Peggy Noonan

Everyone is noting the 40th anniversary, on July 20, of the moon landing. Good. It was an epic moment in history, though its memory is accompanied by an unsatisfied feeling, as if Columbus came to America and then no one followed. People will ask again why we’ve stopped visiting other places and have instead spent the past few decades watching the space shuttle orbit the Earth. There are many reasons for this (budgets, the end of the space race, an inability to understand the human imagination) but let me throw forward this one: The space program of the past 32 years unconsciously mirrored a change in American psychology. Once, we saw ourselves as a breakthrough people, a nation with a mission to push beyond ourselves. Now, in the age of soft narcissism, we just circle ourselves. Which is what the shuttle does: It is on an endless loop, going ‘round and ‘round and looking down at: us.

We should take our eyes off ourselves. We should go someplace again. It would remind us who we’ve been, which would remind us who we are.

Something about the steely-eyed rocket men of the Mercury and Apollo programs: They weren’t criers. Now, on TV every day as people remember some trauma or triumph, they stop as if on cue—they know this is expected of them—and weep. They think this shows sincerity and sensitivity. But they feel too much about their struggles. I sometimes watch with fascination those shows where people lose weight. They often begin to sob as they fall off the treadmill or remember the Twinkie they didn’t eat. This is now the national style. It makes Europeans laugh. When they’re about to be mawkish or overly emotional they say, “I don’t mean to get American on you.” The men who took the moon will be all over TV the next few days. I bet they don’t cry as they remember “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” How moving their dry eyes will be.

The Sotomayor hearings were unsatisfying and relatively unilluminating. She was moderate in tone and manner, said little, will be confirmed, and over the years, decision by decision, we will find out who she is and how she thinks. They’re all a mystery going in and then, paradoxically, cover themselves in a long black robe and reveal themselves. The Republicans questioning her never seemed to gain purchase, never quite succeeded in making the interesting (the Ricci case) interesting. Looking at things shallowly, and let’s, Sonia Sotomayor seemed weirdly overrehearsed, speaking v e r y s l o w l y, gesturing with her hands in a way that was no doubt supposed to look natural and warm, like grandma in the kitchen, but instead came across as artificial and mildly animatronic.

She took refuge (as did some of her questioners) in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won’t be able to follow what is being said. To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You’re talking, so you’ll seem alive—in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated—but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who’ll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)

I suspect the hearings added to a general sense of Washington’s surface comity and essential sketchiness.

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The new senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, signaled in his questioning that he will spend the next few years playing the part of the reasonable fellow who’s awed to be here, eager to learn and ready to work. He’s doing a Full Hillary. When Mrs. Clinton entered the Senate 8 years ago, there was about her the constant air of fisticuffs and scandal. But she did the absolute commonsense thing, keeping her head down and charming people with her hardworking, non-Diva-like attitude. This was not only a great move, which opened her to subsequent journalistic reassessments, it was also probably an actual relief for her. Removed from the daily grind of White House attack-and-defend, with a solid six-year sinecure, she was free for the first time to be what she likely wanted to be when she started out. She tapped into the part of her that really was a policy wonk who wanted to work on legislation, wanted to be liked, and wanted, even, to like. She tapped into her seriousness. We will see if Mr. Franken has any to tap into.

He will devote his time to appearing affable, speaking in a faux regular guy language—the Perry Mason question was his—curbing his crazy, and working well with the big fat lying liars on the other side. His job is to make Minnesota happy he’s there so he can stay longer.

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Mrs. Clinton is in a different position now. By this spring it must have become apparent to her that when the nice new president came and offered her the secretary of state job, and she said yes, she got rolled. What he got was clear: He took her off the chessboard. She wouldn’t be in the Senate being a counterforce, wouldn’t be planning her next move or become the rallying point of anti-Obama Democrats. She’d be on board, part of the team and invested in the administration’s success, for now its success would ensure her future. If their relationship didn’t work, nobody would think it was his fault.

What she would not have known was that she would be a public face of American diplomacy—not the face but a face—and not a decisive inside power. The portfolio for key areas—Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Mideast—was day by day given to others. She was sent off to do interviews on “Good Morning Manila.” In a foreign-affairs apparatus of clashing egos, she’d be just another ego. A Henry Kissinger or George Shultz would never have allowed this. She didn’t even go to the G-8 or the Russia meeting. President Obama, that canny fellow, only wants Obama in the room. It is true she broke her elbow, but they make it sound like a farming accident where her elbow was torn from her arm as she fed the thresher. Tina Brown wrote a witty column saying Mr. Obama should let Hillary out of her burqa.

But you know, one thing Mrs. Clinton’s learned is how to wait. Things turn on a dime, you wake up in the morning and there’s a new headline that changes everything. Sooner or later Mr. Obama is going to get in trouble, sooner or later the trouble will take hold and settle in, and sooner or later she will be the unsullied one who quietly did her duty in spite of the slights to which she’s been subjected. And when that happens, she will emerge—reluctantly, painfully—as the Democratic alternative. The one who almost won, who knew—who learned the hard way—that you can’t do everything all at once, that it’s the economy, stupid.

They will look like kids playing with history. Hillary isn’t a kid. She’s experienced, and has been roughed up by history. Watch. She’ll roll right back.

Sarah Palin’s resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

To wit, “I love her because she’s so working-class.” This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they’re working class “tropes.” Because, you know, that’s what they teach in “Ways of the Working Class” at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

“She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it’s included in U.S. News and World Report’s top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named “Abe,” and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn’t need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

“She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism.

“Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!

“The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

“Turning to others means the media won!” No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn’t the media want to keep that going?

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Here’s why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.

We are going to need the best.

Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his “popularity,” but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is “premature,” to declare independence now would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.” When he sat down, “all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the windows.”

Then John Adams rose. He wished he had the power of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, he said; surely they had never faced a question of greater human import.

He made, again, the case for independence. Now is the time, the facts are inescapable, the people are for it, we are not so much declaring as acknowledging reality. “Looking into the future [he] saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend: ‘. . . We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.’ “ Outside the wind picked up and the storm struck hard with thunder and lightning. Storms had in the past unnerved Adams, but he spoke steadily, logically and compellingly for two hours.

After nine hours of debate, the voting commenced. The yeses were in the majority, but there were more noes than expected. Someone moved a final vote be taken the next morning. Adams and the rest hastily agreed.

That night word reached Philadelphia that the British fleet, a hundred ships, had been sighted off New York.

The next day, July 2, the final voting began. It went quickly. This was a pivotal moment in the political history of man. A creative, imaginative, historically conscious person in the middle of a thing so huge and full of consequence will try to notice things, to keep them forever in his eyes and pass them on. Here is a thing John Adams would never forget:

At 9 in the morning, just as the doors to the Congress were to be closed, “Caesar Rodney, mud spattered, ‘booted and spurred,’ made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney—the ‘oddest-looking man in the world,’ Adams once described him—had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of ‘fire.’ Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote.”

All of these quotes are from David McCullough’s “John Adams.” More on Mr. McCullough in a moment.

The vote was completed: 12 for independence, New York abstaining, no one opposing. “The break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all 13 clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the others silent the effect was the same.”

On July 3, Congress argued over the wording and exact content of the formal Declaration. An indictment of the slave trade was dropped. In all, Thomas Jefferson saw roughly 25% of what he’d written wind up on the floor.

On July 4, discussion ended, debate was closed, a vote on the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was called, and the results were as on July 2. Congress ordered the document be printed. They’d sign it in a month. For now, John Hancock and one other, Charles Thompson, fixed their signatures.

Those present thought the great day had been July 2—the vote for independence itself. John Adams, who’d emoted over the 2nd in letters to Abigail, didn’t even mention the 4th, and Thomas Jefferson famously went shopping that afternoon for ladies’ gloves.
But on the morning of July 5, the people of Philadelphia started getting their hands on independently printed copies of the Declaration, and the impact was electric: My God, look what they said yesterday—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And on the 6th, a local newspaper carried the text of what had been agreed upon on the 4th. And so the celebration of the Fourth of July as one of the signal moments in the history of human freedom, was born. And so we mark it still.

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On David McCullough: Almost all the details in the above come from his “John Adams” and “1776”. He is America’s greatest living historian. He has often written about great men and the reason may be a certain law of similarity: He is one also. His work has been broadly influential, immensely popular, respected by his peers (Pulitzer Prizes for “Truman” and “John Adams,” National Book Awards for “The Path Between the Seas” and “Mornings on Horseback”) and by the American public. It is not often—it is increasingly rare—that the academy shares the views of the local dry cleaner, the student flying coach and the high school teacher, but all agree on Mr. McCullough, as they did half a century ago on, say, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. He is admired by normal people and esteemed by the intellectual establishment.

Why? Here are a few reasons. He has the eye of a gifted reporter and the depth of a historian. He sees and explains the true size of an incident or endeavor, he factors in, always, the fact that we are human, and he captures the detail that is somehow so telling—it was a scarf of green silk, not soft muslin, that Rodney wore to the vote on American independence. He writes like a dream, of course. He is broad gauged and has range—the Johnstown flood, the building of the Panama Canal, the founders.

Mr. McCullough betrays no need to be contrarian but is only too happy to knock down history’s clichés, to wit George III, the mad doofus, who was in fact “tall and rather handsome” and played both the violin and piano. “His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach.” He rendered “quite beautiful architectural drawings,” assembled a distinguished art collection, collected books that in time constituted “one of the finest libraries in the world,” loved astronomy, was nonetheless practical, and had a gift for putting people at their ease. He impressed even crusty old Samuel Johnson, who after meeting him called him “the finest gentleman I have ever seen.” As for the famous madness, he suffered not during the American Revolution but later in life from what appears to have been “prophyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century.”

One can’t know if Mr. McCullough is correct in his judgment here, or fully so. One can know he inspected the available data, pondered it, and attempted a fair-minded assessment. He is reliable. (Of how many can that be said?) And he loves America. His work has gone to explaining it to itself, to telling its story.

Almost two years ago, I was lucky enough to tour Mount Vernon with a dozen people including him. (If I were David McCullough I would know the date and time. But I know the weather.) At the bottom of a stairway leading to the second floor, we chatted for a moment, and I asked him how he accounted in his imagination for the amazing fact of the genius cluster that founded our nation. How did so many gifted men, true geniuses, walk into history at the same time, in the same place, and come together to pursue so brilliantly a common endeavor? “I think it was providential,” he said, simply.

Well, so do I. If you do too, it’s part of what you’re celebrating today.

Later, after dusk, an unforgettable moment. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association, led by Gay Gaines, retiring after three years as one of its greatest regents—she’d worked herself like a rented mule to solidify and expand the operation—gave us dinner on a long table on the piazza, the veranda overlooking the unchanged Potomac. It is where President and Mrs. Washington dined. It was hot, and now dark, and David McCullough rose to speak of Washington, of his courage and leadership. A storm had been gathering all day. Now it broke, and as he spoke of Valley Forge there was, literally, a sudden roar of thunder, and lightning lit the clouds over the river. Mr. McCullough continued, with his beautiful voice, and we all got a chill: What kind of moment is this? What could we possibly have done to deserve it?

Nothing of course. Some gifts are just given.

That’s what Mr. McCullough’s work has been, a gift, one big enough for a nation. So thanks today to the memory of John and Tom and George, and old Ben, and John Dickinson, and Caesar Rodney too. Good work, gentlemen. You too, David.

Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves. All this followed the president’s first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: “Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy and ability to control spending have caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest level since taking office, according to a spate of recent polls.” Independents and some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are “becoming skeptical.”

You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy, which all the polls mentioned. But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he’s not seeing to it.

The Sentence comes from a story Clare Boothe Luce told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that “a great man is one sentence.” His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about. “He preserved the union and freed the slaves,” or, “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.” You didn’t have to be told “Lincoln” or “FDR.”

She wondered what Kennedy’s sentence would be. She was telling him to concentrate, to know the great themes and demands of his time and focus on them.

It was good advice. History has imperatives, and sometimes they are clear. Sometimes they are met, and sometimes not. When they’re clear and met, you get quite a sentence.

And click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace. Mr. Obama’s White House is at the moment like most new White Houses. Every administration wants to do great things. Or, rather, it wants greatness. It wants to break through on some great issue or issues and claim to be, as they used to say, consequential. There’s a busy hum of action. It can cause a blur. Everyone who works for a nation gets carried away. They’re all swept up. It’s understandable. They’re working in the White House, they’re mostly young—only the young can take the punishing hours, and only the young have lived through a limited enough history that they think everything counts and everything matters, which is how you want people in a White House to feel. In this they are like the young reporters and anchors on weekend TV. The storm comes and it’s the biggest storm ever, or the most terrible brushfire. They’re like this because it’s their first hurricane. If the sin of the young is to blow things out of proportion, the sin of the old is no longer to notice true dimension and size. It’s their 30th revolution after all, how big a deal could it be?

New White Houses are always ardent for change, for breakthroughs. They want the sentence even when they don’t know the sentence exists, even when they think it’s a paragraph. The Obama people want, “He was the president who gave all Americans health care,” and, “He lessened income inequality,” and, “He took over a failed company,” and other things. They wants a jumble of sentences and do a jumble of things. But an administration about everything is an administration about nothing.

Mr. Obama is not seeing his sentence. He’s missing it. This is the sentence history has given him: “He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.” That’s all anybody wants. It’s all that’s needed.

It is a great and worthy sentence, the kind that gives you a second term and the affectionate memory of history. If Mr. Obama earns it and makes it true of himself, he will be called good to great. But you have to meet it, you have to do it.

To get the first part of the sentence right would take a lot—restoring the confidence of the nation, getting spending down so people don’t feel a sense of horror as they look at the future, getting or keeping the dollar sound, keeping the banks up and operating. A friend says that what’s missing is an adult and responsible sense of limits, that we need to remember—we need to be reminded by our leaders—that it’s not un-American to see limits. It’s adult to see limits, it’s right and realistic.

Are we beginning the journey back to anything like fiscal health? Who thinks the answer is yes? There’s a pervasive sense that still, nine months into the crash, “we live in castles built on sand.” We’re not building on anything secure. Instead, and more and more, we have a series of presidential actions that seem less like proposals than non sequiturs. A new health-care program that Congress itself says will cost a trillion dollars over 10 years? A new energy program that will cost however many hundreds of billions in however many years? Running General Motors, and discussing where its plants should be, and what the interiors of the cars should look like, and shouldn’t the little cup holder be bigger to account for Starbucks-sized coffee? Wait, what if it’s a venti latte? One imagines the conversation in the car czar’s office: “You know, I’ve always wanted to see a mauve car because mauve is my favorite color, I mean to the extent it’s a color.”

There is a persistent sense of extraneous effort, of ambitions too big and yet too small, too off point, too base-pleading, too ideological, too unaware of the imperatives. And there is the depressing psychological effect of seeing government grow so much, so big, so fast. This encourages a sense that things are out of control and cannot be made better.

In terms of our security, we face challenges all over the world, from state and nonstate actors. Today a headline popped up on my screen: North Korea has threatened to attack us. A mordant response: Get in line, buddy. The administration, which has been appropriately modest in its face toward the world, should be more modest internally, and seek a new and serious bipartisan consensus on our defense system, our security, our civil defense, our safety. This of course is an impossible dream, but it was impossible back in the fractious ‘50s to reach a workable consensus on a strategy toward the Soviets. And yet we did it. Do we have anything like a bipartisan strategy for our age? Not nearly. We’re split in two, in three. We’ll wish someday we did. It is amazing we don’t even talk about this.

Our economy and our security are intertwined. They are at the heart of everything, even to our ultimate continuance as a nation. Mr. Obama cannot replace his sentence with 10 paragraphs, and he can’t escape it, either. Because history dictated it. History wrote it. “He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.” Sentences don’t really get better than that. He should stop looking for a better one. There isn’t a better one.

America so often gets Iran wrong. We didn’t know when the shah was going to fall, didn’t foresee the massive wave that would topple him, didn’t know the 1979 revolution would move violently against American citizens, didn’t know how to handle the hostage-taking. Last week we didn’t know a mass rebellion was coming, and this week we don’t know who will emerge the full or partial victor. So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment.

That having been said, it’s pretty wonderful to see what we’re seeing. It is moving, stirring—they are risking their lives over there in a spontaneous, self-generated movement for greater liberty and justice. Good for them. In a selfish and solipsistic way—more on that in a moment—the uprising, as it moves us, reminds us of who we are: lovers of political freedom who are always and irresistibly on the side of the student standing in front of the tank or the demonstrator chanting “Where is my vote?” in the face of the billy club. Good for us. (If you don’t understand who the American people are for, put down this newspaper or get up from your computer, walk into the street and grab the first non-insane-looking person you meet. Say, “Did you see the demonstrations in Iran? It’s the ayatollahs versus the reformers. Who do you want to win?” You won’t just get “the reformers,” you’ll get the perplexed-puppy look, a tilt of the head and a wondering stare: You have to ask?)

If the rebels on the street win, however winning is defined, they, being more modern and moderate than the ruling government, will likely have a moderating influence on their government. If the rebels on the street lose, however that is defined, this fact remains: Something has been unleashed, and it won’t be going away. A thugocracy has been revealed as lacking the support and respect of a considerable portion of its people, and that portion is not solely the most sophisticated and educated but, far more significantly, the young. Half the people in Iran are under 27. When the young rise against the old, the future rises against the past. In that contest, the future always wins. The question is timing: soon or some years from now? (A heartening Twitter feed Thursday, from Andrew Sullivan’s site: “Fact is, we’ve seen variety of protesters grow: young+old, students+professionals, women in chador+westernized students.”)

Stifling and corrupt religious autocracy has seen its international standing diminished, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is among other things a Holocaust denier, has in effect been rebuked by half his country, and through free speech, that most painful way to lose your reputation, which has broken out on the streets. He can no longer claim to speak for his people. The rising tide of the young and educated seems uninterested in reflexively hating the West and deriving their meaning from that hatred.

To refuse to see all this as progress, or potential progress, is perverse to the point of wicked. To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous. The ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week. John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn’t know whose side America is on. “In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral,” said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it’s neutral?

This was Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else’s delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.

Mr. Obama was restrained, balanced and helpful in the crucial first days, keeping the government out of it but having his State Department ask a primary conduit of information, Twitter, to delay planned maintenance and keep reports from the streets coming. Then he made a mistake, telling the New York Times in terms of our national security there is little difference between Mr. Ahmadinejad and his foe, Mir Hossein Mousavi, which may or may not in the long run be true but was undercutting of the opposition.
What now? Americans, and the West, should be who they are, friends of freedom. Iranians on the street made sure they got their Twitter reports and videos here. They trust us to spread the word through our technology. A lot of the signs they held were in English. They trust us to be for change and to advance their cause, and they’re right to trust us.

Should there at this point, more than a week into the story, be a formal declaration of support from the U.S. government? Certainly it’s time for an indignant statement on the abuses, including killings and beatings, perpetrated by the government and against the opposition. It’s never wrong to be on the side of civilization. Beyond that, what would be efficacious? It must be asked if a formal statement of support for the rebels would help them. And they’d have a better sense of it than we.

If the American president, for reasons of prudence, does not make a public statement of the government’s stand, he could certainly refer, as if it is an obvious fact because it is an obvious fact, to whom the American people are for. And that is the protesters on the street. If he were particularly striking in his comments about how Americans cannot help but love their brothers and sisters who stand for greater freedom and democracy in the world, all the better. The American people, after all, are not their government. Our sentiments are not controlled by the government, and this may be a timely moment to point that out, and remind the young of Iran, who are the future of Iran, that Americans are a future-siding people.

A small point on the technological aspects of the Iranian situation. Some ask if the impact of the new technology is exaggerated. No. Twittering and YouTubing made the story take hold and take off. But did the technology create the rebellion? No, it encouraged what was there. If they Twittered and liveblogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: “this aft 3pm @ the bastille.” It all still would have happened, perhaps with marginally greater support. Revolutions are revolutions and rebellions are rebellions; they don’t work unless the people are for it. In Iran, Twitter reported and encouraged. But the conviction must be there to be encouraged.

The interesting question is what technology would have done after the Revolution, during the Terror. What would word of the demonic violence, the tumbrels and nonstop guillotines unleashed circa 1790-95 have done to French support for the Revolution, and world support? Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?

The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

In America almost everybody has a base, not only political parties. Businesses do, and public figures, and Web sites. We attempt to quantify to the nth degree everybody’s numbers, ratings, page views. These tell us how big a base is and, roughly, who is in it.

“The base” is a great if largely unspoken preoccupation in broad segments of our public life. In fact we have developed baseitis. Is this good?

What occasions the question is the USA Today story this week on a Gallup poll saying nearly half the country’s Republicans and Republican-leaners can’t come up with a name when asked who their party’s leader is. Of those who could think of a name, 10% said Rush Limbaugh, 10% Newt Gingrich, 9% Dick Cheney. Among Democrats, on the other hand, 83% could think of a leader of their party. Most of them said it was President Obama. This makes sense, yes?

The poll was a source of, or excuse for, interparty needling (the base likes that) and faux sympathy on cable news (their base likes that too.) What no one notes is the poll makes no sense, or rather makes so much sense that it’s not news.

The Democrats have a leader. He’s the president. When a party has a president, he’s the leader.

Parties out of power, almost by definition, are in search of one. When parties do not hold the White House and Congress they are, of necessity, retooling and reshaping themselves. Leaders of various party factions, being humans in politics and therefore bearing within themselves unsleeping little engines of ambition (that’s what Billy Herndon said lay inside his friend, unassuming prairie lawyer Abe Lincoln) will jostle each other for place.

The last time the Republican Party was in this position was 1977-78, after Watergate and the 1976 victory of Jimmy Carter. The Republicans then had no leader of the party, or rather there were a number of leaders: Rep. John Anderson was a leading moderate, Howard Baker was in the Senate, and Rep. Jack Kemp was a promising conservative. Out West, Ronald Reagan, nearing 70, was writing commentaries and contemplating a third presidential run.

No one knew what would happen, who would rise.

The last time Democrats were in this position was eight years ago, when they’d lost the presidency and Congress. Who exactly was the Democratic leader at that time? Teddy Kennedy had the liberals’ heart but he was going nowhere, Al Gore was in Europe growing a beard, Bill Clinton was out getting rich. Hillary Clinton was settling into New York. There was no leader. But there were people coming up in the states, including a state senator from Chicago named Barack Obama.

Everything changes, life is movement, leaders take time to emerge. Nationally our parties have produced both stasis and surprise.

What is different now, and it really is different, is that assisting and complicating the Republican process is something that didn’t exist in 1977 and was only a nascent force in 2000, and that is the conservative media infrastructure. The Republican Party has never re-formed itself while such a thing existed. The infrastructure changes things just by being.

For the Republicans it’s not all good news.

The good part is big: Absent a compelling leader with an actual vision of the future, conservative media (I speak here of the highly popular radio shows) lend a sense of dynamism to what used to be called Republican thought. Their hosts talk, explain, lead, providing information and arguments that in the past were unnoticed, unmentioned, uncovered. This has given an air of vitality, of presence, to Republican views.

But it constitutes a challenge to the party, too. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele learned this three months ago, when he said Rush Limbaugh was angry. Mr. Steele felt forced to grovel in apology because Rush is more powerful than he is. When Michael Steele gets up in the morning, 20 million people don’t wait to hear his opinion. Rush made him look weak. That’s not an especially good look when you’re trying to rebuild a party.

Conservatives talking only to conservatives is like liberals talking only to liberals. A certain unreality can be enforced. It can encourage a false sense of momentum and dominance when you have an audience of millions saying, “You got that right, buddy.”
More voters have declared themselves independents since Mr. Obama came into the presidency. He is popular and admired, but America remains in play. The White House knows this; it’s why it is so keen and deadly in its political outreach and media operations. They’re never not on the case. They know they can’t afford to be.

And they’re always presenting themselves as smiling centrists.

The commitment and focus of the Obama political/media operation is connected to the Democrats’ knowledge that their position is strong but not fully secure. They aren’t just trying to win, they’re not only trying to hold on, they’re trying to create a new Democratic majority built more or less along the fundamental lines of FDR’s New Deal: a new, activist government; a fairer playing field; less inequity; the federal government as friend, goalie, coach and, in some cases, team owner. This isn’t quite centrism, and yet they portray it as such, while using the conservative media infrastructure as a foil. The Democratic message on the Republicans has gone from “the party of no” to “the party of angry white men.” If they get away with it, it will be in part because angry talkers in the conservative media infrastructure too often leave themselves open to the charge.

Both conservative media and liberal media are alike in that they have to keep the ratings up, or the numbers up, or the hits. If they lose audience, they can lose everything from clout to ad revenue. Because they have to keep the numbers up, they have to keep it hot, which actually has some effect on the national conversation. The mainstream media is only too happy to headline it when a radio talker says Sonia Sotomayor is a dope. The radio talker may be doing it to play to his base, but the mainstream media does it to show that Republicans are mean, thick and angry.

On left and right, on cable and radio, political hosts see gain in hyping the story, agitating and exciting their listeners. All of this creates a circular, self-enclosed world in which it gets hotter and hotter and tighter and tighter. (I remember when the liberals of the Democratic Party were like this, in the ‘80s. They talked only to themselves, and reinforced each other’s views. It took them years to recover.)

Must the Obama administration micromanage General Motors, institute a new health-care system, and institute a new energy regime? Must they mow down the opposition, shutting them out of the development of important bills? Well, the base likes this.

Can the radio host or the freelance policy maker calm down, become less polar and more thoughtful (yawn)? That would leave his base turning the dial and maybe going elsewhere. Can the big left-wing and right-wing Web sites commit apostasy, rethink issues? In general, bases don’t like that.

Everyone is looking to the base, the sliver, their piece of the pie, their slice of the demo. You wonder sometimes as you watch: Who’s looking out for the country?

“You are there.” The rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, that great, sandstone-walled, light-filled hall ringed with statues of the great of American history—Jefferson, Washington, proud Andrew Jackson in his flowing cape, Eisenhower, U.S. Grant, his eyes surveying the terrain as if he sees something out there in the wilderness. It’s 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 3, 2009, and Ronald Reagan marches in, surrounded by his peers. Actually his newly installed statue is unveiled there, in a ceremony attended by officials of both parties (including the speaker of the House and the leaders of the minority), his wife, Nancy, and a few hundred of his friends, appointees, staffers and cabinet members. It was standing room only.

The mood: mellow, proud and modest with the increased modesty of age. “How lucky was I to walk into history when Ronald Reagan was in the room?” The speeches ranged from the heartfelt to the appropriate, with two (James Baker and Mrs. Reagan) being outstanding. It is usual, after formal ceremonies with their frozen rhetoric, to come away feeling that no cliché was left untouched. In some cases here they were quite thoroughly molested, but no matter. The general feeling was that Ronald Reagan restored America to itself, and that’s what people more or less said.

It was a great day and almost a decade in the making. Each of the 50 states is allowed two statues in the Capitol, they are sometimes but not frequently changed, and the changing process is complicated: Both chambers of a state legislature must vote, the governor must agree, the federal government is petitioned. A California congressman told me the hardest part was explaining to the people who the man being replaced was. (Thomas Starr King, a Universalist minister; he helped keep California in the Union during the Civil War.)

The statue was covered by a blue felt drop cloth. The dignitaries walked to the platform—Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, the Republican senate leader, John Boehner of the House. Mrs. Reagan walked slowly onto the platform in a bright white suit. At public events Mrs. Pelosi always tries to look engaged, a pleasant half-smile on her face. This is a courtesy women in their middle years unconsciously give to the world. It is precious and largely unremarked. You see it on the street in small towns. Mr. McConnell had a good speech. Rather than recite a history lesson, he said, he’d note that in the 1980s, when the world said America was over, America said not quite, and when they said freedom was yesterday, America said I don’t think so. Reagan “stood taller than any statue.”

The colors were presented. The U.S. Army chorus sang the national anthem so beautifully, with such harmonic precision and depth, that some dry eyes turned moist, including those of the crusty journalist to my right. Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they’d die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that’s too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.

James Baker, who served as Reagan’s Treasury secretary, was elegant in his remarks. To Mrs. Reagan he said, “You created that secure space from which he ventured forward to change the world.” And, “If anyone deserves to be in Statuary Hall it is Ronald Reagan,” a “principled pragmatist” who would fight for the right, push hard, get the best deal possible, accept it at a crucial moment, “declare victory and move on.” The Reagan that Baker presented was a romantic who lived in the real. The nation said goodbye to him when he lay in state in the Rotunda five years ago, but he stands now “a silent sentry in its hallowed halls.”

Mrs. Reagan had a bit of a one-minute masterpiece. Her face said it all. It was her first time in the Rotunda since her husband lay in state. History had come to endorse what she and her husband’s supporters long thought: that he was great. “The statue is a wonderful likeness of Ronnie, and he would be so proud.” And at the end she said, simply, “That’s it,” and the crowd erupted in applause. She turned, helped pull the big blue drop cloth down, and there he was. That was his posture, that was the way he held his arms as he walked, that was the two button suit. The Gipper will be the only statue in the rotunda that is smiling. (In Statuary Hall, Will Rogers bears a look of wry amusement.)

Mrs. Reagan looked up at the statue, leaned forward, patted the right knee, and wiped her eyes.

The sculptor, 42-year-old Chas Fagan, was in college when Reagan was in the White House. Mrs. Reagan, he said, had input. She wanted a “positive, upbeat visage.” Mr. Fagan studied pictures, campaign videotapes and old films of the president making speeches, telling jokes. A smile on a statue can look frozen; he wanted to get Reagan on the way to a smile, the moment before it is “fully expressed.” He worked on the model in the Reagan library. It was made from clay and then translated into bronze, with a high patina. “He’s in his brown suit again,” Mr. Fagan laughed.

*   *   *

That night there was a candlelit dinner in Statuary Hall. Mrs. Reagan told me of being in the Rotunda again, after five years. “That was hard,” she said in a soft voice. A line of well-wishers spontaneously formed around her chair, and she greeted senators, governors, former cabinet members and old White House staffers by name. She embraced Mrs. Pelosi. There was a lot of happiness at the dinner, but a lot of concern expressed too, privately, about the economy and our security. There was a feeling of well-wishing toward President Obama—it is a difficult world he faces—but concern as to his decisions and direction. Does he understand, fully, all that is at stake in his new approaches to the Arab world? Are we spending ourselves into bankruptcy? Will California’s government be the first terrible test case of the new era?

There were a number of toasts. Ronald Reagan had been rightly lauded all day, but my thoughts were on what a beautiful bipartisan moment we had all experienced, for Republicans and Democrats together had formally embraced the Gipper’s memory, and a Democratic House had made the ceremonies possible. “This is one of those nights when you remember, when the information pierces you, that we are a great nation, a vibrant, peaceful nation of two parties and much bipartisan affection.” My thoughts too were on California, the Golden State, where he’d come to full adulthood, where he came first to see himself as a leader as a union president. California, full of pioneers and originals and artists, which was open to him as he entered politics, which elevated him to two terms as governor, and which had sent the statue of its beloved son to grace our Capitol. And my thoughts were on Mrs. Reagan, whose contribution had been summed up by James Baker. Looking back, she made it all possible. Without her there was no him.

“Let’s play grown-up.” When I was a child, that’s what we said when we ran out of things to do like playing potsie or throwing rocks in the vacant lot. You’d go in and take your father’s hat and your mother’s purse and walk around saying, “Would you like tea?” In retrospect we weren’t imitating our parents but parents on TV, who wore pearls and suits. But the point is we amused ourselves trying to be little adults.

And that’s what the GOP should do right now: play grown-up.

The Democrats in the White House have been doing it since January, operating with a certain decorum, a kind of assumption as to their natural stature. Obamaland is very different from the last Democratic administration, Bill Clinton’s. The cliché is true: White House staffs reflect their presidents. Mr. Clinton’s staff was human, colorful, messy, slightly mad. They had pent-up energy after 12 years of Republican rule, and they believed their own propaganda that Republicans were wicked. They were oafish: One dragooned a government helicopter to go play golf. President Obama’s staff is far less entertaining. They’re smooth, impeccable, sophisticated, like the boss. They don’t hate Republicans but think they’re missing a few chips (empathy, logic, How Things Really Work). It is true they don’t know what they don’t know, but what they do know (how to quietly seize and hold power, for instance—they now run the American auto industry), they know pretty well.

But back to Sonia Sotomayor, which is my subject.

She is of course a brilliant political pick—Hispanic when Republicans have trouble with Hispanics, a woman when they’ve had trouble with women. Her background (public housing, Newyorican, Catholic school, Princeton, prominence) is as moving as Clarence Thomas’s, and that is moving indeed. Politically she’s like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die.

The New York Post’s front page the day after her announcement said it all: “Suprema!” with a picture of the radiant nominee. New York is proud of her; I’m proud of our country and grateful at its insistence, in a time when some say the American dream is dead, that it most certainly is not. The dream is: You can come from any place or condition, any walk of life, and rise to the top, taking your people with you, in your heart and theirs. (Maybe that’s what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that’s what they mean, then we’re all empathetic. We’re the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It’s part of our pride. And it’s not bad, it’s good.

Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.

Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?

The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you’ve ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog. Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left (“Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!”) are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged. They don’t need to be revved, they’re already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think.

A few—very few—agitate to go at Judge Sotomayor as the Democrats went after Robert Bork in 1987. The abuse suffered by that good man is a still suppurating wound within the GOP, but it is also a wound for the Democrats, the worst kind, a self-inflicted one. They damaged our national political culture and lowered their own standing with their assault, and their victory left them looking not strong and uncompromising but mean and ferocious. And on some level they know it. Ask Ted Kennedy, if he had it to do over again, if he would repeat all his intemperate and unjust words about “Bob Bork’s America” and “back-alley abortions” and blacks turned away from lunch counters. He’d be a fool if he said yes. He damaged himself in that battle.

The choice for Republicans isn’t between “attack” and “roll over.” It’s broader than that, and more interesting. There’s a new and fresh opportunity here for Republicans in the Senate to be serious, and, in their seriousness, to be seen and understood in a new light.

Serious opposition to Judge Sotomayor is not only fair, it’s necessary: It’s your job to oppose if you oppose. But it should be serious, not merely partisan. Mr. Obama himself well knows he voted against John Roberts and Sam Alito only in essence because they were conservative. He was planning a presidential run and playing to a left-wing base. But that didn’t enhance his reputation, did it? Not with anyone who wasn’t part of his base.

Barring extraordinary revelations, Judge Sotomayor is going to be confirmed. She’s going to win. She does not appear to be as liberal or left-wing as others who could have been picked. She seems reminiscent of the justice she will replace, David Souter. She will likely come across in hearings as smart, spirited, a middle-aged woman who’s lived a life of grit, determination and American-dream proving.

Republicans can be liberated by the fact that they’re outnumbered and likely about to lose. They can step back, breathe in, and use the Sotomayor confirmation hearings to perform a public service: Find out what the future justice thinks and why she thinks it, explain what they think and why they think it, look at the two different philosophies, if that’s what they are. Don’t make it sparring, make it thinking.

Don’t grill and grandstand, summon and inform. Show the respect that expresses equality and the equality that is an expression of respect. Ask and listen, get the logic, explain where you think it wrong. Fill the airwaves with thoughtful exchanges.

Here are some areas: What is judicial activism? Is it sometimes more rightly called judicial presumption? Judge Sotomayor sided against the Connecticut firemen in the famous Ricci case—why? Was this empathy, or a very selective sympathy that resulted in the victimizing of human beings who were not members of a politically favored ethnic or racial group? What is affirmative action, when does it become quota making? How does she understand the Second Amendment? What did the Framers intend there? In what ways did her experience, upbringing and ethnicity contribute to her understanding of the law?

These are just a few fertile areas. There are more.

*   *   *

The odd thing Republican elected officials forget is that they often have the better argument. So used are they to the defensive crouch that they find it difficult to stand tall, expand, tell, hear. They should have more faith in the philosophical assumptions of their party, which so often reflect the wisdom of experience, of tradition, of Founders more brilliant than we.

This might be a good time for them to rediscover their faith in the American people, in their ability to listen, weigh and think. That thinking may not always show up immediately in polls, but it adds up in time and has its own weight, its own force, and future.

Trust them. They’re grown-ups, even if they don’t always dress the part.

More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made “saints” of civil and political figures. George Washington was our first national hero, known everywhere, famous to children. When he died, we had our first true national mourning, with cities and states re-enacting his funeral. There was the genius cluster that surrounded him, and invented us—Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. Through much of the 20th century our famous heroes were in sports (Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, the Babe, Joltin’ Joe) the arts (Clark Gable, Robert Frost) business and philanthropy (from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates) and religion (Billy Graham). Nobody does fame like America, and they were famous.

The category of military hero—warrior—fell off a bit, in part because of the bad reputation of war. Some emerged of heroic size—Gens. Pershing and Patton, Eisenhower and Marshall. But somewhere in the 1960s I think we decided, or the makers of our culture decided, that to celebrate great warriors was to encourage war. And we always have too much of that. So they made a lot of movies depicting soldiers as victims and officers as brutish. This was especially true in the Vietnam era and the years that followed. Maybe a correction was in order: It’s good to remember war is hell. But when we removed the warrior, we removed something intensely human, something ancestral and stirring, something celebrated naturally throughout the long history of man. Also it was ungrateful: They put themselves in harm’s way for us.

For Memorial Day, then, three warriors, two previously celebrated but not so known now by the young.

*   *   *

Alvin York was born in 1887 into a Tennessee farming family that didn’t have much, but nobody else did, so it wasn’t so bad. He was the third of 11 children and had an average life for that time and place. Then World War I came. He experienced a crisis of conscience over whether to fight. His mother’s Evangelical church tugged him toward more or less pacifist thinking, but he got a draft notice in 1917, joined the Army, went overseas, read and reread his Bible, and concluded that warfare was sometimes justified.

In the battle of the Argonne in October 1918, the allies were attempting to break German lines when York and his men came upon well-hidden machine guns on high ground. As he later put it, “The Germans got us, and they got us right smart . . . and I’m telling you they were shooting straight.” American soldiers “just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home.”

But Cpl. York and his men went behind the German lines, overran a unit, and captured the enemy. Suddenly there was new machine-gun fire from a ridge, and six Americans went down. York was in command, exposed but cool, and he began to shoot. “All I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting. . . . All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn’t want to kill any more than I had to.” A German officer tried to empty his gun into York while York fired. He failed but York succeeded, the Germans surrendered, and York and his small band marched 132 German prisoners back to the American lines.

His Medal of Honor citation called him fearless, daring and heroic.

*   *   *

Warriors are funny people. They’re often naturally peaceable, and often do great good when they return. York went home to Tennessee, married, founded an agricultural institute (it’s still operating as an award-winning public high school) and a Bible school. They made a movie about him in 1941, the great Howard Hawks film “Sergeant York.” If you are in Manhattan this week, you may walk down York Avenue on the Upper East Side. It was named for him. He died in Nashville in 1964 at 77.

Once, 25 years ago, my father (U.S. Army, replacement troops, Italy, 1945) visited Washington, a town he’d never been to. There was a lot to see: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial. But he just wanted to see one thing, Audie Murphy’s grave.

Audie Leon Murphy was born in 1924 or 1926 (more on that in a moment) the sixth of 12 children of a Texas sharecropper. It was all hardscrabble for him: father left, mother died, no education, working in the fields from adolescence on. He was good with a hunting rifle: he said that when he wasn’t, his family didn’t eat, so yeah, he had to be good. He tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor, was turned away as underage, came back the next year claiming to be 18 (he was probably 16) and went on to a busy war, seeing action as an infantryman in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. Then came southern France, where the Germans made the mistake of shooting Audie Murphy’s best friend, Lattie Tipton. Murphy wiped out the machine gun crew that did it.

On Jan. 26, 1945, Lt. Murphy was engaged in a battle in which his unit took heavy fire and he was wounded. He ordered his men back. From his Medal of Honor citation: “Behind him . . . one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back.”

Murphy returned to Texas a legend. He was also 5-foot-7, having grown two inches while away. He became an actor (44 films, mostly Westerns) and businessman. He died in a plane crash in 1971 and was buried with full honors at Arlington, but he did a warrior-like thing. He asked that the gold leaf normally put on the gravestone of a Medal of Honor recipient not be used. He wanted a plain GI headstone. Some worried this might make his grave harder to find. My father found it, and he was not alone. Audie Murphy’s grave is the most visited site at Arlington with the exception of John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame.

*   *   *

I thought of these two men the other night after I introduced at a dinner a retired Air Force general named Chuck Boyd. He runs Business Executives for National Security, a group whose members devote time and treasure to helping the government work through various 21st-century challenges. I mentioned that Chuck had been shot down over Vietnam on his 105th mission in April 1966 and was a POW for 2,488 days. He’s the only former POW of the era to go on to become a four-star general.

When I said “2,488 days,” a number of people in the audience went “Oh!” I heard it up on the podium. They didn’t know because he doesn’t talk about it, and when asked to, he treats it like nothing, a long night at a bad inn. Warriors always do that. They all deserve the “Oh!”

The indecipherable language of government has actually become dangerous to the well-being of the nation. As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing.

The other day I was watching “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, came on from Washington to talk about health care. A reporter on the set, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, asked a few clear and direct questions: What is President Obama’s health-care plan, how would it work, what would it look like? I leaned forward. Finally I will understand. Ms. Sebelius began to answer in that dead and deadening governmental language that does not reveal or clarify but instead wraps legitimate queries in clouds of words and sends them on their way. I think I heard “accessing affordable quality health care,” “single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers” and “key component of quality improvement.” In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.

As she spoke, I attempted a sort of simultaneous translation, which is what most of us do now when we hear our political figures, translate from their language to ours. “Access health care” must mean “go to the doctor.” But I gave up. Then a thought crossed my mind: Maybe we’re supposed to give up! Maybe we’re supposed to be struck dumb, hypnotized by words and phrases that are aimed not at making things clearer but making them more obscure and impenetrable. Maybe we’re not supposed to understand.

I shouldn’t pick too hard on Ms. Sebelius specifically. Most people in the administration, and many in government, speak as she speaks, and have for many years. In her case there’s reason to believe it’s a quirk. A New York Times profile recently had her recalling with self-deprecating charm the time her child ran a high fever and she caused a bit of confusion by forgetting to say, “We have to go to the hospital!” and announcing instead, “This unsustainable increase in body temperature requires immediate access to a local quality health-care facility!” I made that up, but it was believable, wasn’t it?

New Class gobbledygook, which is more prevalent than ever, is also more destructive than ever because the government itself is doing more than ever. The Journal this week had a front page story reporting that the Obama administration is attempting to come up with ways, including federal regulations and “moral suasion,” to change the way employees and executives are paid in the financial services industry “including at companies that did not receive federal bailout money.” This is rather stunning, and is just one very small area of the new activism.

But back to language. Lately it is as if the American government, having decided in its programs, assumptions and philosophy to become more European, has at the same time decided it would be amusing to speak to the American people only in French.

Which would give rise to a simple and wholly understandable suspicion that the government doesn’t speak clearly about what it’s doing for the reason that they know that if people fully understood they would say, “Oh that’s not a good idea,” or, “The cost of that will kill us.”

I think there are two major but not fully formed or fully articulated fears among thinking Americans right now, and the deliberate obscurity of official language only intensifies those fears.

The first is that Mr. Obama’s government, in all its flurry of activism, may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This is as dreadful and obvious a cliché as they come, but too bad, it’s what people fear. They see the spending plans and tax plans, the regulation and reform hunger, the energy proposals and health-care ambitions, and they—we—wonder if the men and women doing all this, working in their separate and discrete areas, are being overseen by anyone saying, “By the way, don’t kill the goose.”

The goose of course is the big, messy, spirited, inspiring, and sometimes in some respects damaging but on the whole brilliant and productive wealth-generator known as the free-market capitalist system. People do want things cleaned up and needed regulations instituted, and they don’t mind at all if the very wealthy are more heavily taxed, but they greatly fear a goose killing. Economic freedom in all its chaos and disorder has kept us rich for 200 years, and allowed us as a nation to be generous and strong at home and in the world. But the goose can be killed—by carelessness, hostility, incrementalism, paralysis, and by no one saying, “Don’t kill the goose.”

Complicating all this is the fact that so many of the Obama people seem to be extremely bright and pleasant academic types with no particular and personal knowledge of business in America. They are not messy businessmen with a love for the system that lifted them. Mr. Obama himself, like John McCain, has shown no particular interest in making money in his life, with the latter preferring military and then political glory, and the former preferring political power.

The second great fear is that the balance between those who pay taxes and those who need benefits will be left, after the great flurry, all out of whack. When this balance is deeply disturbed or distorted, when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make, a tipping point occurs. People become disheartened. Generations become resigned. Tiredness steps in. We will miss irrational exuberance.

Is anyone in the Obama administration watching this? If they are, they’re not saying, certainly not clearly. I continue to be astounded by how much Mr. Obama reminds me in his first few months of George W. Bush in his first few years. There is a sense with both men that they always pushed too hard, were always revolutionizing and doing “the work of generations,” as Mr. Bush put it. They appear to share an insensitivity to the delicacy of even so great a nation as ours, an inability to see limits, and to know at a certain point that what you do with a nation becomes what you do to it.

Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can’t help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren’t all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They’re not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own. After all, it’s not their health-care system they’re reforming, it is America’s. It would be nice if America were allowed to know what exactly the plan is, and how it would work, and who would pay, and how.

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As for the Republicans, the administration is giving them an opening. There could be gain in becoming the party that speaks with concrete honesty, and in a known human language, on the great issues of the day. The GOP could become the party that doesn’t make you translate, and doesn’t leave you giving up. I wonder if the party right now, for all the battering it’s experienced the past few years, is still quick enough to see an opening like this.