Enthusiasm

Do you remember Jason Miller? He's the deadbeat baby daddy in the "When AJ met Jason" story I've been writing about for the last three years. (You can read those posts here.) Jason is once again working for Donald's reelection campaign, and in fact, he's one of their top spokesmen. Today he said this on MSNBC, about Trump voter enthusiasm: "The Trump supporters? It doesn't matter if it's snowing, if it's raining, they're going to be there. There's a big question on that on the Biden end." 

Talking about Republican voter enthusiasm gives me an excuse to resurrect Peggy Noonan's unintentionally hilarious (and now infamous) paean to the "coming Romney moment" during the 2012 election, featuring lawn signs and good vibrations. Peggy's column, titled "Monday Morning," was published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, November 5, 2012, the day before that election. To pass the time as we wait for this year's election, I'm copying it here in its entirety: 

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 tremendous, 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.    

Peggy was wrong, of course. A few days after the 2012 election, which Obama won and Romney lost, Peggy had this to say: 

President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney's assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled nor reflected a Republican resurgence. Mr Romney's air of peaceful dynamism was the product of a false optimism that, in the closing days, buoyed some conservatives and swept some Republicans. While GOP voters were proud to assert their support with lawn signs, Democratic professionals were quietly organizing, data mining and turning out the vote. Their effort was a bit of a masterpiece; it will likely change national politics forever. Mr. Obama was perhaps not joyless but dogged, determined, and tired.

For what it's worth, Peggy wasn't the only Republican seeing voter enthusiasm and translating it to a big Romney win. The candidate did too, and so did his campaign. According to the after-the-campaign book Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, by the week-end before the election, Romney and his staff were certain he would win:  

[His internal pollsters] had him running ahead in Florida, Colorado, and other battlegrounds; in Ohio, he was leading among independent voters, a reliable barometer of impending victory. Then there was the matter of Republican intensity, which Romney was experiencing firsthand--the size of the crowds, the rabid enthusiasm, the way Believe in America voters, for the first time, were really believing in him. All of it had Romney's gut screaming that he was going to win. 

Is there enough voter enthusiasm for Donald to carry him over the finish line first on election night? Current polls appear to say no, but after the debacle of 2016, I'm petrified to take anything for granted, so I'll simply say I hope not. I can't even begin to think how I'll feel if Donald is reelected. Seriously. It will be unbearable. 

And one more thing: Peggy Noonan has a website (peggynoonan.com, see it here,) and it includes an archive featuring over 1,000 of her Wall Street Journal columns going back to 1999. There are several columns written in 2012, but not "Monday Morning." Is it possible that, upon reflection, Peggy doesn't love her ode to lawn signs and is trying to keep it hidden? Maybe. I just happen to have printed it out back in 2012. Sorry, Peggy.