The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  SAR: Mr. President, the rebellion isn’t shame-based, it’s John Wayne-based.

  President: I don’t follow.

  SAR: John Wayne removes his boots and hat and puts his six-shooter on the belt, he gets through the scanner, and now he’s standing there and sees what’s being done to other people. A TSA guy is walking toward him, snapping his rubber gloves. Guy gets up close to Wayne, starts feeling his waist and hips. Wayne says, “Touch the jewels, Pilgrim, and I’ll knock you into tomorrow.”

  President: John Wayne is dead.

  SAR: No, he’s not. You’ve got to understand that. Everyone’s got an Inner Duke, even grandma.

  President: What should I do?

  SAR: Back off. Say you spent a day watching YouTube. You’re not giving in to pressure, you’re conceding to common sense. “Free men and women have a right not to be trifled with. We’ll find a better way.”

  President: If I don’t?

  SAR: Well, every businessman in America already thinks you’ve been grabbing his gonads. You’ll continue that general symbolism.

  President: Janet Napolitano won’t like it. Drudge is always after her. He’ll get all “Big Sis Bows Now.” She might quit.

  SAR: Oh God, yes. A twofer!

  President: I’d look like I got rolled.

  SAR: Then look strong. Fire her. She’s been a disaster from day one. Now she’s the face of the debacle.

  President: Won’t they think I’m weak?

  SAR: No. They’ll think you returned to Planet Earth. They’ll think ground control broke through to Major Tom. They’ll think you took a step outside the bubble.

  The Loneliest President since Nixon

  The Wall Street Journal: November 24, 2014

  Seven years ago I was talking to a longtime Democratic operative on Capitol Hill about a politician who was in trouble. The pol was likely finished, he said. I was surprised. Can’t he change things and dig himself out? No. “People do what they know how to do.” Politicians don’t have a vast repertoire. When they get in a jam they just do what they’ve always done, even if it’s not working anymore.

  This came to mind when contemplating President Obama. After a devastating election, he is presenting himself as if he won. The people were not saying no to his policies, he explained, they would in fact like it if Republicans do what he tells them.

  You don’t begin a new relationship with a threat, but that is what he gave Congress: Get me an immigration bill I like or I’ll change U.S. immigration law on my own.

  Mr. Obama is doing what he knows how to do—stare them down and face them off. But his circumstances have changed. He used to be a conquering hero, now he’s not. On the other hand, he used to have to worry about public support. Now, with no more elections before him, he has the special power of the man who doesn’t care.

  I have never seen a president in exactly the position Mr. Obama is, which is essentially alone. He’s got no one with him now. The Republicans don’t like him, for reasons both usual and particular: They have had no good experiences with him. The Democrats don’t like him, for their own reasons plus the election loss. Before his post-election lunch with congressional leaders, he told the press that he will judiciously consider any legislation, whoever sends it to him, Republicans or Democrats. His words implied that in this he was less partisan and more public-spirited than the hacks arrayed around him. It is for these grace notes that he is loved. No one at the table looked at him with colder, beadier eyes than outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who clearly doesn’t like him at all.

  The press doesn’t especially like the president; in conversation they evince no residual warmth. This week at the Beijing summit there was no sign the leaders of the world had any particular regard for him. They can read election returns. They respect power and see it leaking out of him. If Mr. Obama had won the election they would have faked respect and affection.

  Vladimir Putin delivered the unkindest cut, patting Mr. Obama’s shoulder reassuringly. Normally that’s Mr. Obama’s move, putting his hand on your back or shoulder as if to bestow gracious encouragement, needy little shrimp that you are. It’s a dominance move. He’s been doing it six years. This time it was Mr. Putin doing it to him. The president didn’t like it.

  From Reuters: “‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Putin was overheard saying in English in Obama’s general direction, referring to the ornate conference room. ‘Yes,’ Obama replied, coldly, according to journalists who witnessed the scene.”

  The last time we saw a president so alone it was Richard Nixon, at the end of his presidency, when the Democrats had turned on him, the press hated him and the Republicans were fleeing. It was Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s standard-bearer in 1964, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes, also of Arizona, who went to the White House to tell Nixon his support in Congress had collapsed, they would vote to impeach. Years later Goldwater called Nixon “the world’s biggest liar.”

  But Nixon had one advantage Obama does not: the high regard of the world’s leaders, who found his downfall tragic (such ruin over such a trifling matter) and befuddling (he didn’t keep political prisoners chained up in dungeons, as they did. Why such a fuss?).

  Nixon’s isolation didn’t end well.

  Last Sunday Mr. Obama, in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, spoke of his motivation, how he’s always for the little guy. “I love just being with the American people… You know how passionate I am about trying to help them.” He said what is important is “a guy who’s lost his job or lost his home or… is trying to send a kid to college.” When he talks like that, as he does a lot, you get the impression his romantic vision of himself is Tom Joad in the movie version of “The Grapes of Wrath.” “I’ll be all around… wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.”

  I mentioned last week that the president has taken to filibustering, to long, rambling answers in planned sit-down settings—no questions on the fly walking from here to there, as other presidents have always faced. The press generally allows him to ramble on, rarely fighting back as they did with Nixon. But I have noticed Mr. Obama uses a lot of words as padding. He always has, but now he does it more. There’s a sense of indirection and obfuscation. You can say, “I love you,” or you can say, “You know, feelings will develop, that happens among humans and it’s good it happens, and I have always said, and I said it again just last week, that you are a good friend, I care about you, and it’s fair to say in terms of emotional responses that mine has escalated or increased somewhat, and ‘love’ would not be a wholly inappropriate word to use to describe where I’m coming from.”

  When politicians do this they’re trying to mush words up so nothing breaks through. They’re leaving you dazed and trying to make it harder for you to understand what’s truly being said.

  It is possible the president is responding to changed circumstances with a certain rigidity because no one ever stood in his way before. Most of his adult life has been a smooth glide. He had family challenges and an unusual childhood, but as an adult and a professional he never faced fierce, concentrated resistance. He was always magic. Life never came in and gave it to him hard on the jaw. So he really doesn’t know how to get up from the mat. He doesn’t know how to struggle to his feet and regain his balance. He only knows how to throw punches. But you can’t punch from the mat.

  He only knows how to do what he’s doing.

  In the meantime he is killing his party. Gallup this week found that the Republicans for the first time in three years beat the Democrats on favorability, and also that respondents would rather have Congress lead the White House than the White House lead Congress.

  A few weeks ago a conservative intellectual asked me: “How are we going to get through the next two years?” It was a rhetorical question; he was just sharing his anxiety. We have a president who actually can’t work with Congress, operating in a capital in which he is resented and disliked and a world increasingly unimpressed by him,
and so increasingly predatory.

  Anyway, for those who are young and not sure if what they are seeing is wholly unusual: Yes, it is wholly unusual.

  Lafayette, We Are Not Here

  The Wall Street Journal: January 12, 2015

  It was not a missed public relations opportunity. PR is the showbiz of life, and that is not what this is.

  Here are the reasons the president of the United States, or at very least the vice president, should have gone yesterday to the Paris march and walked shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the world:

  To show through his presence that the American people fully understand the import of what happened in the Charlie Hebdo murders, which is that Islamist extremists took the lives of free men and women who represented American and Western political freedoms, including freedom of speech;

  To show through his presence that America and the West, and whatever nations choose to proclaim adherence to their democratic values, will stand together in rejecting and resisting extremist Islamist intolerance and violence;

  To demonstrate the shared understanding that the massacre may amount to a tipping point, whereby those who protect and put forward Western political values will insist upon them in their sphere and ask their Muslim fellow citizens to walk side by side with them in shared public commitment;

  To formally acknowledge the deep sympathy we feel that France, our oldest ally, suffered in the Charlie Hebdo murders a psychic shock akin to what America felt and suffered on 9/11/01. The day after our tragedy, the great French newspaper “Le Monde” ran an unforgettable cover with an editorial of affection and love titled “Nous sommes tous Américains”: “We are all Americans.” That was an echo of what our American doughboys, who went to France in 1917 to save it, famously said as they landed: “Lafayette, we are here.” Gen. Lafayette had been our first foreign friend and fought alongside Washington when we needed friends, in 1776. Is it sentimental to note this? Great nations run in part on sentiment.

  For these reasons and more, Mr. President, Paris was worth a march.

  It matters when, through absence and through bland statements, the leaders of America say: “Lafayette, we are not here.” For all the ups and downs of the Franco-American relationship, the French are our friends. You march with your friends. It is civilizational: Sheer numbers and the importance of those marching show the world what unity, strength and shared commitment look like. Even Putin sent a top official.

  The absence of the American president shows, too, what America would never in the past have conceded or acknowledged, and it was there in the photos of the order of the march. There in the center of the world leaders was Angela Merkel, leader of the West. I wrote a piece suggesting she had become that last spring. I was disturbed and saddened—actually I was mortified as I watched the entire march on TV in New York—to see that fact played out on every screen in the world.

  Mr. Obama is wholly out of sync with U.S. thinking and sentiment.

  Well, we sent the U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, down the street from the embassy to the march, say the administration’s defenders. An Obama bundler, Hartley is widely acquainted with New York’s journalists, who looked for her in the pictures of the crowd. I scanned dozens of pictures and could not find her. The French know a snub when they see one, and the French know how to snub back. I’m sure the organizers put her somewhere among the millions and perhaps through the obscurity of the position showed what they thought of the governmental status and standing of the person America “sent.” Memo to this, past and future White Houses: just because you send fund-raisers to represent our country in high diplomatic posts does not mean those countries will pretend they were sent Chip Bohlen. The French, of all peoples, won’t.

  Were security concerns the reason for the president’s absence? Life is a security concern, you must do what’s right. Would massive U.S. security have inconvenienced others? Then make the security around the president less massive, less an imposition. There is no law that says it must be as Caesarian, and alienating, as it is. The president was too busy? He had an empty schedule. So did the vice president. The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?

  This was not caring enough.

  Politico yesterday noted the president’s reaction from day one of the Charlie Hebdo story has been “muted.” He sat in an armchair in his office and pronounced the shootings “cowardly.” He also said something that struck me at the time, that the murders violated “a universal belief in the freedom of expression.” But there is no universal belief of free expression. Where it exists it has to be defended, in unity and with guts. That is the point.

  Before I put up this post I searched the phrase “Lafayette, we are not here” to see if anyone had said it yet. It is already appearing on blogs and comment threads. Good. And it would be good to send our friends in France, again through social media, the sentence “Lafayette we are here, still, and with you, even if our leaders were not. The American people.”

  What a Disaster Looks Like

  The Wall Street Journal: March 4, 2010

  It is now exactly a year since President Obama unveiled his health-care push and his decision to devote his inaugural year to it—his branding year, his first, vivid year.

  What a disaster it has been.

  At best it was a waste of history’s time, a struggle that will not in the end yield something big and helpful but will in fact make future progress more difficult. At worst it may prove to have fatally undermined a new presidency at a time when America desperately needs a successful one.

  In terms of policy, his essential mistake was to choose health-care expansion over health-care reform. This at the exact moment voters were growing more anxious about the cost and reach of government. The practical mistake was that he did not include or envelop congressional Republicans from the outset, but handed the bill’s creation over to a Democratic Congress that was becoming a runaway train. This at the exact moment Americans were coming to be concerned that Washington was broken, incapable of progress, frozen in partisanship.

  His political mistakes were myriad and perhaps can be reduced to this:

  There are all sorts of harm a new president can do to his presidency. Right now, part of the job of a new president in a hypermediaized environment is harm avoidance. This sounds defensive, and is at odds with the wisdom that presidents in times of crisis must boldly go forth and break through. But it all depends on what you’re being bold about. Why, in 2009, create a new crisis over an important but secondary issue when we already have the Great Recession and two wars? Prudence and soundness of judgment are more greatly needed at the moment.

  New presidents should never, ever, court any problem that isn’t already banging at the door. They should never summon trouble. Mr. Obama did, boldly, perhaps even madly. And this is perhaps the oddest thing about No Drama Obama: In his first year as president he created unneeded political drama, and wound up seen by many Americans not as the hero but the villain.

  In Washington among sympathetic political hands (actually, most of them sound formerly sympathetic) you hear the word “intervention,” as in: “So-and-so tried an intervention with the president and it didn’t work.” So-and-so tried to tell him he’s in trouble with the public and must moderate, recalibrate, back off from health care. The end of the story is always that so-and-so got nowhere. David Gergen a few weeks ago told the Financial Times the administration puts him in mind of the old joke: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

  Sometimes when I look at the past three chief executives, I wonder if we were witnessing not three presidencies but three psychodramas played out on an intensely public stage.

  What accounts for Mr. Obama’s confidence and certainty?

  Well, if you were a young progressive who’d won
the presidency by a comfortable margin in a center-right country, you just might think you were a genius. You might not be surprised to find yourself surrounded by a cultish admiration: “They see him as a fabled figure,” said a frequent White House visitor of some on the president’s staff.

  You might think the great strength you demonstrated during the campaign—an ability to stay in the game you’re playing and not the game someone else is playing, an ability to proceed undistracted by the crises or the machinations of your opponents, but to just keep playing your slow and steady game—is a strength suitable to your presidency. If you choose to play health care, that’s the game you play, straight through, no jeers from the crowd distracting you.

  If you were a young progressive who’d won the presidency against the odds, you probably wouldn’t see yourself as someone who lucked out, with the stars perfectly aligned for a liberal victory. And you might forget we are more or less and functionally a 50–50 country and that you have to keep your finger very much on the pulse of the people if you’re to survive and prosper.

  And now here are two growing problems for Mr. Obama.

  The first hasn’t become apparent yet, but I suspect will be presenting itself, and soon. In order to sharpen the air of crisis he seems to think he needed to get his health-care legislation passed, in order to continue the air of crisis that might justify expanding government and sustaining its costs, and in order, always, to remind voters of George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has harped on what a horror the economy is. How great our challenges, how wicked our businessmen, how dim our future.

  This is a delicate business. You can’t be all rosy glow, you have to be candid. But attitude and mood matter. America has reached the point, a year and a half into the crisis, when frankly it needs some cheerleading. It can’t always be mourning in America. We need some inspiration from the top, need someone who can speak with authority of what is working and can be made to work, of what is good and cause for pride. We are still employing 130 million people, and America is still competitive in the world, with innovative business leaders and practices.