Peggy Noonan

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.

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

It is a story in two parts. The first: “They do not think they can make it better.”

I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call “the drug companies” until we decided that didn’t sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early ‘80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we’re experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here’s why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, “If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!” Others said, “If we follow Reagan, he’ll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we’ll be America again, we’ll be acting like Americans again.” Everyone had a path through.

Now they don’t. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our federal government, from the White House through Congress, and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

And so the disheartenedness of the leadership class, of those in business, of those who have something. This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.

You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.

I talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.’ “ He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”

He felt government doesn’t understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they’re human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they’re all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)

*   *   *

And here is the second part of the story. While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—“strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency—all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them—was his. The American people didn’t hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it. This is part of the reason the image of him standing on the rubble of the twin towers, bullhorn in hand, on Sept.14, 2001, became an iconic one. It said: I’m owning it.

Mr. Bush surely knew from the moment he put the bullhorn down that he would be judged on everything that followed. And he has been. Early on, the American people rallied to his support, but Americans are practical people. They will support a leader when there is trouble, but there’s an unspoken demand, or rather bargain: We’re behind you, now fix this, it’s yours.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking—a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he’s standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He’s got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It’s his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him. You can see it in the polls. That’s what his falling poll numbers are about. “It’s been almost a year, you own this. Fix it.”

*   *   *

The president doesn’t seem to like this moment. Who would? He and his men and women have returned to referring to what they “inherited.” And what they inherited was, truly, terrible: again, a severe economic crisis and two wars. But their recent return to this theme is unbecoming. Worse, it is politically unpersuasive. It sounds defensive, like a dodge.

The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he doesn’t enjoy “somebody sitting back and saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.’” Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking “Why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.

This is not a sign of confidence. Nor were the president’s comments to a New York fund-raiser this week. Democrats, he said to the Democratic audience, are “an opinionated bunch.” They always have a lot of thoughts and views. Republicans, on the other hand—“the other side”—aren’t really big on independent thinking. “They just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, ya’ll thinkin’ for yourselves.” It is never a good sign when the president gets folksy, dropping his g’s, because he is by nature not a folksy g-dropper but a coolly calibrating intellectual who is always trying to guess, as most politicians do, what normal people think. When Mr. Obama gets folksy he isn’t narrowing his distance from his audience but underlining it. He shouldn’t do this.

But the statement that Republicans just do what they’re told was like his famous explanation of unhappy voters are people who “cling to guns or religion.” (What comes over him at fund-raisers?) Both statements speaks of a political misjudgment of his opponents and his situation. They show a misdiagnosis of the opposition that is politically tin-eared. Politicians looking to win don’t patronize those they’re trying to win over.

*   *   *

But the point on the We Inherited a Terrible Situation and It’s Not Our Fault argument is, again, that it is worse than unbecoming. It is unpersuasive.

How do we know this? Through the polls. In all of the major surveys, the president’s popularity has gone down the past few months. A Gallup Daily Tracking Poll out this week reported Mr. Obama’s job approval dropped nine points during the third quarter of this year, that is between July 1 and Sept. 30, when it fell from 62% to 53%. It was the biggest such drop Gallup has ever measured for an elected president during the same period of his term. A Fox News poll out Thursday showed support for the president’s policies falling below 50% for the first time. Ominously for him, independents are peeling off. In 2006 and 2008 independents looked like Democrat. They were angry and frustrated by the wars, they sought to rebuke the Bush White House. Now those independents look like Republicans. They worry about joblessness, debts and deficits.

The White House sees the falling support. Thus the reminder: We faced an insuperable challenge, we’re mopping up somebody else’s mess.

The Democratic Party too sees the falling support, and is misunderstanding it. The great question they debated last week was whether the president is tough enough: Does he come across as too weak? It is true, as the cliché has it, that it’s helpful for a president to be both revered and feared. But this president is not weak, that’s not his problem. He willed himself into the presidency with an adroit reading of the lay of the land, brought together and dominated all the constituent pieces of victory, showed and shows impressive self-discipline, seems in general to stick to a course once he’s chosen it, though arguably especially when he’s wrong. His decision to let Congress write a health-care bill may yield at least the appearance of victory. And if Mr. Obama isn’t twisting arms like LBJ, and then giving just an extra little jerk to snap the rotator cuff just for fun, the case can be made that day by day he’s moving the Democrats of Congress in the historic direction he desires. All his adult life he’s played the long game, which takes patience and skill.

The problem isn’t his personality, it’s his policies. His problem isn’t what George W. Bush left but what he himself has done. It is a problem of political judgment, of putting forward bills that were deeply flawed or off-point. Bailouts, the stimulus package, cap-and-trade; turning to health care at the exact moment in history when his countrymen were turning their concerns to the economy, joblessness, debt and deficits—all of these reflect a misreading of the political terrain. They are matters of political judgment, not personality. (Republicans would best heed this as they gear up for 2010: Don’t hit him, hit his policies. That’s where the break with the people is occurring.)

The result of all this is flagging public support, a drop in the polls, and independents peeling off.

In this atmosphere, with these dynamics, Mr. Obama’s excuse-begging and defensiveness won’t work.

Everyone knows he was handed horror. They want him to fix it.

At some point, you own your presidency. At some point it’s your rubble. At some point the American people tell you it’s yours. The polls now, with the presidential approval numbers going down and the disapproval numbers going up: That’s the American people telling him.

Here are pertinent observations from two accomplished political veterans at a forum Tuesday night at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The question, from David Gergen, was what advice the panelists, former Reagan advisor Ken Duberstein and former JFK advisor Ted Sorensen, both of whom had been supportive of Mr. Obama in 2008—Mr. Sorensen campaigned with him in the primaries and the general election—would now give the president.

Mr. Duberstein said, “Don’t overload the circuits,” sequence your actions, don’t attempt too much too quickly, or too completely. Then, modify the tone. “In campaigning, you try to annihilate your opponent. Governing, you try to make love to your opponents, as well as your allies.”

Mr. Sorensen disagreed with the first point—he thought the circuit board was already overloaded when Mr. Obama was handed it last January—but not the second. On the issue of tone, he had told the Obama transition team, “Stop campaigning. You’ve been campaigning for years, and of course you’ve been in perpetual campaign mode, and [Bill] Clinton more than anyone else set that pattern of the permanent campaign. But once you’re president you don’t need to worry” about what’s on the front page of the Washington Post or how some mayor reacts to some appointment. You’ve got to think bigger than that, more expansively.

Mr. Gergen: “Do you think [the president] is still campaigning too much?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Sorensen. “I think that he’s a remarkable speaker, but his speeches are still largely in campaign mode. I think he was surprised by the unanimity of the Republicans in Congress against his program, and probably feels he has to be in campaign mode,” but “he’s got a long time before he has to start his re-election campaign.”

I’m not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between “us versus them” and “us.” People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public’s enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don’t want whatever it is they’re about to get, and they’re about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

*   *   *

The biggest thing supporters of a health care overhaul do not understand about those who oppose their efforts, and who oppose the Baucus bill, which has triumphantly passed the Senate Finance Committee even though no one knows exactly what is or will end up in it, is the issue of context.

The Democratic Party and the White House repeatedly suggest that if you are not for the bill or an overhaul, you don’t care about your fellow human beings and you love and support the insurance companies. Actually, no one loves the insurance companies, including the insurance companies. They attack aspects of various bills but seem unable to defend themselves, which is why you haven’t seen any 60-second spots explaining that they actually perform a public good, which they do, however imperfectly, frustratingly, mindlessly and passive-aggressively. An industry that always seems to have to be embarrassed into doing the right thing is an industry that is unlovable. But the Obama administration’s strategy of making it “the villain” in “the narrative” will probably not have that much punch because . . . well, again, who likes the insurance companies? Who ever did?

People who oppose a health-care overhaul are not in love with insurance companies. They’re not even in love with the status quo. Everyone knows the jerry-built system of the past half-century has weak points. They just don’t think the current plan will shore them up. They think the plan would create new weak points and widen old ones. They think this because they have brains.

But even that doesn’t get to the real subtext of the opposition. Yes, the timing is wrong—we have other, more urgent crises to face, and an exploding deficit. And yes, a big change in a huge economic sector during economic crisis is looking for trouble.

But a big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they’re living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we’re in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn’t claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It’s not virgin territory anymore, it’s crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren’t all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it’s a world America has been to. It isn’t new to us. And we don’t have too many illusions about it.

This week Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, spoke, in an interview with the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, of the real-world consequences of what Washington is on the verge of doing. He said he believes the Baucus plan is “the absolute height of fiscal irresponsibility,” adding that “the shame of it all is we could actually fix what’s broken in health care without breaking what’s working, and without creating a huge new entitlement program that will accelerate the bankruptcy of this country.”

He does not believe the Baucus bill would reduce the deficit over the next 10 years. “Congress has a pattern of passing cuts to pay for bills and then restoring the cuts once the bill has been passed. It’s crystal-clear to me that the ‘pay-fors’ in this bill will not survive and we will have created a huge deficit-funded liability.” He spoke of what the likely end of Medicare Advantage, the government-subsidized private insurance program on which millions rely to supplement their coverage. He said the Obama White House has even forbidden its officials from discussing that program’s fate under various health-care bills. He charged that Democrats “hate it anyway, because it’s private, so they are killing a program that they never liked in the first place.”

Mr. Ryan is 39 years old, though he’s serving his sixth term in Congress. In his comments on the health care plan he sounded like a veteran, like someone who thinks he has seen the terrain ahead, seen that it is both crowded and costly.