The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.

  * * *

  There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

  And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech: “Renewed in our strength—tested, but not weary—we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”

  This is—how else to put it?—over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

  One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

  Further Thoughts on the Passions of the Inaugural

  The Wall Street Journal: January 27, 2005

  I have been called old, jaded, a sourpuss. Far worse, I have been called French. A response is in order.

  You know the dispute. Last week I slammed the president’s Inaugural Address. I was not alone, but I came down hard, early and in one of the most highly read editorial pages in America. Bill Buckley and David Frum also had critical reactions. Bill Safire on the other hand called it one of the best second inaugurals ever, and commentators from right and left (Bill Kristol, E. J. Dionne) found much to praise and ponder. (To my mind the best response to the inaugural was the grave, passionate essay of Mark Helprin.) So herewith some questions and answers:

  A week later, do I stand by my views?

  Yes. If I wrote it today I wouldn’t be softer, but harder.

  Am I heartened by White House clarifications that the speech did not intend to announce the unveiling of a new policy?

  Yes. My reaction is the exact opposite of Bill Bennett’s and E. J. Dionne’s, who were both disappointed. I am relieved.

  Why don’t I see the speech as so many others do, as a thematic and romantic statement of what we all hope for, world freedom? Don’t we all want that?

  Yes. But words have meaning. To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of freedom and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation—seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional overreach of the most embarrassing sort.

  What’s wrong with a little overweening ambition? Shouldn’t man’s reach exceed his grasp?

  True. But history is quite big enough right now. We’ve already been given a lot to grasp. The president will have real juice for the next 2½ years. If in the next 30 months he can stabilize and fortify Iraq, helping it to become a functioning democratic entity that doesn’t encourage terrorism; further gird and undergird Afghanistan; keep the U.S. safe from attack; make our alliances closer; make permanent his tax cuts; and break through on Social Security, that will be huge. It will be historic. It will yield a presidency that even its severest critics will have to admit was enormously consequential, and its supporters will rightly claim as leaving a lasting legacy of courage and inspiration. We don’t need more than that—it’s quite enough. And it will be quite astonishing. Beyond that, don’t overreach. Refrain from breast beating, and don’t clobber the world over the head with your moral fabulousness.

  What was the biggest mistake of the speech?

  They forgot context. All speeches take place within a historical context, a time and place. A good speech acknowledges context, often without even mentioning it.

  For a half century our country faced a terrible foe. Some feared conflagration. Many of us who did not were convinced it would not happen because the United States was not evil and the Soviet Union was not crazy. The Soviets didn’t want war to achieve their ends, they wanted to achieve those ends without the expense and gamble of war. We rolled them back, bankrupted them, forced their collapse. And we did it in part through a change of policy in which Ronald Reagan declared: From here on in we tell the truth. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was a) evil and b) an empire, and c) he judged a new and stark candor the way to begin progress. We’d already kissed Brezhnev; it didn’t work. And it wasn’t Reagan’s way in any case.

  Today is quite different. The context is different. Now we are up against not an organized state monolith but dozens, hundreds and thousands of state and nonstate actors—nuts with nukes, freelance bioterrorists, Islamofascists, independent but allied terror groups. The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don’t have to summon more.

  Healthy alliances are a coolant in this world. What this era demands is steely resolve and actions that remove those who want things at a full boil. In this world we must speak, yes, but softly, and carry many sticks, using them, when we must, terribly and swiftly. We must gather around us as many friends, allies and well-wishers as possible. And we must do nothing that provides our foes with ammunition with which they can accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness.

  Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as—ugly imagery coming—garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage—the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists—pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

  Am I saying we shouldn’t support freedom then?

  Hardly. But we should remember as we do it that history, while full of opportunity, is also a long tale of woe. And human vanity—not only that of others, but our own—only complicates our endeavors. Thomas Jefferson was a genius, a great man who loved liberty. But that love led him to headlong support of a French Revolution that proved more demonic than liberating. He was right to encourage the fire of liberty but wrong to lend his great name to Robespierre, Marat and the rest. So much of life is case by case, so many of our decisions must be discrete and particular and not “thematic.” It is hard to do the right thing. That is why grown-ups often get headaches and children mostly don’t.

  Life is layered, complex, not always most needful of political action. For many people in the world the most important extrafamilial relationship is not with the state but with God. Pope John Paul II helped free his beloved Poland from the Soviet yoke. But when he looked at Poland some years after its freedom was won, he wondered if many of his kinsmen had not chosen a kind of existential enslavement to Western materialism. He wondered if his people were not in some ways less free. It wasn’t a stupid question. It was at the heart of life.

  But isn’t hard criticism of such an important speech at such a serious moment disloyal? You’re a Bush supporter!

  I am. I even took off from the Journal to work for his reelection. I did exciting and I hope helpful work at considerable financial loss. But loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. As Reagan used to say, candor is a compliment. This White House can take it. Two years ago, after watchi
ng a series of rather too jocular and arguably too boastful news conferences from administration leaders on the coming war, I said that they seemed to be suffering from mission inebriation. I meant it. And meant it as a caution. The White House can be a hothouse. Emotions run high, tired minds run on adrenal fumes. When I said last week that they seemed again to be suffering from mission inebriation, I meant that, too.

  As for criticizing Mr. Bush on something so big, that’s why I did it: It’s big. And so important. When you really disagree, you have to say so. In the end I found the president’s thinking perplexing and disturbing. At any rate, in the end, as Jack Kennedy once said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”

  What do you think of David Frum’s wondering if the fact that the system let this speech through doesn’t suggest the system needs work?

  I had a similar thought. I wonder if this White House, with its understandable but not always helpful Band of Brothers aspect, isn’t different from previous White Houses in this. In other White Houses there were always too many people eager to show their worth by removing the meaning of the speech, or warning the president that such and such shouldn’t be said. I get the impression no one in this White House wants to be the person in the speechwriter’s memoir who tried to remove “Tear down this wall” or “evil empire.” So often such people are defensive, anxious, unhelpful. They often lost the battle in the Reagan White House, to the benefit of history. But for this speech there seemed no one who wanted to think defensively and wield the editing stick. Which is bad, because such people are actually needed. They’re like dead wood in a forest; they add to the ecology; they have their purpose.

  Bill Buckley and David Gelernter suggest the speech was badly written. Isn’t that really the essential problem?

  No. It was badly thought. In any case most inaugural addresses are rather badly written, and I would know. We haven’t had a truly great one since 1961, 44 years ago. In this case the document seems to me to bear hard the personal mark of the president, and not of writers. But it is not the plain-talking Bush we know so well. It is Bush trying to be fancy. It is a tough man who speaks the language of business, sports and politics trying to be high-toned and elegant.

  You’re being patronizing.

  That’s what jaded old French people are for.

  We all have our different styles. The biggest style mistake you can make is to use someone else’s style, or the moment’s style if you will, and not your own.

  Speaking of style, how did you like the headline on your piece last week?

  I thought it was quite wicked and didn’t capture the meaning of the piece. When I pointed this out to the editor he promised in the future to be more nuanced. But it was my fault. Advice to self: Don’t go to cover a story before you’ve OK’d the headline on the previous one.

  What are you looking forward to now?

  I am hoping for a State of the Union address that is tough, clear, tethered, and in which the speaker takes his program seriously but himself rather more lightly. I am hoping the headline will be “Return to Planet Earth.”

  * * *

  Two departures this week deserve note. A respectful and affectionate goodbye-from-columnating to Bill Safire of the New York Times, a great presence on that op-ed page for 30 years. He was a gutsy, witty wader into the fray. He has taken shots at me in the past, and in the spirit of comradely columnary aggression I wish I could take a goodbye shot back. (If he were sitting next to me now he’d say, “Don’t be soft, I’m on top, start a pile-on!”) But I can’t. A classy and provocative pro from beginning to end. I’m going to miss his column a lot.

  Johnny Carson’s gift was that he seemed startled by sophistication. This was so American. It’s why Americans loved him. When the starlet blurted the seamy detail, when someone said or did something too odd or too open to interpretation, Carson would give the audience the dry look. And east or west, north or south, we all got the joke. When we laughed together, in our separate houses, that was a kind of community. It was a good note on which to end the day. He was an American treasure. Rest in peace.

  Time for an Intervention

  The Wall Street Journal: September 18, 2012

  What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

  And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

  He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

  Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

  * * *

  And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

  The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

  My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

  This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

  We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

  You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

  I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

  She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

  And she’s watching this whole election and thinking. You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

  As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

  They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

  So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

  And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

  That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not ho
w Republicans emerge victorious—“I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

  You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

  They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

  * * *

  The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

  I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

  I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.