President signs proclamation reviving the Presidential Fitness Test for schoolchildren.

The President signed a proclamation Tuesday in the Oval Office reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test, the sit-up-and-pull-up regimen the Obama administration replaced in 2012 with a less standardized program that, depending on whom you ask, was either kinder or weaker. Hall of Fame golfer Gary Player attended. Two-time U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau attended. The Health Secretary, the Defense Secretary, the Education Secretary, and the Housing Secretary stood behind the desk in a matched set.

The Health Secretary, who has views on this and most subjects, said the country was the sickest in the world, that childhood obesity had quadrupled in a generation, and that seventy-seven percent of young Americans cannot pass the fitness threshold required for military service. The numbers are roughly correct. The crisis is real. The proclamation is, on its narrow merits, defensible policy.

This is, at the table, the first thing that happens. The second thing that happens is the President turns to the room and asks, what about me, do I have to take it.

He was joking. Probably.

The Defense Secretary explained that the test will be piloted in 161 Department of Defense schools. The press secretary read a list of athletes endorsing the program. A sixth-grader was asked what sport he played and answered correctly. The cameras lingered on a tray of medals.

The deeper thing on the table is the politics. The Obama-era replacement program was called Let’s Move. It was, to its critics, soft. To its defenders, it was an attempt to keep less-athletic children from being publicly humiliated by a fitness regime calibrated, in 1956, to the sons of farmers. There is a real argument here. The administration is making the argument loudly, with a Hall of Fame golfer in the room, and the argument is not absurd.

The argument is also, transparently, an argument about culture. About what schools used to do and what they ought to do again. About how the gymnasium teacher, in the President’s preferred America, is the teacher who matters. The proclamation does not mention culture. The signing ceremony was about almost nothing else.

A serious country can have this conversation. A serious country can hold the fitness data in one hand and the cultural argument in the other and make a real decision. A serious country does not require the President, mid-signing, to ask if he has to take it.

Calmly documenting the decline.