Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, my favorite Brooklyn-born Irish conservative writer/pundit, is getting a raw deal. The Internet is awash with news that Noonan has dumped on the McCain Presidential run. It just isn’t so.
In yesterday’s open-mic embarrassment, Noonan did not say it “was over” for McCain. A review of the YouTube video makes that clear. Noonan did say “it’s over,” referring to the Republican leadership that thinks its “base” is in line with the thinking of the American people. That thinking resulted in the nomination of the woefully unqualified Sarah Palin to the GOP ticket in a bid to energize right-wing evangelicals, a group whose clout diminishes minute-by-minute.
Noonan posts on the WSJ website that GOP party leaders are “stuck in the assumptions of 1988 and 1994, the assumptions that reigned when they were young and coming up.” Noonan is right when she says Republicans are mired in a time warp. A quick glance at the fat and happy convention-goers in St. Paul makes that abundantly clear. As America because more ethnic and multicultural each day, the GOP remains the party of old white men and women who are being led by a crotchety senior citizen to a November electoral slaughter.
Palin and her entire brood represent the time warp that Noon referred to. Noonan blurted out during the live but off-air MSNBC program that the Alaskan Governor isn’t the “most qualified” to run in `08. The former Reagan speechwriter went on to say that Republicans are sticking to their “narrative” about what the campaign likes to tell itself. It is fantasy land spin. The narrative is light years from the American reality. As Noonan summed up: “The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives and [inaudible] the picture,” said Noonan. “Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, and they blow it.”
Noonan, in her website column, apologized for the barnyard epithet. She explained that she chatted earlier in the day with Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas. Noonan was bummed, very disappointed that the GOP selected the inexperienced Palin over the more qualified Hutchinson.
My hope is that Noonan doesn’t play the role of the good GOP soldier, self-censoring herself for the rest of the campaign. This blogger appreciates Noonan’s honest take on the world. The last thing we did is a another media shill for McCain/Palin.
Noonan is off to a good start. She writes that Palin is a “Hail Mary pass, the pass the guy who thinks he has a good arm makes to the receiver he hopes is gifted.” Noonan concludes: “Most Hail Mary passes don’t work. But when they do they’re a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.”
That beauty can be found in the best of Noonan’s columns. Keep `em coming, Peggy.
