Noonan Vomits Palin

[AdamSmith]

Interesting to see Noonan finally let her gorge rise, fully & publicly, on sister Sarah.

A Farewell to Harms

Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.

By Peggy Noonan

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News and World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html

[MsGuy]

"If you defile the land, it will vomit you out..." Lev. 18:28

Ms. Noonan's jeremiad is a tiny bit disengenous. Where was her voice when conservatives were cheerfully herding creationists and nativists to the polls? As the Good Book says, "Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind."

"She makes the party look stupid, like a party of the easily manipulated...She show [our] cynicism."

Isn't this the heart of Noonan's argument, that Palin lets the cat out of the bag? That she too openly personifies that part of the base that the consevative elite would rather keep locked in the attic (always excepting election days)?

The GOP's problem isn't Palin, it's the millions of lackwits who recognise her as one of their own.

[Guest StuCotts]

Whatever can be said of her disingenuousness, she must be willing to face ostracism and vilification from the segment of Reps that supports and apparently worships Palin. They are a nasty and brutish mob, who won't be inclined to make light of, let alone forgive, this big-time apostasy.

[RA1]

At least for the benefit of the Republicans (and maybe all of us) she has unquestionably revealed some of her flaws. Shades of Thomas Eagleton?

Personally I regarded her as just another wanna be like Biden, Gore, Qayle and Rockefeller. Pols rewarded for their loyalty but not their effectiveness. Now, she has gone one step beyond the reward stage, hasn't she?

Best regards,

RA1

[TampaYankee]

"If you defile the land, it will vomit you out..." Lev. 18:28

Ms. Noonan's jeremiad is a tiny bit disengenous. Where

Actually, she exhibited some sense of incredulity early on. I believe it was on Morning Joe, during an unintended open mike episode, that she made some pretty damaging remarks about Palin. She had to walk those back in short order, the party being what it is with heretics. She was one of the few Conservative apparatchiks to exhibit reluctantly only tepid enthusiasm for Palin. Still, honor and responsibility should have goaded her to be more outspoken, as it should have many other conservative voices. Coming in the middle of the campaign (when most needed) though, this would have had the severest of professional repercussions for her.

The GOP's problem isn't Palin, it's the millions of lackwits who recognise her as one of their own.

Yes, yes, and no. Palin is the sympton, not the problem for the GOP. If she were ever elected she WOULD be a problem for all of us. It does point out the 'lackwits' as you describe. And their existence is disturbing. However, each party has its lackwits if driven by different ideologies.

In the case of the conservatives, what is much more disturbing to me is the number of Conservatve Apparatchiks who push Palin forward as savior to our system and the country. Now it is true that some of the apparatchiks may actually be stupid but most are not and see that she does not have the depth and breath and gravitas to lead the country as Executive and Commander in Chief. They are ideologues who have an agenda to push and view Palin as the 'Useful Idiot' they can use to rise to power and control the government apparatus to meet their goals of neocon foreign adventurism and to continue the 'greed is good' philosophy that 'what is good for the Haves is good for the country, and that by defintion is good for all, including the HaveNots. (After all, this succeeded with Bush II didn't it!) No, these people are not stupid... well maybe Hanity and couple of the 'Family Council' types who lack the vision to see beyond our bedrooms and churchs, that it is really uncertain and dangerous world out there that requires competent national leadership. They seek power to futher their own narrow interests, nothing more.

[MsGuy]

An alternative explanation advanced for Noonan's rant.

GOP elite contemplates a divorce from the lumpen middle class

Edit: The above link does not necessarily reflect the views of this station.

[Guest StuCotts]

I'm not a student of the writings of either Peggy Noonan or Frank Rich, but I'll bet that never before have they been so in agreement with each other on any political topic as they are on Palin. Not unexpectedly, they have arrived at their meeting of the minds by widely divergent paths, and both might bristle at the suggestion that it even exists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/opinion/...amp;ref=opinion