s focus on a question that is relevant to people’s lives, and that is: How in the coming decade can we do better? How can we repair and rebuild?

Cannon to the left of him, cannon to the right of him, cannon in front of him volley and thunder. That’s our president’s position on the political battlefield now, taking it from all sides. And the odd thing, the unique thing in terms of modern political history, is that no one really defends him, no one holds high his flag. When was the last time you put on the radio or TV and heard someone say “Open line Friday—we’re talking about what it is we like best about Barack Obama!” When did you last see a cable talking head say, “The greatness of this man is as obvious as it is unnoticed”?

Is the left out there on the Internet and the airwaves talking about him? Oh, yes. They’re calling him a disappointment, a sellout, a DINO—Democratic in name only. He sold out on single-payer health insurance, and then the public option. He’ll sell you out on your issue too.

The pundits and columnists, dreadful people that they are, call him cold, weak, aloof, arrogant, entitled.

So let’s denounce him again.

Wait—it’s Christmas. Let’s not. There are people who deeply admire the president, who work with him and believe he’s doing right. This week, this column is their forum. They speak not for attribution to avoid the charge of suckupism.

*   *   *

We start with a note from an accomplished young man who worked with Mr. Obama on the campaign and in the White House. He reminded me this week of a conversation we’d had shortly before the president’s inauguration. “I remember you asked me back in January if I loved my guy. And in light of all that’s happened in this first year, I still do. Even more so. And I also have a strong sense—based not just on polls but on a lot of folks I’ve talked to who don’t always pay attention to politics—that he DOES have that base of people who still love him too.

“It’s hard to detect, because the part of the ‘base’ that’s represented on cable and on blogs is so vocal (and by vocal I mean shrill), but it’s there. I also read it in the letters he gets. Some of them are amazingly poignant and appreciative of what he’s done and what he’s doing. Some of them are tough—very tough—but still respectful and hopeful that he’s doing the right thing. Even if they’re unsure right now, they want him to succeed. . .”

He sees them as a kind of quiet majority, or at least quiet-but-large-group-within-the-electorate.

“[T]hey’re not going to run out and defend him on the blogs or start screaming back at his detractors, because they know its fruitless and they’re sick of all that Washington nonsense anyway.” They want him to cut through the mess and “get things done for them. And they’re willing to give him that chance. Still.”

The president, he suggested, tends toward the long view and the broad view. “Here’s what I know about him. He still has this amazing ability to tune out the noise from Washington, read the letters from the people, listen to their concerns, listen to his advisors, hear both sides, absorb all the information, and make the decision that he honestly feels is right for the country.”

He does this “without worrying too much about the polls, without worrying too much about being a one-term president. He just does what he thinks is right. And that consumes a lot of his time. Most of it, in fact.”

He is aware that Obama is “perceived as alternately too weak and too Chicago, too left and too right, too willing to compromise and too beholden to his majority, too detached and too much meddling in too many things.” The administration needs “to do better in resetting the story and telling it the way we want it told.” But “the fractured, petty, biased-towards-the-sensational media today makes that more difficult than ever before.”

He knows now, he said, “how the Bushes and the Clintons must have felt,” and wonders “if that just happens to all White Houses. I don’t know. But I do know that we have some very big, very unique problems right now. And we live in a very cynical . . . time where it’s difficult to maintain the benefit of the doubt as you’re navigating through the storm.” They’re giving it their best. “Lots of good people are trying. We won’t fix it all, but I think we’ll succeed (and think that in some cases, we already have!) at fixing a good deal.”

*   *   *

Another staffer spoke warmly of President Obama’s warmth. “He’s interested in who you are, and it’s not manufactured.” He sometimes finds himself briefing the president before events. “I know he’s just come out of a meeting on Afghanistan” and maybe the next meeting isn’t as important, but he wants to know who they are and where they’re from and has a gift for “making them feel important.”

“He’s a young president, young in terms of youthful.” Sometimes people come in to meet him and find “they came for a photo and he gives them a game” of pick-up basketball on the White House court. “Those are the things from a human perspective that make him so accessible. Accessible is the right word. He’s emotionally available.”

He is appreciative of his staff’s efforts. “When you’re working hard for your country and you know [he cares] it is huge.” How does he show his thanks? “It’s a little like a basketball game—‘Thanks for that, I know what you did.’ It’s not a note or a pat or a call, it’s a guy-to-guy thank you, ‘That’s cool, that’s good.’ You think, ‘My coach got that I worked my ass off.’”

“As a person he is just an incredible human being who you can’t help but love.”

A third Obama staffer spoke of last week’s senior staff dinner, at which the president went around the table and told each one individually “what they meant to him, and thanked the spouses for putting up with what they have to put up with.” He marks birthdays by marching in with cakes. He’ll walk around the White House, pop into offices and tease people for putting their feet on the desk. “Sometimes he puts his feet on the desk.” He’s concerned about much, but largely unruffled. “He’s not taken aback by the challenges he has. He seems more focused than he’s ever been. He’s like Michael Jordan in that at the big moments everything slows down for him.” He’s good in the crunch.

*   *   *

I end with a story told to me by an old Reagan hand who, with another former Reagan administration official, was being given a private tour of the White House by Michelle Obama. This was last summer. Mrs. Obama led the two through the halls, and then they stopped by the Lincoln bedroom. They stood in the doorway, and then took a step inside, but went no deeper. Everything looked the same, but something was different. “We don’t allow guests to stay in this room anymore,” Mrs. Obama explained. She spoke of it as a place of reverence. They keep it apart, it’s not for overnights.

Unspoken, but clearly understood by the Reagan hands, was: This is where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A true copy of it is here, on the desk. He signed it: “Abraham Lincoln.” The Reagan hands were impressed and moved. It is fitting and right that the Lincoln bedroom be held apart. It always should have been. Good, they thought. Good.

The news came in numbers and the numbers were fairly grim, all the grimmer for being unsurprising. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported this week that more than half of Americans, 55%, think America is on the wrong track, with only 33% saying it is going in the right direction. A stunning 66% say they’re not confident that their children’s lives will be better than their own (27% are).

It is another in a long trail of polls that show a clear if occasionally broken decline in American optimism. The poll was discussed on TV the other day, and everyone said those things everyone says: “People are afraid they’ll lose their jobs or their houses.” “It’s health care. Every uninsured person feels they’re one illness away from bankruptcy.”

All too true. The economy has always had an impact on the general American mood, and the poll offered data to buttress the reader’s assumption that economic concerns are driving pessimism. Fifty-one percent of those interviewed said they disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy, versus 42% approving.

But something tells me this isn’t all about money. It’s possible, and I can’t help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.

Sure, Americans are worried about long-term debt and endless deficits. We’re worried about taxes and the burden we’re bequeathing to our children, and their children.

But we are concerned about other things, too, and there are often signs in various polls that those things may dwarf economic concerns. Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.

It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don’t care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don’t care about us control our culture. In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in the Adam Lambert Problem. More on that in a moment.

America is good at making practical compromises, and one of the compromises we’ve made in the area of arts and entertainment is captured in the words “We don’t care what you do in New York.” That was said to me years ago by a social conservative who was explaining that he and his friends don’t wish to impose their cultural sensibilities on a city that is uninterested in them, and that the city, in turn, shouldn’t impose its cultural sensibilities on them. He was speaking metaphorically; “New York” meant “wherever the cultural left happily lives.”

For years now, without anyone declaring it or even noticing it, we’ve had a compromise on television. Do you want, or will you allow into your home, dramas and comedies that, however good or bad, are graphically violent, highly sexualized, or reflective of cultural messages that you believe may be destructive? Fine, get cable. Pay for it. Buy your premium package, it’s your money, spend it as you like.

But the big broadcast networks are for everyone. They are free, they are available on every television set in the nation, and we watch them with our children. The whole family’s watching. Higher, stricter standards must maintain.

This was behind the resentment at the Adam Lambert incident on ABC in November. The compromise was breached. It was a broadcast network, it was prime time, it was the American Music Awards featuring singers your 11-year-old wants to see, and your 8-year-old. And Mr. Lambert came on and—again, in front of your children, in the living room, in the middle of your peaceful evening—uncorked an act in which he, in the words of various news reports the next day, performed “faux oral sex” featuring “S&M play,” “bondage gear,” “same-sex makeouts” and “walking a man and woman around the stage on a leash.”

People were offended, and they complained. Mr. Lambert seemed surprised and puzzled. With an idiot’s logic that was nonetheless logic, he suggested he was the focus of bigotry: They let women act perverse on TV all the time, so why can’t a gay man do it? Fifteen hundred callers didn’t see it as he did and complained to ABC, which was negligent but in the end responsive: They changed the West Coast feed and apparently kept Mr. Lambert off “Good Morning America.”

Mr. Lambert’s act left viewers feeling not just offended but assaulted. Again, “we don’t care what you do in New York,” but don’t include us in it, don’t bring it into our homes. Our children are here.

I don’t mean to make too much of it. In the great scheme of things a creepy musical act doesn’t matter much. But increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.

It’s things like this, every bit as much as taxes and spending, that leave people feeling jarred and dismayed, and worried about the future of their country.

*   *   *

Truly, 2009 was a bad year for public behavior.

There were this year the party-crashing Salahis and their amoral assumption that their needs—fame and fortune, which are the same as Adam Lambert’s—trump everyone else’s. You want public order and security? We want a reality show. And there was their honest and very modern shock that people were criticizing them. “It’s ruined our lives,” Michaele Salahi told the Today show in a bid for sympathy. She and her husband in turn were reminiscent of the single woman who likes to have babies, and this year had eight, through in vitro fertilization, and apparently expected to win public praise.

All these things—plus Wall Street and Washington and the general sense that most of our great institutions have forgotten their essential mission—add up and produce a fear that the biggest deterioration in America isn’t economic but something else, something more characterological.

I’d like to see a poll on this. Yes or no: Have we become a more vulgar country? Are we coarser than, say, 50 years ago? Do we talk more about sensitivity and treat others less sensitively? Do you think standards of public behavior are rising or falling? Is there something called the American Character, and do you think it has, the past half-century, improved or degenerated? If the latter, what are the implications of this? Do you sense, as you look around you, that each year we have less or more of the glue that holds a great nation together? Is there less courtesy in America now than when you were a child, or more? Bonus question: Is “Excuse me” a request or a command?

So much always roils us in America, and so much always will. But maybe as 2010 begins and the 00s recede, we should think more about the noneconomic issues that leave us uneasy, and that need our attention. Not everything in America comes down to money. Not everything ever did. .

The political headline this week is that President Obama appears to be attempting to move toward the center, or what he believes is the center. We saw the big pivot in two major speeches, one on the economy and the other, in Oslo, on peace.

If it is real—if the pivot signals a true, partial or coming shift, if it is not limited to rhetorical flurries—it is welcome news in terms of public policy. It also tells us some things. It tells us White House internal polling is probably worse than the public polls telling us the president has been losing support among independents. It tells us the mounting criticism from Republicans, conservatives and others has had a real effect. It tells us White House officials have concluded they were out on a cliff. It tells us they are calculating that after a first year of governing from the left, and winning whatever they win on health care, they believe they can persuasively shift to the center, that it will work.

Which is the great political question: Will it work? With congressional elections a year away, will it help make Democrats safe and keep Congress?

The disadvantage of a pivot is that it will further agitate the president’s base, which feels he’s already been too moderate. (This actually carries some benefits: When the left rails at Mr. Obama, he looks more moderate.) The upside is clear. In a time of extended crisis, voters are inclined to reject the radical. And a shift will represent a challenge to the president’s competitors. It is one thing to meet a president’s policies with effective wholesale denunciations when they are wholesale liberal. It’s harder when those policies are more of a mix; it’s harder to rally and rouse, harder to make criticism stick. Bill Clinton knew this. Maybe the White House is learning it, and the same way he learned it: after a bruising.

The economic speech took place Tuesday at the Brookings Institute, the generally left-leaning think tank in Washington. The president put unusual emphasis on—and showed unusual sympathy for—Americans in business, specifically small businesses. “Over the past 15 years, small businesses have created roughly 65% of all new jobs in America,” he said. “These are companies formed around kitchen tables in family meetings, formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, formed when a worker decides it’s time she became her own boss.” This is how Republicans, moderates and centrists think, and talk.

The president claimed success in reducing taxes—“This fall, I signed into law more than $30 billion in tax cuts for struggling businesses”—and announced a new cut: “We’re proposing a complete elimination of capital gains taxes on small business investment along with an extension of write-offs to encourage small businesses to expand in the coming year.” He called it “worthwhile” to create a new “tax incentive to encourage small businesses to add and keep employees.”

All this was striking, and seemed an implicit concession that tax levels affect economic activity. It was as if he were waving his arms and saying, “Hey taxpayer, I’m not your enemy!” The only reason a president would find it necessary to deliver such a message is if he just found out taxpayers do think he’s the enemy. The emphasis on what it takes to start and build a business, seemed if nothing else, a bowing to reality. And if you’re going to bow to something, it might as well be reality.

Thursday, at his Nobel laureate speech in Oslo, the president used an audience of European leftists to place himself smack-dab in the American center. He said, essentially: War is bad but sometimes justified, America is good, and I am an American. He spoke of Afghanistan as “a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries—including Norway—in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” Adroit, that “including Norway.” He said he had “an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict” and suggested America’s efforts in Afghanistan fit the criterion of the concept of a “just war.” It continues to be of great value that a modern, left-leaning American president speaks in this way to the world. “The world” didn’t seem to enjoy it, and burst into applause a resounding once.

He quoted Martin Luther King, when he received the Peace Prize: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.” But Mr. Obama added that “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he could not be guided only by Dr. King’s example. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.” Evil exists: “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

He acknowledged Europe’s “ambivalence” about military action, and “a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.” But the world should remember what America did during and after World War II. “It is hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers,” he said—and he pointedly noted America’s creation of the Marshall Plan and contribution to the United Nations, “a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud. . . . Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

All of this, as William Safire used to say, was good stuff. There were wiggy moments—his references to John Paul II in Poland and Richard Nixon in China were historically unknowing to the point of being utterly inapt—but they did no particular harm.

*   *   *

There continues to be a particular challenge for the president, and it is an affection gap. It is not hard to respect this president, not hard to want to listen to his views and weigh his arguments. It is a challenge, however, to feel warmly toward him. This matters politically because Americans like to feel affection for their presidents, and are more likely to forgive them for policy differences when they do. There’s the stony, cool temperament, and also something new. The White House lately seems very fancy. When you think of them now, it’s all tuxedoes, gowns and Hollywood. There’s a certain a metallic glamour. But metal is cold.

White House image masters will think the answer is to show pictures of the president smiling at children and walking newly plowed fields. Actually this is part of the mystery of politics—what to do with the clay of your candidate, how to make your guy likable.

I remember when everyone was turning against Bill Clinton after the financial scandals and the smallness of his first term. I thought for a while that Bob Dole would beat him. What I didn’t take into account was a small thing that wasn’t small. When people slammed Clinton in interviews they were often smiling as they spoke. “The rogue.” “Ol’ Bubba.” Those smiles said something. They liked him. When they like you, they forgive you a lot. Mr. Obama needs to make them smile. He doesn’t. He leaves them cool as he is.

A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.

For eight years we heard this from Republicans. Halfway through those years people began to tune the president out: He was acting on a Republican obsession and approaching it with the usual Republican tear-jerking bellicosity. The Democrats for eight years had been removed from daily national responsibility—the party out of power always is—and in any case it’s always easier to question and criticize than to know and make a decision. But to have now a Democratic president surveying essentially the same history and data as his predecessor and coming to the same rough conclusion—we are in a real struggle with bad people, it will go a long time—was encouraging, and seemed to mark a two-party sharing of overall authority and investment.

We can continue to fight over how to deal with the struggle, but we agree the struggle is real. This sounds small but is not.

*   *   *

No matter who gave the speech Tuesday night, he’d be pounded. If President John McCain announced at West Point that we would stay in Afghanistan and he would increase troop levels by 60,000, he would have been roundly denounced: “This is just more ‘bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.’ It’s not a policy, it’s a reflex.” If a President Hillary Clinton had come forward to announce complete withdrawal, she would have been denounced as returning to her McGovernite roots.

It tells us something about the difficulty of the issue that no matter who decided what, he’d be derided.

That said, it appears we’re seeing some things we’ve not seen before. The president of the United States gave a war speech, and the next day the nation didn’t seem to rally around him. This is not the way it’s gone in the past. Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush—when they addressed the nation about the wars they led, they received immediate support.

This is also the first time we’ve seen an American president declaring, or rather redeclaring, a war without a political base. Again, LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush—they always had a base that would support them, on which they could rely and from which they could maneuver. But Mr. Obama’s base is not with him on this decision.

Can a president fight a war without a base? Will the American people, on this issue, decide to become his base? In the end what they decide will likely determine the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan.

As to the policy, the president chose a middle path, not this way or that way, not 60,000 but 30,000, not “go” or “stay” but stay for now, and stronger. What Mr. Obama has bought, at some cost, not all his, is time. Maybe things can be turned around, maybe it will work, hear the generals, after all this history and all this effort it is worth the attempt. Sudden departure would create a vacuum that might suck in and destabilize nuclear Pakistan. We don’t want to encourage what is brewing there.

Here we should think about and emblazon on the national memory the biggest lesson of the uses of American power circa 2001-09. The minute American troops are committed anywhere in the world, there are, immediately, 10 reasons why they cannot leave, should not leave. The next day there are 20. It is, always, the commitment itself that is the dramatic fact, the thing from which all else flows, and that carries within it the heaviest implications.

*   *   *

As to the speech, much was made of the president’s chosen audience, the cadets of West Point, who were appropriately and understandably restrained. Their faces communicated one thing: “Dude, I’m not here to be your backdrop.” It is a great misunderstanding of the service academies, mostly held by liberals who lived through the ‘60s, that they are full of rabble-rousing blood-and-guts warriors who can’t wait for a fight. This is a stereotype, and a stupid one. West Point is in fact populated by sober and sophisticated young men and women who’ve seen their colleagues, upperclassmen and instructors die or be wounded. They’ve grown used to presidents telling them their war plans. Some of them may die executing the one unveiled this week. They were listening. What would you do?

In his remarks, the president plowed straight in. The speech’s second sentence announced his subject and its complexity. The first half of the speech was blessedly free of the emotional pleading and posing we’ve all grown used to. His recounting of the history of America in Afghanistan was clever and helpful: Most of us need to be reminded of at least some of the facts, and some soldiers on their way to Kandahar were only 10 and 12 years old when it all began. And so, “We did not ask for this fight.” We and our allies were “compelled” to fight after dreadful men killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. America moved, and with a forgotten unity. “Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them—an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98-0. The vote in the House was 420-1. For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5—the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all.”

This was all good, direct and unvarnished. It provided forgotten context and underscored the president’s sincerity and engagement.

But there was too much “I” in the speech. George H.W. Bush famously took the word “I” out of his speeches—we called them “I-ectomies”—because of a horror of appearing to be calling attention to himself. Mr. Obama is plagued with no such fears. “When I took office . . . I approved a long-standing request . . . After consultations with our allies I then . . . I set a goal.” That’s all from one paragraph. Further down he used the word “I” in three paragraphs an impressive 15 times. “I believe I know,” “I have signed,” “I have read,” “I have visited.”

After the president announced his plan he seemed to slip in, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” Then came the reference to July 2011 as the date departure begins. It was startling to hear a compelling case for our presence followed so quickly by an abrupt announcement of our leaving. It sounded like a strategy based on the song Groucho Marx used to sing, “Hello, I must be going.”

About two-thirds of the way through, the speech degenerated into the faux eloquence that makes people listening across our nation want to gouge out their eyes and run screaming from the room. Lots of our children and our children’s children, the dark clouds of tyranny, the light of freedom. Our strength comes from “the entrepreneurs and researchers who will pioneer new industries; from the teachers that will educate our children, and the service of those who work in our communities at home . . .”

This is where normal people began to daydream. Or scream. None of it was terrible, but we’ve heard it now for 40 years. Enough. Make it new.

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington’s Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.

From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, “a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man.” They once held “an unromantically high opinion of Obama,” and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn’t “the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought.”

She scored “the Chicago crowd,” which she characterized as “a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team.” The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—“an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.”

As I read Ms. Drew’s piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, “Well, I was for Hillary.” This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they’re not dazzled and head over heels. That’s gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20% who, no matter what’s happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.

They’re the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn’t seem to be love.

*   *   *

Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president’s Asia trip suggested “a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power.” The president’s Afghanistan review has been “inexcusably clumsy,” Mideast negotiations have been “fumbling.” So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it “as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs.”

He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama “seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably”—he should begin to bow to “the voices of experience” in Washington.

When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.

It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of “the oldest and wisest” who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received.

*   *   *

Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can’t afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can’t afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama’s rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.

Which gets us back to the bow.

In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn’t that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He’d been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford’s policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren’t playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying “Tough Talks Yield Big Progress” or “Obama Shows Muscle in China,” the bowing pictures might be understood this way: “He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation’s interests.”

But that’s not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.

It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through ‘08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you’re stupid doesn’t mean you’re Lincoln.

One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we’ve got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don’t worry.

But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

Last Thanksgiving, it looked as if a hard year was coming, and it was and it did. The holiday was shadowed by a sense of economic foreboding—Wall Street failing, companies falling and layoffs coming. It isn’t over—no one thinks it’s over. But the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different.

An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: “We’re still here,” and, “I am so grateful.” Almost all experienced business reverses, some of which were deep, and some had personal misfortunes of one kind or another: “I am thankful that my mother’s death was fast and that she did not have to suffer,” wrote a beloved friend. But something tells me that a number of Thanksgiving dinners will be marked this year by a new or refreshed sense of gratitude: We’re still here. I am so grateful.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn’t been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf’s, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it’s there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf’s is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We’re still here. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. “I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish,” he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, “dodge the firings” in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. “Broadly,” he added, “I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out ‘I Wanna Rock’ is so America.”

My friend Robert wrote, “I am thankful that I lived to see a person of color sworn into the office of President.” He takes heart that America has set a new face toward the world. “I am thankful and proud when I am in London and people ask me about my president and show great interest in him.” And, “I am thankful that my friends survived the global financial disaster. I am thankful America survived it.”

A real estate lawyer in Washington emailed, “Whether you agree with the policy decisions made by the new administration or not, let’s be thankful that our economy did not fall apart since last Thanksgiving.”

A Washington journalist: “I am thankful that this is still a normal country, with predictable common-sense reactions to excesses. The American people served as a counterweight to the excesses of the Bush years, and are now serving as a counterweight to the excesses of the Obama years.”

A friend who emigrated from Nicaragua 21 years ago and lives now in New York knew right away what she was thankful for: her still-new country. “I’m mainly grateful that I could raise my son in freedom. I could vote for the first time in my life. I could express my opinions without being shot on the spot, jailed, or exiled like my grandfather. I could sleep through the night without fearing for my life. I could work and buy food without rationing.”

My friend Stephanie is grateful that she got health insurance despite a pre-existing condition. Another friend, an academic, was grateful to have been raised in America that taught well the rules of survival—perseverance, discipline.

Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, “the number of frowns” he saw on the street “was overwhelming.” He decided to take action. “I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It’s such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back.” He hopes to start “a smiling epidemic” in Chicago.

My friend Vin said, when I asked him what he was most grateful for in 2009, “I remember reading that survival rates for breast cancer have been improving. I remember thinking: Thank God.”

I am grateful for a great deal, especially: I’m here. I’m drinking coffee as I write, and the sun is so bright, I had to close the blinds to keep the glare from the computer. When I open the blinds, I will see the world: people, kids, traffic, dogs. Too many friends have left during the past few years, and it reminds us of what death is always trying to remind us: It’s good to be alive.

And after that, after gratitude for friends and family, and for those who protect us, after that something small. I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: “Playhouse 90.” It was the 1950s and ‘60, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “ER,” “24,” “The West Wing,” “Law and Order,” “30 Rock.” These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.

I leave it to others to dilate on why TV now is so good and movies so bad, since both come from the same town, Hollywood, in the same era. But there is a side benefit to televisions’s excellence, and that is the number of people who follow a show so closely, and love it so much, that after it’s aired they come together on long threads on Web sites and talk about what happened and what it means. People use their imaginations and unfocused creativity to add new layers of meaning and interpretation. “You know that was a reference to ‘Chinatown.’” “Did anyone notice what it meant when Peggy told Mr. Sterling ‘no’ when he asked for the coffee? A whole revolution captured in one word!”

Those threads are golden. We rightly discuss the fact that media now is fractured, niched and broken up, that we no longer watch the same shows or have the same conversation. But what’s happening now on the Internet after a good show is a conversation, a new one, and it’s sprung up from the technology that helped do in the old one. How ironic and predictable, and another cause, however small, for gratitude.

The president has been taking time thinking about Afghanistan. I cannot see why this is bad. If he’s really thinking, he’s not dithering—thought can be harder than action, weighing plans as hard as choosing and executing one. A question of such consequence deserves pondering. A president ought to summon and hear counsel before committing or removing American troops.

The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad. The cliché that politics stops at the water’s edge is a fiction worth preserving. It’s a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition. Maybe it’s too great a sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe he’s bowing to the reigning premise that we live in a poisonously partisan age, that the old forms and ways no longer apply. But why bow to that? To bow to it is to make it truer. The opposition is full of patriots who wish their country well. Bow to that.

All will depend on the outcome. If his decision is sound and ends in success, history will not say he was indecisive and Hamlet-like. If his decision results in failure, history will not celebrate his wonderfully cerebral deliberative style.

President Obama will tell us his decision soon, probably in a speech. Because it will be big, and high-stakes, there will be people telling him he must do many things, including tug at the nation’s heart strings and move it with his vision. He really shouldn’t do this.

Now of all times, and in this of all speeches, sheer, blunt logic is needed. He must appeal not to the nation’s heart but to its brain. America is not in a misty-eyed mood, and in any event when the logic of a case is made, when the listener’s head is appealed to, his heart will become engaged, because the heart is grateful. He’s talking to me like I’m a person who thinks, like I’ve got an IQ. Thank you, Mr. President!

It is a secret of politics, a deep inside secret known to so few that even the most experienced operatives are unaware of it, that people are thinking creatures. They’re not “the masses,” waiting to be manipulated. They think, they calculate. This is true now more than ever.

*   *   *

One day in October 1962, a young president had to tell America something dreadful. What had once been a friendly nation 90 miles from our shore, a nation we’d long and until very recently been used to seeing as peaceful and nonthreatening, was receiving from the Soviet Union nuclear weaponry that we had every reason to believe would be or were aimed at us. It was dreadful news—literally, dreadful.

The president had to tell his country, which didn’t have a clue, all about it, and announce in the same speech what exactly he was going to do and why exactly his plan was the right one and deserved support.

That was a lot of pressure for one speech to bear. John F. Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen bore it by being direct, densely factual and no-frills. Hard to imagine a speech beginning more bluntly than this:

“Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”

He did, in a style that assumed the intelligence of those listening, that assumed as a matter of course their ability to follow an argument and absorb densely presented data.

It would be a real relief to hear this approach from anyone in public life today. Politicians in general no longer assume that we all more or less operate on the same intellectual level, with roughly the same amount of common sense. Instead they talk down to us.

Mr. Obama is in a drama not as urgent as Kennedy’s, but every bit as consequential. The president needs to tell the public what his plan is, how he came to it, how it will work, why it will work, why we should back it, and why the world should view it with sympathy.

He will be talking to a nation full of people tested by a difficult and dramatic decade and anxious about their daily lives. But they will be willing to make a last great push if that push seems thought through, serious and credibly argued for with believable facts. Americans know their taxes at all levels of government are going to go up, as will future spending, as will the national debt. It is one thing to make a war decision in a time of plenty, with the optimism and daring such a time brings. It is another to make a war decision in a time of constriction, and the anxiety that brings.

Which gets us back to style.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” the actor Jack Webb, playing Detective Joe Friday, used to say on the old TV show “Dragnet.” He’d be interviewing the witness to a crime and she—and it was always a she—would wring her hankie, embellish and share her feelings. Joe Friday would stop her. He didn’t need her emotion, he needed to hear what had happened to solve the crime: “Just the facts.”

That is the phrase for the moment. The facts, and a sound interpretation of the facts, are the only thing that will satisfy the public.

First thought on Tuesday’s elections: There’s a lot of firing going on in America, and now that includes politicians. Seems only fair and will likely continue. I don’t think voters in New Jersey and Virginia were saying, “Oh the Democrats are awful, and we hate them,” nor were they saying, “Republicans are wonderful, and we love them.” The voters were being practical, and thinking policy: “Will he raise my taxes?” In Jersey, they fired the incumbent governor because they couldn’t imagine the state getting off its current trajectory (high unemployment, high taxes, high spending) with him there. And they’re certain they have to get off their current trajectory or they’re sunk.

Both states hired new governors. The good news for the GOP is that they hired Republicans. The bad news is that if the Republicans don’t make progress, they’ll fire them too.

Second, it’s too simple to say this was a vote against Obama. Yes, he went to Jersey three times and draped himself like a shawl around the Democratic incumbent. But the crowds showed and nobody booed and everyone had a good time. What happened actually is more interesting. They just didn’t listen to him. Mr. Obama told Jersey to vote for Jon Corzine, and they didn’t. They don’t hate him, they’re just not hearing him. That’s new. They’re warning him: Hey you with the health-care obsession, shape up or you’ll get shipped out!

*   *   *

There’s a new detachment between the president and the electorate he won a year ago by 9.5 million votes. The reason: In 2009, the Democrats who run the White House and Congress chose to go down one path at the exact moment voters went down a different one. The voters, frustrated and then alarmed, waited to fire the first available Democrat, and this week they did. Mr. Obama carried Democratic Jersey by more than 15 points exactly one year ago. The Democratic governor lost by nearly five points this week. That is a 20-point swing. Mr. Obama won Virginia a year ago by six points. The Democratic candidate for governor lost by more than 18 points. That is a 24-point plummet. (The congressional race in upstate New York was too messy, too local, and too full of jumbly facts to yield a theme that coheres.)

The path the president and the Democrats of Congress chose has been called the big-bang strategy. In January 2009 they had the big mo and could claim a mandate. The strategy was to give their first year to 2008 domestic policy pledges: health-care reform, climate change, empowering unions, etc.

But reality came in and stole the mandate, stopped the mo. The reality is that over the past 10 months the great recession settled in, broadened its presence, and became part of the national landscape. It became the big bad thing for normal people. It became a literal daily threat (“Is Daddy going to lose his job?”) that underscored a chronic anxiety. That anxiety is that spending at all levels of government, and the tax demands it will bring and has brought, will make the overall economy worse. If Daddy manages to keep his job in this round of cutbacks, he won’t be safe in the next round.

A president has only so much time. Mr. Obama gives a lot of his to health care. But the majority of voters in New Jersey and Virginia told pollsters they were primarily worried about joblessness and the economy. They’re on another path, and they don’t like the path he’s chosen. A majority in a Gallup poll out Wednesday said they now think the president governs from the left, not the middle. The majority did not expect that a year ago.

The president chose promises made before the recession fully took hold, rather than more pressing and pertinent public concerns. In the language of marketing that has become the language of politics he thereby, in his first year, damaged his brand.

*   *   *

Professional politicians say great things after an election this stark, great in the sense that they reveal whether they have a tropism toward truth or a tropism toward . . . let us call it other things, including mindless spin. “We won last night!” Nancy Pelosi crowed. “I think we had a major victory,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) on “Morning Joe.” Mika Brzezinski was so delighted by his lurch from reality that she asked him to repeat it, and he did.

Interestingly, the president has said nothing.

Under the heading tropism toward truth we have what Sen. Mark Warner, himself a former Virginia governor, told Politico: “We got walloped.”

That was admirably candid. Some party activists said the problem was with Democrats such as Virginia’s gubernatorial nominee, Creigh Deeds, not more fully embracing Mr. Obama in their campaigns. White House adviser David Axelrod echoed this to Politico, saying that in previous elections, beleaguered candidates learned that “the history of running away from a president is not very good.”

My goodness, throw the drowning man an anvil. This goes beyond loyalty. All White House staffs tend to hypnotize themselves into thinking their greatest asset is the president. George W. Bush’s people thought this way too—the guy is magic, associate yourself with him and you’ll win big. That’s what they told candidates in 2006, when Mr. Bush dragged them down. Most modern White House staffs, no matter who the president, wind up at a point where they’re like the men around Stalin. Stalin would give a speech, and his commissars would all wildly applaud. The applause would go on a long time, but it had to end at some point, so Vladimir sitting up front would, in an attempt to be helpful, would stop applauding and sit down. Everyone else would follow. The next week Stalin would give a speech and everything would be the same except Vladimir was no longer in the front row. He was in the gulag. This is how White House staffs come to think: Never be the first one to stop applauding.

Democrats in the House, especially the moderates and so-called blue dogs, really should stop applauding at this point, and signal to the president that he’s been handed a gift by the voters: a rough suggestion as to a midcourse correction.

Politico asked if the White House would learn anything through what happened Tuesday, and if a correction was possible. I doubt it. It is odd to see such hard-line tough-guy political players—and that’s how they see themselves and in part are—governed, really, by abstractions, by things that look big-time but are actually small-time: our legacy, our greater historical meaning, the Aristotelian purity of getting at least a partial public option established so that it will grow and history will look back and say, “Ah, after 40 years of waiting they delivered what America never had and needed.”

Mr. Obama and the House leadership may be too deep into health care to make a shift now and get in line with the American people’s concerns. But they should start paying attention to what the people are saying. What happened Tuesday isn’t a death knell, but it is a fire alarm: Something’s wrong, fix it, change course. Show humility. Bow to the public. “Public opinion is everything,” Lincoln is said to have said. It is. It can be changed and it can be shaped, but it always has to be listened to. This White House has gotten bad at listening. It paid the price for that on Tuesday.