The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  In domestic affairs, the president leaned on yesterday’s men. The aides and cabinet members who represented the new conservatism and the future of the party—Jack Kemp, William Bennett, Vin Weber—were given access and then ignored. The president listened to those—Richard Darman, Nicholas Brady—who represented the “realistic” and “sophisticated” thinking of Republicans who came of age during Watergate. They thought they were on the losing side of history; they thought their job was not to win but to limit inevitable loss. The president’s choice here revived the old party divisions Mr. Reagan had healed and further sundered the Republican coalition.

  After 12 years in power, the most talented Republicans were the most exhausted. They had lost touch with the grass roots when they used to be the grass roots. Years ago, Henry Kissinger said the government is all intellectual outgo, that you never have time for inflow, for reading and thinking. (The conservatives around Mr. Bush who make good use of their time off and become reacquainted with their country will come back strong in ’96 or 2000.)

  Bill Clinton ran a creative campaign. Buses, Elvis, answering each attack with more and bigger verbal warheads. A lot of people find it hard not to daydream during his speeches—for me it’s like watching a soap opera; I can never quite follow the narrative—but he made no major rhetorical mistakes. His people were smart and hungry, and they had the press. The media were partial to Bill Clinton not only because they lean toward liberalism and many are baby boomers but because they want a new story, a new headline, new news. They love their country; they want change; they’re sick unto death of Republicans. (Note to the Clinton staff: Your new friends have built you up for a steep fall.)

  Finally, on the Republican side, the myth of the great campaign tacticians was revealed. A lot of them were jockeys who won because the horse they rode was fast. Ronald Reagan carried them across the line, they didn’t carry him. When they rode George Bush, they failed, because he couldn’t win for them.

  Those are the reasons for George Bush’s defeat, as I see it.

  Back in ’88, the Democrats around Michael Dukakis sized up Mr. Bush and history and said, “If we can’t win this one we might as well find another country.” That was not true then but was true this time. The good news for Republicans is if you know what went wrong you can correct it. More good news: Every defeat carries within it the seeds of victory, and every victory carries within it the seeds of defeat.

  Someone said that to me once—I think Lee Atwater. He may be another reason the theme of this article is not victory.

  The Risk of Catastrophic Victory

  Obama is in the midst of one. Can the GOP avert one of their own?

  The Wall Street Journal: January 7, 2010

  Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.

  If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, “You didn’t even waste our time successfully.”

  What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008—expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated, the president ran into the spirit of 2009—more dug in, more anxious, more bottom line—and didn’t notice.

  At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.

  In a way Mr. Obama made the same mistake President Bush did on immigration, producing a big, mammoth, comprehensive bill when the public mood was for small, discrete steps in what might reasonably seem in the right direction.

  The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that—and the victory of it—last winter.

  Instead, they were greedy for glory.

  It was not worth it—not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public’s concerns and the administration’s are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security.

  Those were not only the two topics on the public’s mind the past 10 months, they were precisely the issues that presented themselves in screaming headlines at the end of the year: unemployment and the national security breakdowns that led to the Christmas bomb plot and, earlier, the Fort Hood massacre. “That’s two strikes,” said the president’s national security adviser, James Jones, to USA Today’s Susan Page. Left unsaid: Three and you’re out.

  Just as bad, or worse, the president’s focus on health care allowed the public to infer that his mind was not focused on our security. He’d frittered his attention on issues that were secondary and tertiary—climate change, health care—while al Qaeda moved, and the system stuttered. A lack of focus breeds bureaucratic complacency, complacency gives rise to slovenliness, slovenliness results in what was said in the report issued Thursday: that, faced with clear evidence of coming danger, the government failed, as they’re saying on TV, to “connect the dots.” Dots? They were boulders.

  * * *

  I am wondering if the Obama administration thinks it vaguely dishonorable to be popular. If you mention to Obama staffers that they really have to be concerned about the polls, they look at you with a certain… not disdain but patience, as if you don’t understand the purpose of politics. That purpose, they believe, is to move the governed toward greater justice. Just so, but in democracy you do this by garnering and galvanizing public support. But they think it’s weasely to be well thought of.

  In politics you must tend to the garden. The garden is the constituency, in Mr. Obama’s case the country. No great endeavor is possible without its backing. In a modern presidency especially you have to know this, because there will be times when history throws you a crisis, and to address it you may have to do an unpopular thing. A president in those circumstances must use all the goodwill he’s built up over the months and years to get through that moment and survive doing what he thinks is right. Mr. Obama acts as if he doesn’t know this. He hasn’t built up popularity to use on a rainy day. If he had, he’d be getting through the Christmas plot drama better than he is.

  The Obama people have taken to pointing out how their guy doesn’t govern by the polls. This is all too believable. The Bush people, too, used to bang away about how he didn’t govern by the polls. They both added unneeded stress to the past 10 years, and it is understandable if many of us now think, “Oh for a president who’d govern by the polls.”

  If Mr. Obama is extremely lucky—and we’re not sure he’s a lucky man anymore—he will get a Republican Congress in 2010, and they will do for him what Newt Gingrich did for Bill Clinton: right his ship, give him a foil, guide him while allowing him to look as if he’s resisting, bend him while allowing him to look strong.

  * * *

  Which gets us to the Republicans. The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ’08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious.

  I spoke a few weeks ago with a respected Republican congressman who told me with some excitement of a bill he’s put forward to address the growth of entitlements and long-term government
spending. We only have three or four years to get it right, he said. He made a strong case. I asked if his party was doing anything to get behind the bill, and he got the blanched look people get when they’re trying to keep their faces from betraying anything. Not really, he said. Then he shrugged. “They’re waiting for the Democrats to destroy themselves.”

  This isn’t news, really, but it was startling to hear a successful Republican political practitioner say it.

  Republican political professionals in Washington assume a coming victory. They do not see that 2010 could be a catastrophic victory for them. If they seize back power without clear purpose, if they are not serious, if they do the lazy and cynical thing by just sitting back and letting the Democrats lose, three bad things will happen. They will contribute to the air of cynicism in which our citizens marinate. Their lack of seriousness will be discerned by the Republican base, whose enthusiasm and generosity will be blunted. And the Republicans themselves will be left unable to lead when their time comes, because operating cynically will allow the public to view them cynically, which will lessen the chance they will be able to do anything constructive.

  In this sense, the cynical view—we can sit back and wait—is naive. The idealistic view—we must stand for things and move on them now—is shrewder.

  Political professionals are pugilistic, and often see politics in terms of fight movies: “Rocky,” “Raging Bull.” They should be thinking now of a different one, of Tom Hanks at the end of “Saving Private Ryan.” “Earn this,” he said to the man whose life he’d helped save.

  Earn this. Be worthy of it. Be serious.

  Meanwhile, Back in America…

  The growing distance between Washington and the public it dominates.

  The Wall Street Journal: January 31, 2014

  The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year’s innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid’s school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

  I watched at home and thought: They hate it. They being the people, whom we’re now supposed to refer to as the folks. But you look at the polls at how people view Washington—one, in October, had almost 9 in 10 disapproving—and you watch a kabuki-like event like this and you know the distance, the psychic, emotional and experiential distance, between Washington and America, between the people and their federal government, is not only real but, actually, carries dangers. History will make more of the distance than we do. Someday in the future we will see it most vividly when a truly bad thing happens and the people suddenly need to trust what Washington says, and will not, to everyone’s loss.

  In the country, the president’s popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it’s at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it’s good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in “The Hunger Games,” the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “Scandal” and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates. Supposedly people feel great rage about this, and I imagine many do. But the other night I wondered if what they’re feeling isn’t something else.

  * * *

  As the president made his jaunty claims and the senators and congressmen responded semirapturously I kept thinking of four words: Meanwhile, back in America…

  Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered. They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don’t—and of course they can’t, being Catholic, and nuns—they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw “Philomena,” suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don’t see the form as meaningless; they know it’s not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.

  Everyone who says that would never have happened in the past is correct. It never, ever would have under normal American political leadership, Republican or Democratic. No one would’ve defied religious liberty like this. The president has taken to saying he isn’t ideological, but this mandate—his mandate—is purely ideological.

  It also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn’t tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they’ll be ruined. You don’t make the Little Sisters bow down to you.

  This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

  Meanwhile, back in America, disadvantaged parents in Louisiana—people who could never afford to live in places like McLean, Va., or Chevy Chase, Md.—continue to wait to see what will happen with the state’s successful school voucher program. It lets poor kids get out of failed public schools and go to private schools on state scholarships. What a great thing. But the Obama Justice Department filed suit in August: The voucher system might violate civil rights law by worsening racial imbalance in the public schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal, and the parents, said nonsense, the scholarship students are predominately black, they have civil rights too. Is it possible the Justice Department has taken its action because a major benefactor of the president’s party is the teachers’ unions, which do not like vouchers because their existence suggests real failures in the public schools they run?

  Meanwhile, back in America, conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service still await answers on their years-long requests for tax-exempt status. When news of the IRS targeting broke last spring, agency officials lied about it, and one took the Fifth. The president said he was outraged, had no idea, read about it in the papers, boy was he going to get to the bottom of it. An investigation was announced but somehow never quite materialized. Victims of the targeting waited to be contacted by the FBI to be asked about their experience. Now the Justice Department has made clear its investigation won’t be spearheaded by the FBI but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and the Democratic Party. Sometimes you feel they are just laughing at you, and going too far.

  In the past five years many Americans have come to understand that an agency that maintained a pretty impressive record for a very long time has been turned, at least in part, into a political operation. Now the IRS has proposed new and tougher rules for grassroots groups. Cleta Mitchell, longtime attorney for many who’ve been targeted, says the IRS is no longer used in line with its mission: “They’re supposed to be collecting revenues, not snooping and trampling on the First Amendment rights of the citizens. We are not subjects of a king, we are permitted to engage in First Amendment activities without reporting those activities to the IRS.”

  All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting
of conservative groups—all these have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

  * * *

  Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

  They call it rage. But if feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you’d lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

  A Separate Peace

  America is in trouble—and our elites are merely resigned.

  The Wall Street Journal: October 27, 2005

  It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It’s harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can’t prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.

  I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

  I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean… the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.