Peggy Noonan

It is absurd and it is embarrassing. It would even be infuriating if it were not such a declaration of emptiness.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has embarrassed itself and cheapened a great award that had real meaning.

It was a good thing, the Nobel Peace Prize. Every year the giving of it was a matter of note throughout the world, almost a matter of state. It was serious. It mattered that it was given to a woman like Mother Teresa in 1979. She had lived for 30 years with the poorest of the poor; she and her Missionaries of Charity dressed their wounds, healed their illnesses, and literally carried them from the streets to mats and beds in a home where they would at least have in death the thing they had not had in life, someone to care for them. She didn’t just care for them, she did the hard thing: She loved them. Her life was heroic, epic, and when she was given the Nobel Peace Prize, it was as if the world were saying, “You are the best we have. You are living a life that should be emulated.”

Nelson Mandela was unjustly imprisoned for 27 years, and he came out without bitterness. There’s a hero for you. He preserved his faith and that of his countrymen that together they could make their nation better, more decent and humane. He lived a life of moral and political struggle, broke the old chains that had bound South Africa. At the end he was a literal inspiration to the world.

Some Peace Prizes have been more roughly political, or had a political edge, and were of course debatable. Woodrow Wilson, self-infatuated after World War I, had little patience with those who foresaw that the Peace of Versailles would lead to more war, and did not understand or know the political realities and deeper nature of his own countrymen. And so his League of Nations flopped in America, the one place where it absolutely had to succeed. But—well, he helped end “the war to end all wars,” issued his Fourteen Points, did try to make the world better. Ferocious Teddy Roosevelt, that progressive and bloody-minded man, worked hard to forge a truce and a peace between the czar’s Russia and Japan.

More deeply into the political life of the 20th century, there were Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, and their Peace Prizes were what they were. But each man had a body of work; each had devoted considerable time and effort to a great issue. It was always absurd that Ronald Reagan, whose political project led to the end of the gulag and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and who gambled his personal standing in the world for a system that would protect the common man from annihilation in a nuclear missile attack, could not win it. But nobody wept over it, and for one reason: because everyone, every sentient adult who cared to know about such things, knew that the Nobel Peace Prize is, when awarded to a political figure, a great and prestigious award given by liberals to liberals. NCNA—no conservatives need apply. This is the way of the world, and so what? Life isn’t for prizes.

Yet even within that context, the giving of the peace prize to President Obama is absurd. He doesn’t have a body of work; he’s a young man; he’s been president less than nine months. He hopes to accomplish much, and so far—nine months!—has accomplished little. Is this a life of heroic self-denial, of the sacrifice of self for something greater, of huge and historic consequence, of sustained vision? No it’s not. Is this a life marked by a vivid and calculable contribution to the peace of the world? No, it’s not.

This is an award for not being George W. Bush. This is an award for not making the world nervous. This is an award for sharing the basic political sentiments and assumptions of the members of the committee. It is for what Barack Obama may do, not what he has done. He hasn’t done anything.

In one mindless stroke, the committee has rendered the Nobel Peace Prize a laughingstock, perhaps for as long as a generation. And that is an act of true destruction, because it was actually good that the world had a prestigious award for peacemaking.

The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of “The One,” the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people. Which puts him at a disadvantage in his own country, because Americans don’t really like it when flaky European politicians tell them how they ought to see him or the world.

And you have to wonder how the truly self-sacrificing professionals who are attempting to create a sound American policy on Afghanistan are going to experience this. Hmm, can a president who just won the left’s great peace prize decide to increase American troop strength and presence in a foreign war? What impact will this have on larger geopolitical considerations?

Assuming the White House did nothing to encourage or lobby for the award, it is not Barack Obama’s fault that he has been embarrassed by this honor. And it may possibly hold for him an unanticipated benefit. It may give him pause: Look what idiots my biggest international supporters are. I may have to rethink a few things.

How to redeem this? That is a hard question, but here is one idea. The president will deliver a big speech in Oslo Dec. 10: white tie and tails, a formal, bound statement. The world, as they say, will be watching. He should deflect the limelight. (Can he?) He should make his subject bigger than himself. (Is there a subject bigger than himself?) He has been accused of traveling through the world on an extended apology tour. That isn’t fair, but the tag is there. How about an unapologetic address, a speech, with the world’s elites leaning forward and listening, about the meaning of America? A speech that shows a grounded and sophisticated love for his country and its great traditions and history. Not a nationalistic speech, not a prideful one, but a loving one.

For instance: The Peace Prize judges won’t see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can’t kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn’t actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)

America hasn’t just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.

Europe’s elites experience Mr. Obama as a historical accident that needs and deserves their encouragement. Actually he was elected with 69.5 million votes, and you know, they were cast by Americans. Go figure.

*   *   *

Mr. Obama should get the spotlight off himself and put it on the great thing that yielded him up and made him possible. America is misunderstood these days, and he could perform a public service by helping people understand it better.

Love, after all, never harms the world, and as an added practical bonus such a speech would obscurely embarrass the committee, which won’t be able to criticize the thoughts of its hero. That would be pleasurable for Americans, and therefore helpful to Mr. Obama.

This might to some degree redeem this wicked and ignorant award, this mischievous honor.

All in. All out. Double down. Withdraw. The language of the Afghanistan debate is stark, as seem the choices. But at least the debate has begun, forced by the blunt recent comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is overdue. At the very least, less than a full airing of all the facts, realities, challenges and possibilities in that region shows insufficient respect and gratitude toward those we’ve put in harm’s way.

Nobody, really, is certain what to do, or wherein lies wisdom. It isn’t a choice between right and wrong or “clearly smart” versus “obviously stupid” so much as a choice between two hells, or more than two.

The hell of withdrawal is what kind of drama would fill the vacuum, who would re-emerge, who would be empowered, what Pakistan would look like with a newly redrawn reality in the neighborhood, what tremors would shake the ground there as the U.S. troops march out. It is the hell of a great nation that had made a commitment in retreat, abandoning not only its investment of blood and treasure but those on the ground, and elsewhere, who had one way or another cast their lot with us. It would involve the hell, too, of a U.N. commitment, an allied commitment, deflated to the point of collapse.

The hell of staying is equally clear, and vivid: more loss of American and allied troops, more damage to men and resources, an American national debate that would be a continuing wound and possibly a debilitating one, an overstretched military given no relief and in fact stretched thinner, a huge and continuing financial cost in a time when our economy is low. There is no particular guarantee of, or even completely persuasive definition of, success. And Pakistan may blow anyway.

The debate is over which hell is less damaging in the long term, which hell is more livable.

In the immediate term, we should move slowly. In an unstable time, in an unstable environment, with many movable pieces and uncertain dynamics, the best thing to do, often, is nothing dramatic. When all is excitable, move deliberately, thoughtfully. Listen, weigh and consider, with the emphasis on listen.

To what? To the serious testimony we should all be hearing so we can reach something like rough consensus on the long term.

*   *   *

So far, oddly, most of the debate over Afghanistan has taken place among journalists and foreign-policy professionals. All power to them: They’ve been fighting it out on op-ed pages and in journals for months now, in many cases with a moral seriousness, good faith, and sense of protectiveness toward the interests of the United States that is, actually, moving. But nobody elected them. We need a truly national debate. The closest we’ve come to the starting of one was the stunning McChrystal interview two weeks ago on “60 Minutes.” He was cuffed by his superiors for some of his comments, and rightly so—we have a chain of command, and certain ways and traditions—but he clearly knew his candor carried a price, was willing to pay it and for what seemed to be high motives: We’ve got to get this right, Washington has to get serious, and the American people have a right to know the facts and options. It was impolitic and patriotic. Good for him.

But Afghanistan is a great American undertaking, and we are at a signal moment. We know, more or less and for better or worse, what Bush policy was until 2009: stay and fight. Now we’re closing on 2010. What is the policy of the new era?

*   *   *

It is strange—it is more than strange, and will confound the historians of the future—that Gen. McChrystal has not been asked to testify before Congress about Afghanistan, about what the facts are on the ground, what is doable, what is desirable, how the war can be continued, and how it can end. He—and others, including experienced members of the military past and present, and foreign-policy professionals—should be called forth to talk to the country in the clearest terms under questioning from our elected representatives.

Before the surge in Iraq, we had the Petraeus hearings, which were nothing if not informative, and helped form consensus. Two generations earlier, we had the Fulbright hearings on Vietnam, which were in their way the first formal, if deeply and inevitably contentious, airing of what was at stake there and what our position was.

Why are we not doing this now? Why are we treating Afghanistan almost like an afterthought, interesting and important but not as urgent a question as health care?

It’s not as if the stakes aren’t as high as they were in Iraq, and Vietnam. It’s not as if our decisions won’t have repercussions that echo down the decades.

A few members of Congress have begun calling for hearings. Democrat Ike Skelton of the House Armed Services Committee told this newspaper that “it would be useful” to hear Gen. McChrystal speak of his proposed strategy. Rep. Skelton said he’d like to hear it from “the horse’s mouth.” Missouri’s Republican senator, Kit Bond, has noted that while the president may not want to hear from Gen. McChrystal, Congress does.

But no hearings are scheduled. Why? The Pentagon doesn’t want them. A spokesman said Gen. McChrystal should be working the war, not in Washington “wading into the debate.” But Afghanistan will be settled in Washington, not Kabul, and the debate has already begun.

Which gets us to the commander in chief, who directs the secretary of defense, who runs the Pentagon. The president, as almost all have noted—and for once, almost all are correct—has not distinguished himself in this matter. Afghanistan is a necessary war or not, we’ll see. He famously talked to Gen. McChrystal only once in the latter’s first 70 days in Afghanistan. He is meeting with advisers, considering options. Would that he’d begun earlier.

At the moment he seems a sort of anti-Lincoln. President Lincoln was early on damaged by Gen. George McClellan’s leaking to his friends in the press, but Lincoln every day was focused on one thing, the war, and took no offense. He knew what was urgent. For Mr. Obama, many things are urgent. But when many things are urgent, nothing really is urgent.

Mr. Obama reportedly began intensive meetings on the future of Afghanistan in the past few weeks. Lincoln used to go to McClellan’s house down the street from the White House and wait in the parlor for a chance at deliberations. One night when McClellan wasn’t in the mood, he came home from a party and sent a servant to say the general was too tired. Lincoln, being Lincoln, laughed, and left. He’d take anything from someone who might win. And when he concluded McClellan couldn’t win, he removed him, with no malice and complete coldness.

One senses Afghanistan has been waiting in the president’s parlor. Now that’s he’s focused, and deliberating, why not include the public?

What is said might box in the president, and Congress, but only because they’ve left a void. Hearings would illuminate issues, air differences, broaden the picture, and make clear the stakes. And all of those things would help spur decisions that spring from a thing badly needed, consensus.

When William Safire died the other day, we lost one of the Elders of journalism and the argumentative arts. We’ve been losing a lot of them lately: Walter Cronkite, Bob Novak, Don Hewitt, Irving Kristol. “The stars seem to be going out one by one,” said Howard Stringer at Cronkite’s memorial.

At a gathering of Safire’s friends and family this week, Bill stories were told with affection, humor, and a bit of awe. He made his way in a profession that was, early on, hostile to the former Nixon speechwriter and PR man. He barreled through with well-marshalled gifts and a heroic work effort. He was a famous lover of words and language whose deepest loyalty was reserved, kept apart, for his wife, children and friends. He took care of those in his ken. And there was the professionalism: He loved journalism, respected what he did, loved helping young ones on the way up, and was so proud of his work that he was only half kidding when he said, “It’s not a column, it’s a pillar.”

Anyway, everyone there knew we’d suddenly lost one of the great ones, the Elders, and there is lately a sense of a changing of the guard.

*   *   *

Who are The Elders? They set the standards. They hand down the lore. They’re the oldest and wisest. By proceeding through the world each day with dignity and humanity, they show the young what it is that should be emulated. They’re the tribal chieftains. This role has probably existed since caveman days, because people need guidance and encouragement, they need to be heartened by examples of endurance. They need to be inspired.

We are in a generational shift in the media, and new Elders are rising. They’re running the networks and newspapers, they own the Web sites, they anchor the shows. What is their job?

It’s to do what the Elders have always done, but now more than ever.

You know the current media environment. You think I’m about to say, “Boy, what’s said on cable, radio and the Internet now is really harmful and dangerous.” And you’re right, and it is. Some of the ranters don’t have the faintest idea where the line is. “They keep moving the little sucker,” said the William Hurt character, the clueless and unstoppable anchorman, in “Broadcast News.” They’ve been moving the little sucker for 20 years. But it’s getting worse, and those who warn of danger are right.

Two examples from just the past week. A few days ago, I was sent a link to a screed by MSNBC’s left-wing anchorman Ed Schultz, in which he explained opposition to the president’s health-care reform. “The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They’d rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for us.” Next, a link to the syndicated show of right-wing radio talker Alex Jones, on the subject of the U.S. military, whose security efforts at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh show them to be agents and lackeys of the New World Order. “They are complete enemies of America. . . . Our military’s been taken over. . . . This is the end of our country.” Later, “They’d love to kill 10,000 Americans,” and, “The republic is falling right now.”

This, increasingly, is the sound of our political conversation.

It is not new to call this kind of thing destructive, though it is. It is a daily agitating barrage that coarsens and inflames. It tears the national fabric. But it could wind up doing worse than that.

I see it this way. There are roughly 300 million people in America. Let’s say 1% of them, only 1 in 100, are composed of those who might fairly be called emotionally unstable—the mentally ill, those who have limited or no ability to govern their actions, those who act out, as they say, physically or violently. That’s three million people.

Let’s say a third of them are regularly exposed to political media rants from right or left. That’s a million people.

What effect might “they want to see you dead” and “the Republic is falling right now” have on their minds?

I was once in a small joust with Roger Ailes about violence on television. I was worried about it. He responded, I paraphrase: But there’s comedy all over TV, and I don’t see people breaking out in jokes and laughter on the streets. True, I said, but depictions of violence are different. Violent images excite the unstable. Violent words do, too.

This is why, I think, so many people—I include, literally, every person I know, from all walks of life, and all ages—are worried that our elected leaders are not safe, that this overheated era will end in some violent act or acts.

Stop reading this and ask whoever’s nearby, “Do you find yourself worrying about President Obama’s safety?” I do not think you are going to get, “No.”

*   *   *

Some conservatives feel umbrage when this is said. “The left equates criticism with violence in order to squelch dissent.” In some cases that of course will be true. But this isn’t debate, it’s more like incitement. And it comes from both right and left.

Democracy cannot healthily endure without free and unfettered debate. It’s our job to watch, critique and question, and, being us, to do it in colorful terms.

But knowing where the line is, matters. Seeing clearly the lay of the land, knowing the facts of the country and your countrymen, matters.

Which gets us back to Safire and Cronkite and Novak and the rest. They knew where the line was. They were tough guys who got in big fights, but they had a sense of responsibility towards the country, and towards its culture. They, actually, were protective toward it. They made mistakes, but they were solid.

Now the new Elders must do the job they once did. Some of them will think they can’t, that the old ones were too big. But it always looks that way. Who thought Walter Cronkite of United Press would become Ed Murrow, only maybe more influential? Who would have thought Bill Safire, refugee from the Nixon White House, could fill the shoes of Scotty Reston? But he did, and more.

Everything has changed since the old ones came up—new platforms, new ways of communicating. Everyone has a mic now, from the guy making YouTubes to the anonymous drunk on the comment thread.

But it’s still possible to set an example, encourage the helpful, stand for the good, pass on the lore, take responsibility.

The new Elders will have to rescue America from the precipice. They’ll have to be mature, think of the collective, of the country as a whole.

If they don’t do it, who will? If they don’t lead through this polarized time, who can? People who are 25 and 30 can’t. They haven’t been around long enough and don’t have the sway. They’re the guests on the broadcasts, not the executive producers. The new Elders are.

And they’ll have obits someday too. Their careers will be captured in eulogies, leaving their children proud, or not. In a way you’re writing your own obit every day. You’re making the lead paragraph positive and constructive, or not.

Someone’s going to sum you up one day. You want to live your professional life in a way that they can write good things.

It is eight years since 9/11, and here is an unexpected stage of grief: fear that the ache will go away. I don’t suppose it ever will, but grieving has gradations, and “horror” becomes “absorbed sadness.” Life moves on, and wants to move on, which is painful for those who will not forget and cannot be comforted. Part of the spookiness of life, part of its power to disorient us, is not only that people die, that they slip below the waves, but that the waves close above them so quickly, the sea so quickly looks the same.

I’ve been thinking about those who were children on 9/11, not little ones who were shielded but those who were 10 and 12, old enough to understand that something dreadful had happened but young enough still to be in childhood. A young man who was 14 the day of the attacks told me recently that there’s an unspoken taboo among the young people of New York: They don’t talk about it, ever. They don’t want to say, “Oh boo hoo, it was awful.” They don’t want to dwell. They shrug it off when it comes up. They change the subject.

This week, in a conversation with college students at an eastern university, I brought it up. Seven students politely shared some of their memories. I invited them to tell me more the next morning, and was surprised when six of the seven showed up. This is what I learned:

They’ve been marked by 9/11 more than they know. It was their first moment of historical consciousness. Before that day, they didn’t know what history was; after that day, they knew they were in it.

It was a life-splitting event. Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, “a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack,” and a crowded theater was “a source for concern.” Every one of them used the word “bubble”: the protected bubble of their childhood “popped.” And all of them said they spent 9/11 and the days after glued to the television, watching over and over again the footage—the north tower being hit by the plane, the fireball. The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down.

I’d never fully realized this: 9/11 was for America’s kids exactly what Nov. 22, 1963, was for their parents and uncles and aunts. They were at school. Suddenly there were rumors in the hall and teachers speaking in hushed tones. You passed an open classroom and saw a teacher sobbing. Then the principal came on the public-address system and said something very bad had happened. Shocked parents began to pick kids up. Everyone went home and watched TV all day, and the next.

*   *   *

Simon, a 20-year-old college junior, was a 12-year-old seventh-grader at a public school in Baltimore. He said: “It’s first-period science, and the teacher next door, who was known to play jokes on other teachers, comes in completely stone-faced and says a plane has hit the World Trade Center, and no one believes him.” Simon didn’t know what to believe but remembered reading that in 1945 a plane had struck the Empire State Building, and “the building stayed up,” so he didn’t worry too much.

“At lunch time the vice principal comes up and he explains that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and one had hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was gone, and I never—when you have your mouth agape it’s never for anything important, but I remember having my mouth agape for a minute or two in complete and utter shock. I went to my art period and I remember my art teacher sitting there with her hands on her face just bawling, she was so frightened. My mom picked me up, and I remember walking with her, and I’m saying ‘This is Pearl Harbor.’”

Nine-eleven, he felt, changed everything for his generation. “It completely destroyed our sense of invincibility—maybe that’s not the right word. I would say it made everything real to a 12-year-old. It showed the world could be a dangerous place when for my generation that was never the case. My generation had no Soviet Union, no war against fascism, we never had any threats. I was born when the Berlin Wall came down. It destroyed the sense of carefree innocence that we had.”

*   *   *

Juliette, also 20 and a junior, was in eighth grade in Great Falls, Va. “I think the kids were shocked,” she said. “The major question was how could this happen, who would do that—like, how does something so crazy happen? What I had is a sense that it was going to be one of those days of which 30 years down the road, people would ask me, What were you doing on that day, where were you on 9/11?—that my children would ask me. And so I set myself to remembering the details.”

I told her that it is interesting to me that no great art has yet come from 9/11. The reason may be that adults absorbed what had happened, and because we had absorbed it, we did not have to transmute it into art. Maybe when you are still absorbing, or cannot absorb, that’s when art happens. Maybe your generation will do it, I said.

She considered this. “There’s always the odds that something much more horrible will happen that will really shake us out of our torpor, that will wake us up,” she said.

*   *   *

The attack was not only an American event. Robbie, an 18-year-old freshman, was 10 and in primary school in England. “We were near the end of school. There were murmurs from teachers about something happening. I remember going back home, and my mum had both televisions on with different news channels. I remember the tower and the pillar of smoke. The big pillar of smoke was very vivid to me, and my mother trying to explain the seriousness of it. I think 9/11 brought us bang slap into the 21st century. I remember when the millennium came people said ‘new time, new world,’ but 9/11 was the ‘new time, new world.’ I understood it was something big, something that changed the world.”

Then he told me that after we had talked the previous evening, he’d had a dream. “I was back in my old school in England, and in front of me I could see the city of Bristol, nothing distinct, but big towers, big buildings. And I could see them crumbling and falling. There was a collective fear, not just from myself but amongst everyone in the dream. I remember calling in the dream my mum, and saying ‘Are you safe, are you safe?’ I think this perhaps shows that after 9/11 . . . as a small child you felt safe, but after 9/11, I don’t think I personally will ever feel 100% safe. . . . I think the dream demonstrates—I think the dream contained my hidden feelings, my consciousness.”

He remembered after 9/11 those who rose up to fight terrorism. Even as a child he was moved by them. There are always in history so many such people, he said. It is always the great reason for hope.

At a speech in Colorado someone asked if I was concerned about some of the appointees to the Obama administration. The questioner was referring obliquely to conservative dismay at Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs on the White House environmental council. Apart from a flirtation with radicalism (you have to hope it did not become a full, deep and continuing relationship), Jones, in February, thoughtfully attempted to capture the essence of the GOP in a speech in Berkeley, Calif. “Republicans are —,” he explained. We don’t print the word he used, but it refers to a body part involved in elimination. He was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the Rahm Emanuel Center for the Study of Political Comportment. Ha, just kidding.

But Mr. Jones is not my concern. All early administrations draw to their middle and lower levels a certain number of activists from the edges—flakes. But because they are extreme, they become controversial, and because they are controversial, they become ineffective. In its way the system works.

A greater concern about President Obama’s staffers and appointees is that so many of them are so young and relatively untried. And not only young and untried, but triumphant. They’re on top of the world. They came from nowhere and elected their guy against the odds. Against expectations, they beat a machine (the Clintons) and a behemoth (long-triumphant Republicanism). Now nothing can stop them, Let’s do big things, let’s be consequential. Consequentialism has been the blight of America’s political life for a decade. Because of it, America’s nerves have been rubbed raw.

To make things worse, for the past 10 months Mr. Obama’s aides have been overpraised by their friends in the media, who either are on their side or were source-greasing. How can you not return my calls when I called you “coruscatingly brilliant” in Time?

I use “coruscatingly brilliant” because it was what a columnist early on called Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a figure in John F. Kennedy’s White House and the focus of much, and deserved, praise. JFK saw it and laughed: “Just remember, a hundred thousand votes the other way and we’d all be coruscatingly stupid.” JFK was of course young himself, but he’d fought a war and been sick since childhood, which will tend to age you.

Why be concerned about the young in the White House? Because they’ve never been beaten up by life, never been defeated. They haven’t learned from failure because they haven’t experienced it. They don’t know what the warning signs of trouble are. They haven’t spent time on the losing side.

Mr. Obama’s young aides are hardworking, humorous and bright as pennies, but I wish they had an arthritic ache or two, I wish they told old war stories because they’d been in old wars, I wish they knew what it looks like when an administration goes too far and strains the ties between itself and the bulk of the people.

*   *   *

They are all now busy planning and strategizing his congressional address on health care. It will be hard to pull off well. The president will be talking, essentially, to three groups: the political elites of both parties and the media, his supporters on the ground, and highly informed citizens who are already either for or against the plan but want to hear, ponder and form an opinion on the speech.

But the great mass of Americans, the big center, will, I strongly suspect, not be listening. Mr. Obama has grown boring. And it’s not Solid Boring, which is fine in a president and may be good. It’s sort of Faux Eloquent Boring, especially on health care. The president likely doesn’t know this, and his people won’t have told him because they don’t know it either, but Mr. Obama always has the same sound, approach, logic, tone, modulation. He always has the same stance. There’s no humor or humility in it. News is surprise, and he never makes news.

The past 10 months, the president has lessened and not increased the trust of the big center. He did a number of things wrong, but one has not been noticed much, or noted. He moved too quickly, before he’d earned the right to change a big chunk of American life. You earn that right by establishing trust. Absent crisis, leaders have to show, over a certain amount of time and through a series of actions, that they’re sober, sound, farsighted, looking out for the middle. In addition, of course, middle America is worried about two dramas, the economy and war, and he’s showing he’s worried about a third drama, health care, which they’ve put to the side. His concerns do not coincide with theirs. Which makes him, not them, look out of touch.

He could always surprise everyone by saying he made a mistake and he’s going back to the drawing board to work hand in hand with Republicans. That would be interesting, and could be quite productive. But no one expects a climbdown at this point. And so he will go on, and win something, some piece of what he wants, and “Obama Wins Health Care Battle” will wind up in the headlines, and it will be a catastrophic victory, won at the price of losing the big center.

*   *   *

The president’s biggest potential long-term problem in terms of the public part of the presidency became obvious to me only during the past week.

I watched with great interest much of Teddy Kennedy’s wake and funeral, and saw in a clearer way than I had in the past a big cultural difference between the elites of the two parties, or rather the Democratic and Republican establishments. Pretty much the entire Democratic establishment was at the Kennedy services, and the level of shown affection among those in the pews and the audience was striking—laughing, hugging, telling stories, admitting weaknesses, weeping. It was Irish, and old-time. If it had been a gathering of the Republican political and journalistic establishment it would have been less emotive, with little shown affection. Polite laughter, cordial handshakes, a lot of staring ahead. A guy with his head down and you think he’s mourning but he’s BlackBerrying. They don’t especially like each other, they compete against each other, and they don’t feel the need to fake liking each other. They have the old dignity of the old grown-ups. And I suppose their style reflects some of their philosophy: Politics isn’t about emotions but thoughts.

The difference between the party establishments struck me, but is not my point. This is: The president walked into the funeral and moved toward the front pews nodding, shaking hands. He hugged Mrs. Kennedy, nodded some more, shook more hands. He was dignified and contained, he was utterly appropriate, and he was cold.

He is cold, like someone who is contained not because he’s disciplined and successfully restrains his emotions, but because there’s not that much to restrain. This is the dark side of cool. One wonders if this will play well with the American people. Long-term it is hard to get people to trust your policies if they think you’re coolly operating on some intellectual or ideological abstractions.

I don’t think as a presidential style it will wear well with the center. And it may not wear well with the president’s own party. They may come to see him, in time, as not really one of them. And that’s when things will really get interesting.

It was the summer of 1985, a year after the second Reagan landslide, and there was a particular speech coming up that was important to the president and first lady. It was a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which at the time was relatively new and the only presidential library that didn’t have an endowment. The event was at Ted Kennedy’s house. The senator had asked the Reagans to help out. The families had struck up a friendship a few years before; in 1981 the Reagans had been delighted by Rose Kennedy, whom they had hosted for her first visit to the White House since her son Jack was president.

And so, June 24, 1985. I had worked on the speech, to my delight—JFK had been a childhood hero—and Reagan went off in a happy mood, waving his cards at Pat Buchanan, the director of communications. “I bet you love my speech, Pat!” he said as he bounded out of the West Wing.

And this is what Ronald Reagan said of John F. Kennedy, on a warm dark night in the floodlit garden of Ted Kennedy’s home in McLean, Va.:

“It always seemed to me that he was a man of the most interesting contradictions, very American contradictions. We know from his many friends and colleagues, we know in part from the testimony available at the library, that he was both self-deprecating and proud, ironic and easily moved, highly literate yet utterly at home with the common speech of the working man. He was a writer who could expound with ease on the moral forces that shaped John Calhoun’s political philosophy; on the other hand, he betrayed a most delicate and refined appreciation for Boston’s political wards and the characters who inhabited them. He could cuss a blue streak—but then, he’d been a sailor.

“He loved history and approached it as both romantic and realist. He could quote Stephen Vincent Benét on Gen. Lee’s army—‘The aide de camp knew certain lines of Greek / and other things quite fitting for peace but not so suitable for war . . .’ And he could sum up a current ‘statesman’ with an earthy epithet that would leave his audience weak with laughter. One sensed that he loved mankind as it was, in spite of itself, and that he had little patience with those who would perfect what was not meant to be perfect.

“As a leader, as a president, he seemed to have a good, hard, unillusioned understanding of man and his political choices. He had written a book as a very young man about why the world slept as Hitler marched on, and he understood the tension between good and evil in the history of man—understood, indeed, that much of the history of man can be seen in the constant working out of that tension.

“He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country. It is a matter of pride to me that so many young men and women who were inspired by his bracing vision and moved by his call to ‘Ask not’ serve now in the White House doing the business of government.

“Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president, because I didn’t. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it’s true: When the battle’s over and the ground is cooled, well, it’s then that you see the opposing general’s valor.

“He would have understood. He was fiercely, happily partisan, and his political fights were tough, no quarter asked and none given. But he gave as good as he got, and you could see that he loved the battle.

“Everything we saw him do seemed to show a huge enjoyment of life; he seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump aboard and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by. You have to enjoy the journey, it’s unthankful not to. I think that’s how his country remembers him, in his joy.

“And when he died, when that comet disappeared over the continent, a whole nation grieved and would not forget. A tailor in New York put a sign on the door: ‘Closed due to a death in the family.’ The sadness was not confined to us. ‘They cried the rain down that night,’ said a journalist in Europe. They put his picture up in huts in Brazil and tents in the Congo, in offices in Dublin and Danzig. That was one of the things he did for his country, for when they honored him they were honoring someone essentially, quintessentially, completely American.

“Many men are great, but few capture the imagination and the spirit of the times. The ones who do are unforgettable. Four administrations have passed since John Kennedy’s death, five presidents have occupied the Oval Office, and I feel sure that each of them thought of John Kennedy now and then, and his thousand days in the White House.

“And sometimes I want to say to those who are still in school, and who sometimes think that history is a dry thing that lives in a book, that nothing is every lost in that house. Some music plays on.

“I have been told that late at night when the clouds are still and the moon is high, you can just about hear the sound of certain memories brushing by. You can almost hear, if you listen close, the whir of a wheelchair rolling by and the sound of a voice calling out, ‘And another thing, Eleanor.’ Turn down a hall and you hear the brisk strut of a fellow saying, ‘Bully! Absolutely ripping!’ Walk softly now and you’re drawn to the soft notes of a piano and a brilliant gathering in the East Room, where a crowd surrounds a bright young president who is full of hope and laughter.

“I don’t know if this is true, but it’s a story I’ve been told, and it’s not a bad one because it reminds us that history is a living thing that never dies. . . . History is not only made by people, it is people. And so history is, as young John Kennedy demonstrated, as heroic as you want it to be, as heroic as you are.”

*   *   *

The Reagans tried to say hello to all the many gathered Kennedys—“That was Jack,” Jackie Onassis said, to the president’s delight—and a lovely thing followed, which is what Ted Kennedy said. The next morning he poured out his gratitude in a handwritten letter. “I only wish Jack could have been there too last night,” he wrote. “Your presence was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership Mr. President.” He signed it, “With my prayers and thanks for you as you lead us through these difficult times.”

And so grace met grace, and a friendship that had already begun deepened. On Wednesday, the day after Ted Kennedy died, Nancy Reagan gave a telephone interview to Chris Matthews on “Hardball.” “We were close,” she said of their friendship, “and it didn’t make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat.” “I’ll miss him very much,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll all miss him.”

Edward Moore Kennedy, 1932-2009, rest in peace.

Looking back, this must have been the White House health-care strategy:

Health care as a subject is extraordinarily sticky, messy and confusing. It’s inherently complicated, and it’s personal. There are land mines all over the place. Don’t make the mistake the Clintons made and create a plan that gets picked apart, shot down, and injures the standing of the president. Instead, push it off on Congress. Let them come up with a dozen plans. It will keep them busy. It will convince them yet again of their importance and autonomy. It will allow them to vent, and perhaps even exhaust, their animal spirits. Various items and elements within each bill will get picked off by the public. Fine, that’s to be expected. The bills may in fact yield a target-rich environment. Fine again. Maybe health care’s foes will get lost in the din and run out of ammo. Maybe they’ll exhaust their animal spirits, too.

Summer will pass, the fight confined to the public versus Congress. And at the end, in the fall, the beauty part: The president swoops in and saves the day, forcing together an ultimate and more moderate plan that doesn’t contain the more controversial elements but does constitute a successful first step toward universal health care.

That’s not what happened.

It all got hotter, quicker than the White House expected. The many plans of Congress congealed in the public mind into one plan, and the one plan became a poison pool. The president is now immersed in it.

Here’s another thing that didn’t work. (I write as if health-care reform or insurance reform or whatever it’s called this week is already a loss, a historic botch, because it is. Even if the White House wins, they lose, because the cost in terms of public trust and faith was too high.)

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: If you have no money and cannot support yourself, we will help as you get back on your feet.

These things are clear. I understand them. You understand them. The president’s health-care plan is not clear, and I mean that not only in the sense of “he hasn’t told us his plan.” I mean it in terms of the voodoo phrases, this gobbledygook, this secret language of government that no one understands—”single payer,” “public option,” “insurance marketplace exchange.” No one understands what this stuff means, nobody normal.

And when normal people don’t know what the words mean, they don’t say to themselves, “I may not understand, but my trusty government surely does, and will treat me and mine with respect.” They think, “I can’t get what these people are talking about. They must be trying to get one past me. So I’ll vote no.”

*   *   *

In a more beautiful world, the whole health-care chapter could become, for the president, that helpful thing, the teachable moment. The president the past month has been taught a lot by the American people. It’s all there in the polls. He could still step back, rethink, say it didn’t work, promise to return with something better.

When presidents make clear, with modesty and even some chagrin, that they have made a mistake but that they’ve learned a lesson and won’t be making it again, the American people tend to respond with sympathy. It is our tradition and our impulse.

Such admissions are not a sign of weakness. John F. Kennedy knew this after the Bay of Pigs. He didn’t blame his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, or the agencies that had begun the invasion’s tentative planning under Ike. JFK made it clear he’d learned a great deal, which increased confidence in his leadership. His personal popularity rose so high that he later wryly noted that the more mistakes he made, the more popular he became.

I suspect the American people would appreciate seeing Barack Obama learn from this, and keep going. He’s their president. He will be for the next few difficult years, which will no doubt contain moments he will have to lead us through. They also probably wouldn’t mind seeing a wry, modest, very human and self-critical stance from a new president who doesn’t strut and doesn’t swagger but does have a level of 1950s cool, Old Vegas cool, of supreme and confident smoothness that one wouldn’t mind seeing ruffled a bit by that old ruffler, reality. Critics of George W. Bush will say here, “Did he ever show wry self-criticism?” No, he didn’t. And that’s why it ended so well for him.

Modern presidents are always afraid to show anything so human as modesty or doubt. They’re afraid of the endless cable-news loop of “I think I was wrong, I think I misjudged, I didn’t get it right.” They’re afraid of death by soundbite. Which is understandable. But they should get over it, especially when it comes to a bit of self-criticism, and even a bit of self-doubt. Modesty is one of the prevailing moods of the moment, it’s part of where the American people are and have been since at least a year ago when the economy tanked. We all lived through the abundance, made good investments and bad, made mistakes of judgment, and are wondering about the past decade, and its mistakes, and our part in its mistakes.

It shouldn’t become a wallow, but there’s nothing wrong with self-reflection and trying to learn from everything we did that was wrong, and right. It wouldn’t be so bad to see a president echo this.

*   *   *

A final factor contributed to the mess of the health-care debate, and that the White House might ponder it. Looking back, what a lucky man President Clinton was to have—to help bring about after his own health-care fiasco—a Congress controlled by the opposite party. What a great and historic team Mr. Clinton and Newt Gingrich were, a popular Democratic president and a determined GOP leader with a solid majority. Welfare reform, a balanced budget, and a sense the public could have that not much crazy would happen and some serious progress might be made. If Mr. Clinton pressed too hard, Mr. Gingrich would push back. If Mr. Gingrich pressed too hard Mr. Clinton pushed back. Two gifted, often perplexing and always controversial Boomers who didn’t even like each other, and yet you look back now and realize: Good things happened there.

Right now Mr. Obama’s gift is his curse, a Congress dominated by his party. While the country worries about the economy and two wars, the Democrats of Congress are preoccupied with the idea that this is their moment, now is their time, health care now, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” the only blazingly memorable phrase to be uttered in the new era.

It’s not especially pleasurable to see history held hostage to ideological vanity, but it’s not the first time. And if they keep it up, they’ll help solve the president’s problem. He’ll have a Republican congress soon enough.

Don’t strain the system. Don’t add to the national stress level. Don’t pierce when you can envelop. Don’t show even understandable indignation when you can show legitimate regard. Realize that the ties that bind still bind but have grown dryer and more worn with time. They need to be strengthened, not strained.

Govern knowing we are a big, strong, mighty nation, a colossus that is, however, like all highly complex, highly wired organisms, fragile, even at places quite delicate. Don’t overburden or overexcite the system. America used to have fringes, one over here and the other over there. The fringes are growing. The fringes have their own networks. All sorts of forces exist to divide us. Try always to unite.

These are things one always wants people currently rising in government to know deep in their heads and hearts. They are the things the young, fierce staffers in any new White House, and the self-proclaimed ruthless pragmatists in this one, need to hear, be told or be reminded of.

*   *   *

The big, complicated, obscure, abstruse, unsettling and ultimately unhelpful health-care plans, proposals and ideas keep rolling out of Washington. Five bills, thousands of pages, “as it says on page 346, paragraph 3, subsection D.” No one knows what will be passed, what will make its way through House-Senate “conference.” They don’t even know what the president wants, what his true agenda is. He never seems to be leveling, only talking. Everything’s open to misdirection and exaggeration, and everything, people fear, will come down to some future bureaucrat’s interpretation of paragraph 3, subsection D, part 22.

What a disaster this health-care debate is. It strains, stresses and pierces, it unnecessarily agitates and is doomed to be the cause of further agitation. Who doubts the final bill will be something between a pig in a poke and three-card Monte?

Which is too bad, because our health care system actually needs to be made better.

*   *   *

There are smart and experienced people who say whatever the mess right now, the president will get a bill of some sort because he has the brute numeric majority. A rising number say no, this thing has roused such ire he won’t get much if anything. I don’t know, but this is true: If he wins it, will be a victory not worth having. It will have cost too much. It has lessened the thing an admired president must have from the people, and that is trust.

It is divisive save in one respect. The Obama White House has done the near impossible: It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians—they’re all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They’re shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again.

*   *   *

The president’s town hall meeting on Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H., was supposed to be an antidote to the fractious town halls with members of Congress the past weeks. But it was not peaceful, only somnolent. Actually it was a bit of a disaster. It looked utterly stacked, with softball after softball thrown by awed and supportive citizens. When George W. Bush did town halls like that—full of people who’d applaud if he said tomorrow we bring democracy to Saturn—it was considered a mark of manipulation and insecurity. And it was. So was Mr. Obama’s.

The first question was from a Democratic state representative from Dover named Peter Schmidt. He began, “One of the things you’ve been doing in your campaign to change the situation is you’ve been striving for bipartisanship.”

“Right,” the president purred. They were really holding his feet to the fire.

“My question is,” Mr. Schmidt continued, “if the Republicans actively refuse to participate in a reasonable way with reasonable proposals, isn’t it time to just say ,’We’re going to pass what the American people need and what they want without the Republicans’?”

Stop, Torquemada, stop!

The president said it would be nice to pass a bill in a “bipartisan fashion” but “the most important thing is getting it done for the American people.”

Then came a grade-school girl. “I saw a lot of signs outside saying mean things about reforming health care” she said. Here one expected a gentle and avuncular riff on the wonderful and vivid expressions of agreement and disagreement to be seen in a vibrant democracy. But no. The president made a small grimace. “I’ve seen some of those signs,” he said. There’s been a “rumor” the House voted for “death panels” that will “pull the plug on grandma,” but it’s all a lie.

I’m glad he’d like psychiatric care included in future coverage, because after that answer that child may need therapy.

*   *   *

The president seemed like a man long celebrated as being very good at politics—the swift rise, the astute reading of a varied electorate—who is finding out day by day that he isn’t actually all that good at it. In this sense he does seem reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, who was brilliant at becoming president but not being president. (Actually a lot of them are like that these days.)

Also, something odd. When Mr. Obama stays above the fray, above the nitty-gritty of specifics, when he confines his comments on health care to broad terms, he more and more seems . . . pretty slippery. In the town hall he seemed aware of this, and he tried to be very specific about the need for this aspect of a plan, and the history behind that proposal. And yet he seemed even more slippery. When he took refuge in the small pieces of his argument, he lost the major threads; when he addressed the major threads, he seemed almost to be conceding that the specifics don’t hold.

When you seem slippery both in the abstract and the particular, you are in trouble.

*   *   *

Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill. It was a bad bill—off point, porky and philosophically incoherent. He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold. The Democrats of the House pushed it through, and not one Republican, even those from swing districts, even those eager to work with the administration, could support it.

This, of course, was politics as usual. But in 2008 people voted against politics as usual.

It was a real lost opportunity. It marked the moment congressional Republicans felt free to be in full opposition. It gave congressional Democrats the impression that they were in full control, that no one could stop their train. And it was the moment the president, looking at the lay of the land, seemed to reveal he would not govern in a vaguely center-left way, as a unifying figure even if a beset one being beaten ‘round the head by the left, but in a left way, without the modifying “center.” Or at least as one who happily cedes to the left in Congress each day.

Things got all too vividly divided. It was a harbinger of the health care debate.

I always now think of a good president as sitting at the big desk and reaching out with his long arms and holding on to the left, and holding on to the right, and trying mightily to hold it together, letting neither spin out of control, holding on for dear life. I wish we were seeing that. I don’t think we are.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed”, that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.

The Democratic National Committee chimed in with an incendiary Web video whose script reads, “The right wing extremist Republican base is back.” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse issued a statement that said the Republicans “are inciting angry mobs of . . . right wing extremists” who are “not reflective of where the American people are.”

But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems “fishy,” you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight “intentionally misleading” information.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday wrote to the president saying he feared that citizens’ engagement could be “chilled” by the effort. He’s right, it could. He also accused the White House of compiling an “enemies list.” If so, they’re being awfully public about it, but as Byron York at the Washington Examiner pointed, the emails collected could become a “dissident database.”

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.

The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is, the big mic.

And frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.

You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor.

Absent that, and let’s assume that won’t happen, the health-care protesters have to make sure they don’t get too hot, or get out of hand. They haven’t so far, they’ve been burly and full of debate, with plenty of booing. This is democracy’s great barbaric yawp. But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.

Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.

It’s going to be a long August, isn’t it? Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States through the Great Depression and World War II—if FDR, that canny old political operator, that shrewd judger of men, that merry spinner (“First thing we do is deny we were in Philadelphia!”) that cold calculator (he put Joe Kennedy to head the first Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the fox among the foxes), that patient and knowing waiter-outer of events—if FDR were advising President Obama right now, what would he say?

He might look at the lay of the land and tell Mr. Obama something like this:

“My friend, you’re in a bit of a fix. Falling polls, decreasing support for health care. Beyond that, you’re stuck in a bit of a lose-lose. If you don’t get a bill along the lines you’ve announced, you’ll look ineffective and weak—a loser. If, on the other hand, you win, if you get what you asked for, it will all be a mess and all be on you. The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute properly, the costs will be huge. The new regime will thoroughly discombobulate things just in time for everyone’s complaints to reach a crescendo by Election Day 2010.

“But I have an idea, and hear me out. You already have Medicare, a single-payer national health-care system for those 65 and older. Little Harry Truman was the first American to get a Medicare card in 1965, did you know that? LBJ hauled him in for a ceremony. Anyway, Americans like Medicare. So here’s the plan. From here on in, every day, start talking about it: ‘Medicare this, Medicare that, Medicare.’ Get your people in Congress to focus on making the system ‘healthier.’ It’s rife with waste, fraud and abuse, everyone knows that. And there’s the demographic time bomb. Come together in a great show of bipartisan feeling with our Republican friends and announce some serious cost-saving measures that are both legitimate and farsighted. Be Dr. Save the System. On thorny issues like end-of-life care, put together a bipartisan commission, show you’re open to Republican suggestions.

“Then, at the end, get your Democratic majorities to make one little change in the program—it’s now open to all. You don’t have to be 65. The uninsured can enroll. Do it in the dead of night if you have to, you’ve got the votes.

“And then, and only because you’ve all made so many institutional and structural changes, you’ll have to give Medicare a new name. I’d suggest ‘The National Health Service.’

“Voilà! You now have the single-payer system you wanted.

“Everybody wins. You get expansion, Republicans get cost control, the system is made more secure, and the public for once isn’t terrified.
“Republicans of course will say they won—they defeated a brand new boondoggle nationalized health system. Fine. But people will start referring to the National Health Service every day, and they’ll believe they have one, and they’ll believe you gave it to them. And you can run in ’12 saying you did. That’s what I’d do!”

Before departing in a cloud of cigarette smoke and martini fumes, FDR just might add, “A second option, though lacking that special spark of deviousness, is the Wyden-Bennett bill. it’s cost-neutral, it’s not single-payer, but everyone gets coverage. And that was the point, wasn’t it? You can brag about health care for all and fiscal prudence. Not bad!”

*   *   *

If Richard Nixon—one of the great vote counters, a man who loved policy more than politics but was very good at the latter until he wasn’t anymore, a man who acted so very tough because his heart had been broken, not only by Watergate but by other things (he was right about Alger Hiss and still they wouldn’t honor him; he gave liberals everything in terms of domestic programs and still they wouldn’t love him)—if he met in Washington with the national Republicans of 2009, he might, just might, say something like this:

“Men, and a few ladies, and it’s wonderful to have you here, you’re in a good position and a bad one. Good: The American people are peeling off from nationalized medicine or socialized medicine or whatever you call it. Bad: I’m not sure the peeling off has anything to do with you. There’s something going on that I never foresaw, and it’s the fact that you don’t seem anymore to be the face of the party or of the movements within it. People with TV and radio shows do. Media people! There’s a plus to this but a minus, too. They’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room. You think they’re supporting you, but they’re really supplanting you! You’ve got to figure out how to come to the fore more and break through. But that’s small beer. Big thing is the current debate.

“You still haven’t given the American people coherent alternatives and arguments, or not so the people have noticed. You’ve got to have a strategy, and you’ve got to be serious. Put all internal jockeying aside and remember your philosophy, the thing that made you be a Republican and not a Dem.

“They’re calling you all Dr. No, but that’s not really taking off, so don’t worry about it. But they are tagging you as guys who think this is all just about politics. Remember, the majority of the American people don’t care at all about your political prospects. Why should they? Unlike everyone in Washington and the media, they’re not political obsessives. They actually have lives. They care about what happens to them when they’re sick. So stop the ‘Obama’s Waterloo’ stuff—what a mistake that was, to make yourselves look cynical and purely partisan!—and refocus. Come back to first principles and prudent warnings, but always within a context of clear patriotism. At the end of the day, America needs a successful president. It’s dangerous to have a wounded duck six months into a presidency in a dangerous world. So help him by gently instructing him. He’ll hate that, because in his mind he’s the teacher and you’re the student. Point out that there’s a lot the president doesn’t understand, come forward every day with your ideas, talk them up, get them out there.

“For instance: As you know, doctors keep fees up and order expensive tests because they’re afraid of malpractice suits. They pay terrible insurance premiums. We have to reform that. Stop calling it ‘tort reform’; normal people think a tort is something you eat for dessert. Call it the Limiting Lawyers’ Windfalls bill. No one likes lawyers anymore, Perry Mason’s dead. And make it real when you talk. Here you can pinpoints an Obama weakness that you’re not even exploiting. He won’t go near legal reform because his biggest backers and contributors are the trial lawyer’s lobby. He talks about the common good—give me a break. As Jack Kennedy used to say, and so eloquently, here you can really stick it to him and break it off.

“And speaking of JFK, try to seize back a bit of the issue of health in general. Remember physical fitness and vigor and 50 mile hikes on the C&O Canal? Completely captured the public imagination. JFK himself didn’t do it, he wasn’t insane, and he had the bad back. He sent Bobby and that fat Pierre Salinger. Anyway, go with that: personal responsibility, strength, health. Steal it from the Dems. But don’t imitate their censorious tone: ‘Ya can’t smoke, put down that doughnut.’ Let me tell you, doughnut eaters are the largest growing demographic in America. Don’t get crossways with them!”