By trying to do too much he risks not doing enough.
By Peggy Noonan
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 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 presidents first bad numbers.
From Politico on Tuesday: Eroding confidence in President Barack Obamas 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 hes 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 dont have to hear his name to know whos 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 didnt have to be told Lincoln or FDR.
She wondered what Kennedys 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 theyre clear and met you get quite a sentence.
Mr. Obamas 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. Theres a busy hum of action. It can cause a blur.
Everyone who works for a nation gets carried away. Theyre all swept up. Its understandable. Theyre working in the White House theyre mostly youngonly 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 its the biggest storm ever or the most terrible brush fire. Theyre like this because its 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. Its 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 dont know the sentence exists even when they think its 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 want 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. Hes 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. Thats all anybody wants.
Its all thats 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 lotrestoring the confidence of the nation getting spending down so people dont 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 whats missing is an adult and responsible sense of limits that we need to rememberwe need to be reminded by our leadersthat its not un-American to see limits. Its adult to see limits its right and realistic.
Are we beginning the journey back to anything like fiscal health? Who thinks the answer is yes? Theres a pervasive sense that still nine months into the crash we live in castles built on sand.
Were 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 shouldnt the little cup holder be bigger to account for Starbucks-sized coffee? Wait what if its a venti latte?
One imagines the conversation in the car czars office: You know Ive always wanted to see a mauve car because mauve is my favorite color I mean to the extent its 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. Were split in two in three. Well wish someday we did. It is amazing we dont 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 cant 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 dont really get better than that.
He should stop looking for a better one. There isnt a better one.
