Noonan v. Palin

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Peggy Noonan, Reagan’s former speechwriter with a column in the Wall Street Journal, has just unloaded on Sarah Palin. For your information, this isn’t the first time. Last October, Noonan wrote,

we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. . . She doesn't think aloud. She just says things. . . she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. . . the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good. . .

Noonan clearly anticipated her October scorching of Palin would cost her, for she concluded her attack with the words, “the conservative intelligentsia are . . . attempting to silence those who opposed [the] party. . . [Well,] come and get me.”

So having previously struck Palin, Noonan is now out to kill her candidacy for president. Looking back to last Fall’s campaign, Noonan writes:

In television interviews [Palin] 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 wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation . . . has been . . . 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.

Most of Noonan’s column is pushback against Palin’s conservative friends. She mounts a string of straw-(wo)man arguments, quotes supposedly offered by Palin supporters, and bats them down one by one (I dislike the exercise enough to pushback myself against each Noonan argument):

➢ "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.

But wait: Working class isn’t poor, it means body work, not brain work. Secretaries are certainly from the “Working 9 to 5” class, and a track coach who also teaches doesn’t sit at a desk; he works with his body.

➢ "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." . . 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.

But wait: Noonan’s a graduate of the private Fairleigh Dickinson University, not Ivy League but located at the former New Jersey Vanderbilt estate used as a stand-in for Princeton in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” Palin attended 3 community colleges before graduating from the University of Idaho at age 23. Noonan is pseudo-Ivy, Palin isn’t.

➢ "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.

But wait: Noonan gives a smokescreen answer. Conservatives rightly knew the base would go wild for Palin, thus helping McCain with his most glaring weakness. It’s insulting to suggest otherwise. The real elite, one that includes Noonan, does hate Palin.

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

Noonan is name-calling. Undignified.

➢ "Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." 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?

More insults.

➢ "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. . . It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Ms. Noonan, are we running out of arguments? What’s the point of these insults?

➢ "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.

But wait: The media truly hate Palin, and don’t want her anywhere near the White House. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 made president, in spite of all-out media opposition. Palin would be the worst. No, kill Palin’s chances in the crib, now (whispers Noonan)!

I’m sure Noonan really believes

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. . . our leaders. . . 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. . .

It’s just that Noonan worked for Reagan. The grade B movie actor, graduate of Eureka, hardly a “genius” or “gifted,” a guy who certainly didn’t make any elite’s "cut." Yes, Reagan mastered a 3x5 card pack of key issues. It’s too early to know whether or not Palin can too, but she has just written a Washington Post op-ed on energy policy.

We’ll see. In any case, I so detest the elite’s efforts to bar non-philosopher kings from being president. And hey, wasn’t Obama’s election about how any child can aspire to the White House?