We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say:
Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington
with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the
rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in
“like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is
looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s
quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.
Obama and the storm, it was like a wave that lifted him and then moved on,
leaving him where he’d been. Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina.
The exact dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is
over. One word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone
knew it would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until
now, just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in
charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the
Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were
bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.
But to the election. Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and
the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each
party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John
Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before
the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were
quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.
I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.
Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000
in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning:
People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold.
His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught
his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive,
future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about
what’s going on at the rallies is moving.
All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a
longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a
patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him
and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the
crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels
like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.
Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who
appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of
the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It
startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning
something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and
religious Catholics. He said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and
spreading: They really want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election
has taken on a new importance to them.
There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The
Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing
about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama
ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear
the same.
Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not
really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of
what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year:
They left us discounting the world around us.
And there is Obama, out there seeming tired and wan, showing up through sheer
self discipline. A few weeks ago I saw the president and the governor at the Al
Smith dinner, and both were beautiful specimens in their white ties and tails,
and both worked the dais. But sitting there listening to the jokes and speeches,
the archbishop of New York sitting between them, Obama looked like a young
challenger—flinty, not so comfortable. He was distracted, and his smiles seemed
forced. He looked like a man who’d just seen some bad internal polling. Romney?
Expansive, hilarious, self-spoofing, with a few jokes of finely calibrated
meanness that were just perfect for the crowd. He looked like a president. He
looked like someone who’d just seen good internals.
Of all people, Obama would know if he is in trouble. When it comes to
national presidential races, he is a finely tuned political instrument: He read
the field perfectly in 2008. He would know if he’s losing now, and it would
explain his joylessness on the stump. He is out there doing what he has to to
fight the fight. But he’s still trying to fire up the base when he ought to be
wooing the center and speaking their calm centrist talk. His crowds haven’t been
big. His people have struggled to fill various venues. This must hurt the
president after the trememdous, stupendous crowds of ’08. “Voting’s the best
revenge”—revenge against who, and for what? This is not a man who feels himself
on the verge of a grand victory. His campaign doesn’t seem president-sized. It
is small and sad and lost, driven by formidable will and zero joy.
I suspect both Romney and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part
of why Romney looks so peaceful and Obama so roiled.
Romney ends most rallies with his story of the Colorado scout troop that in
1986 had an American flag put in the space shuttle Challenger, saw the
Challenger blow up as they watched on TV, and then found, through the
persistence of their scoutmaster, that the flag had survived the explosion. It
was returned to them by NASA officials. When Romney, afterward, was shown the
flag, he touched it, and an electric jolt went up his arm. It’s a nice story. He
doesn’t make its meaning fully clear. But maybe he means it as a metaphor for
America: It can go through a terrible time, a catastrophe, as it has
economically the past five years, and still emerge whole, intact, enduring.
Maybe that’s what the coming Romney moment is about: independents,
conservatives, Republicans, even some Democrats, thinking: We can turn it
around, we can work together, we can right this thing, and he can help.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/11/05/monday-morning/
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/11/05/monday-morning/
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