Peggy Noonan has been to date, one of Obama’s staunchest defenders. Which has been teeth gritting for many of us who thought she had more sense than that. After all, she served with President Reagan, and even wrote a book or two about his character.
So it is with some amusement and a sense of “harrumph” that I read her latest missive in which the scales come off her eyes and she sees clearly what we’ve been seeing all along: the emperor wears filthy rags.
Welcome to the real world, Ms. Noonan.
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The Wall Street Journal
May 29, 2010
He Was Supposed to Be Competent
The spill is a disaster for the president and his political
philosophy.
I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive
the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18
months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors,
meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and
instincts.
There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care
proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the
views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal
immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering
in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you
politically survive this.
The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests
he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of
his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure,
and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008.
But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync
with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about
A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one
reality, he’s in another.
Peggy Noonan was always too sensitive in that particularly female way (not all women, but some) to recognize and forcibly reject a detached narcissist.
She WANTED so badly for him to be what he said he was. That made her blind to so much of the stuff we saw from the beginning.
Better late than never, Peggy, but you’ve permanently lost whatever respect I had for you as a common sense voice of the people. Nobody with a common touch could have missed the cold, regal, self-obsessed clinical narcissism that is part and parcel of the One. Ergo Peggy simply doesn’t have that contact with the common person. Maybe she never did, and I was just younger then, and couldn’t see it.
no matter. Time to retire, Peg.