Peggy Noonan Analyzes The Election.

[otterinbham 0]

Be Reasonable

As Iowa sizes up the candidates, so do I.

Friday, December 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.

But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.

Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They're the reason we get up in the morning. "What happened?" "Who won?"

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.

Here are two reasonables: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years. They've read a raw threat file or two. They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works. No one will have to explain it to them.

Mitt Romney? Yes. Characterological cheerfulness, personal stability and a good brain would be handy to have around. He hasn't made himself wealthy by seeing the world through a romantic mist. He has a sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in the global economy. I personally am not made anxious by his flip-flopping on big issues because everyone in politics gets to change his mind once. That is, you can be pro-life and then pro-choice but you can't go back to pro-life again, because if you do you'll look like a flake. The positions Mr. Romney espouses now are the positions he will stick with. He has no choice.

John McCain? Yes. Remember when he was the wild man in 2000? For Republicans on the ground he was a little outré, if Republicans on the ground said "outré," as opposed to the more direct "nut job." George W. Bush, then, was the moderate, more even-toned candidate. Times change. Mr. McCain is an experienced, personally heroic, seasoned, blunt-eyed, irascible American character. He makes me proud. He makes everyone proud.

Barack Obama? Yes, I think so. He has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama's mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books.

Is he experienced enough? No. He's not old enough either. Men in their 40s love drama too much. Young politicians on fire over this issue or that tend to see politics as a stage on which they can act out their greatness. And we don't need more theatrics, more comedies or tragedies. But Mr. Obama doesn't seem on fire. He seems like a calm liberal with a certain moderating ambivalence. The great plus of his candidacy: More than anyone else he turns the page. If he rises he is something new in history, good or bad, and a new era begins.

Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited.

But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial--crucial--that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.

Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Bill Richardson are all reasonable--mature, accomplished, nonradical. Mike Huckabee gets enough demerits to fall into my not-reasonable column. John Edwards is not reasonable. All the Democrats would raise taxes as president, but Mr. Edwards's populism is the worst of both worlds, both intemperate and insincere. Also we can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.

I forgot Rudy Giuliani. That must say something. He is reasonable but not desirable. If he wins somewhere, I'll explain.

Because much of the drama is on the Democratic side, a thought on what might be said when they win or lose. If Mrs. Clinton wins, modesty is in order, with a graceful nod to Mr. Obama. If she loses--well, the Clintons haven't lost an election since 1980. For a quarter century she's known only victory at the polls. Does she know how to lose? However she acts, whatever face she shows, it will be revealing. Humility would be a good strategy. In politics you have to prove you can take a punch. I just took one. (On second thought that's a bad idea. She might morph at the podium into Robert DeNiro in "Raging Bull" and ad-lib the taunt: You didn't knock me down Ray! I'm still standing!)

For Mr. Obama: a lot of America will be looking at him for the first time, and under the most favorable circumstances: as the winner of something. This is an opportunity to assert freshly what his victory means, and will mean, for America. This is a break with the past, a break with the tired old argument, a break with the idea of dynasty, the idea of the machine, the idea that there are forces in motion that cannot be resisted . . . But what is it besides a break from? What is it a step toward, an embrace of?

Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you.

[AU Mom 0]

This is a great article. I love it when Peggy Noonan is on her game.

She's right about the candidates, although I do wonder about Senator Dodd. Do you wonder what has on Guilani?

[otterinbham 0]

This is a great article. I love it when Peggy Noonan is on her game.

She's right about the candidates, although I do wonder about Senator Dodd. Do you wonder what has on Guilani?

Peggy Noonan probably is the best-informed political analyst around. She's Republican, but honest and objective.

[TexasTiger 13,029]

Peggy's best at sounding good. Analysis?

She once thought Bush was the next Reagan:

George W. Bush not only won the debate Wednesday night, but in a way that damaged a central assumption of the Gore campaign. That assumption is that Mr. Bush doesn't know very much. But Mr. Bush demonstrated that he knows a lot, and that his common-sense views and observations can be spoken in a common-sense language accessible to all. He sat back in his chair, spoke of America's role in the world, and made it clear that that role should be grounded in moral modesty and strategic realism. He suggested that the various forces at work in the world should be met not with American hubris but with moderation, and with attention to the kind of example we can, as a great power, set. He seemed thoughtful, knowledgeable, and he buried the memory of the less-seasoned Gov. Bush who one day in Boston flailed when pressed by an interviewer who insisted he name the ruler of Pakistan.

... About two years ago I saw George Shultz, a man of great judgment and experience who is both shrewd and wise. Mr. Shultz told me that George Bush, the Texas governor, would run for president, and that he was enthusiastically supporting him.

I was surprised. Isn't Bush young? I asked. He's been governor for one term, is that enough experience?

Mr. Shultz's eyes narrowed, and he shot me a look. I've spent time with him, he said. "He's like Reagan. He's got it." He told me Mr. Bush had a Reaganesque understanding of the world and attitude toward it, and a Reaganesque charm to boot.

I was impressed. It was the moment I started to realize Mr. Bush was coming down the pike.

Watching Mr. Bush in the debate Wednesday night I remembered that conversation and thought: Now I am seeing what George Shultz saw.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=65000413

She once saw Bush as a great leader, although not now:

He has become, as everyone has pointed out, a leader. Our leader, the American president. There are some who knew he always had this potential, had the gift of figuring things out quickly, deciding, delegating, saying what he was doing and why, getting folks to see things his way. A year or so before he announced he would run for president I read a quote about him from the Texas Democrat Bob Bullock. He and George W. had become friends as they worked together during Mr. Bush's first year as governor. Bullock was smart and tough. And when he was asked about Mr. Bush, shortly before he died, he said, "Let me tell you about that fellow. He's going to be a president, and he's going to be a great one." I watched him closely after that and read everything about him. In time, I came to think: Bullock is going to be proved right.

...

Mr. Bush is not obsessed with his legacy. This is good because it suggests he is emotionally and intellectually mature , which is how we want our presidents to be. When you walk into the presidency as a fully formed adult your first thought is "What should I do first and how and when?" When you walk into it with more vanity than sense, more hunger than purpose, your first thought is of what history will say of you. ...

Mr. Bush works well with the competing personalities around him. He keeps Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz close, listens, seems to have an acute sense of what each can give him. He appreciates Mr. Powell's power as a leader and man of respect, and means to keep him close. He will have to, in 2002, which he has called "a war year." That war has many fronts and there are many ways to move forward on each; the war can become bigger or smaller, hotter or cooler, wider or narrower. When he makes his decisions he will announce them, explain them and argue for them with a striking plainness. The quality will be needed, and it is good that the president has it.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=95001687

Or is he obsessed with his legacy? And incompetent and lacking wisdom?

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America."

....

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? ...

The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. ...

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, ...

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq. (Peggy wants you to know that she saw his incompetence before you did!

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010148

From greatness to a model of gross incompetence missing simple wisdom. Okay, I agree with the latter assessment.

Peggy is eloquent, but her powers of analysis are as hit and miss as most folks-- much better after the fact, although, as in the case of Reagan, still delusional when the misperception is so commonly held to allow her to get away with it.

[otterinbham 0]

Oh, stuff, TT, and you know it. Cherrypicking her columns from early in the Bush presidency does not refute her overall body of work.

Bush performed pretty well his first two years in office. His tax cut was exactly the economic tonic the country needed in the face of the stock market meltdown of 2000-2001. By slashing capital gains taxes by 40% in 2002, Bush injected new life in flagging capital markets while simultaneously doubling capital gains tax collections by the year 2006. Further, his original foreign policy strategy, explicitly stated, was the the United States was not in the business of nation building.

Even after 9/11, his first few efforts were performed with skill, chiefly the interdiction in Afghanistan and the efforts to create a broad-based coalition to shut down Al Queda. So a rational observer such as Noonan could find a lot to praise in Bush's performance.

What nobody, and I mean nobody, could have anticipated was how this presidency went off the rails, both in terms of expanding the government and in the ill-advised Iraq adventure. The Medicare Prescription Act, the failure to reform Social Security, and the mushrooming size of the Federal Bureaucracy represent a substantial deviation from what everything thought Bush would do. Somebody said once that Clinton was the best conservative president since Reagan. Conversely, in terms of statism, Bush is the best liberal president since Lyndon Johnson. As a result, Noonan and George Will recanted their support of Bush early and often, even as other, far more doctrinaire voices kept supporting him.

As far as Reagan goes, he remains the best president this country has seen since Harry Truman, both from an economic and geopolitical standpoint. He deserves every bit of the praise that Noonan dishes out.

[TexasTiger 13,029]

She's one of your heroes and you made broad, sweeping statements about her:

Peggy Noonan probably is the best-informed political analyst around

Astute as always

I refuted your broad, sweeping statements and took the time to present her own words to do it.

I think she's pretty full of herself. Good with turning a phrase. Talented. But she is also a lifelong partisan and hardly objective. She sounds objective to you because you agree with her.

It's one thing to say someone might have reasonably found things about Bush to have praised early on. She went far, far beyond that. She attributed true greatness to him. And totally misjudged his skills, maturity and wisdom. Many were taken in by the desire to see more in him than there was after 9/11. Americans needed a strong leader and wanted to believe that they had one. I, too, was hoping that there was more to him than I had seen the previous 6 years in Texas. I supported him after 9/11, but didn't lose all logic, reason and judgement in the process. Noonan grossly misjudged his abilities and his basic wisdom. That's huge. Any reasonable, objective analysis would have to conclude that she is not always astute. Few people are.

You like her, fine. She's an interesting read. Kinda of a Maureen Dowd with more elegantly attired snark and a consistent right-ward lean. Dowd is more apt to take the low-hanging fruit where she finds it.

Oh, stuff, TT, and you know it. Cherrypicking her columns from early in the Bush presidency does not refute her overall body of work.

Bush performed pretty well his first two years in office. His tax cut was exactly the economic tonic the country needed in the face of the stock market meltdown of 2000-2001. By slashing capital gains taxes by 40% in 2002, Bush injected new life in flagging capital markets while simultaneously doubling capital gains tax collections by the year 2006. Further, his original foreign policy strategy, explicitly stated, was the the United States was not in the business of nation building.

Even after 9/11, his first few efforts were performed with skill, chiefly the interdiction in Afghanistan and the efforts to create a broad-based coalition to shut down Al Queda. So a rational observer such as Noonan could find a lot to praise in Bush's performance.

What nobody, and I mean nobody, could have anticipated was how this presidency went off the rails, both in terms of expanding the government and in the ill-advised Iraq adventure. The Medicare Prescription Act, the failure to reform Social Security, and the mushrooming size of the Federal Bureaucracy represent a substantial deviation from what everything thought Bush would do. Somebody said once that Clinton was the best conservative president since Reagan. Conversely, in terms of statism, Bush is the best liberal president since Lyndon Johnson. As a result, Noonan and George Will recanted their support of Bush early and often, even as other, far more doctrinaire voices kept supporting him.

As far as Reagan goes, he remains the best president this country has seen since Harry Truman, both from an economic and geopolitical standpoint. He deserves every bit of the praise that Noonan dishes out.

[otterinbham 0]

She's one of your heroes and you made broad, sweeping statements about her:

Peggy Noonan probably is the best-informed political analyst around

Astute as always

I refuted your broad, sweeping statements and took the time to present her own words to do it.

I think she's pretty full of herself. Good with turning a phrase. Talented. But she is also a lifelong partisan and hardly objective. She sounds objective to you because you agree with her.

It's one thing to say someone might have reasonably found things about Bush to have praised early on. She went far, far beyond that. She attributed true greatness to him. And totally misjudged his skills, maturity and wisdom. Many were taken in by the desire to see more in him than there was after 9/11. Americans needed a strong leader and wanted to believe that they had one. I, too, was hoping that there was more to him than I had seen the previous 6 years in Texas. I supported him after 9/11, but didn't lose all logic, reason and judgement in the process. Noonan grossly misjudged his abilities and his basic wisdom. That's huge. Any reasonable, objective analysis would have to conclude that she is not always astute. Few people are.

You like her, fine. She's an interesting read. Kinda of a Maureen Dowd with more elegantly attired snark and a consistent right-ward lean. Dowd is more apt to take the low-hanging fruit where she finds it.

Oh, stuff, TT, and you know it. Cherrypicking her columns from early in the Bush presidency does not refute her overall body of work.

Bush performed pretty well his first two years in office. His tax cut was exactly the economic tonic the country needed in the face of the stock market meltdown of 2000-2001. By slashing capital gains taxes by 40% in 2002, Bush injected new life in flagging capital markets while simultaneously doubling capital gains tax collections by the year 2006. Further, his original foreign policy strategy, explicitly stated, was the the United States was not in the business of nation building.

Even after 9/11, his first few efforts were performed with skill, chiefly the interdiction in Afghanistan and the efforts to create a broad-based coalition to shut down Al Queda. So a rational observer such as Noonan could find a lot to praise in Bush's performance.

What nobody, and I mean nobody, could have anticipated was how this presidency went off the rails, both in terms of expanding the government and in the ill-advised Iraq adventure. The Medicare Prescription Act, the failure to reform Social Security, and the mushrooming size of the Federal Bureaucracy represent a substantial deviation from what everything thought Bush would do. Somebody said once that Clinton was the best conservative president since Reagan. Conversely, in terms of statism, Bush is the best liberal president since Lyndon Johnson. As a result, Noonan and George Will recanted their support of Bush early and often, even as other, far more doctrinaire voices kept supporting him.

As far as Reagan goes, he remains the best president this country has seen since Harry Truman, both from an economic and geopolitical standpoint. He deserves every bit of the praise that Noonan dishes out.

Agreed on Dowd, by the way. Hey, I'll enjoy an opposing political columnist and can even see merits in their arguments. But Dowd to me is just a harpy who is more interested in the kill than writing an informed piece.