Posted on 11/12/2023 11:02:07 AM PST by Rummyfan
Hopefully there will be NO ONE LEFT TO GOVERN.
Peggy Noonan was great at writing speeches for a President. Somehow, she decided that meant she could devise great governmental policy.
She is definitely one of the dumbest c units around.
“All things considered, Peggy Noonan must be the worst columnist in the United States”
not even close: THAT “prize” goes to the completely insane Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post ...
Peggy Noonan passed her sell-by date about twenty years ago.
More like 40 years ago, but yeah.
snip
Peggy Noonan-—WSJ
Joe Biden’s perception, that he is too old for the job, is guaranteed to get worse each day. This makes his vice president more important than vice presidents ever have been.
When people consider voting for Mr. Biden for the presidency they’ll know it is likely they’re really voting for Kamala Harris. This will only hurt Democratic fortunes, because she is uniquely unpopular.
I have been fascinated by Ms. Harris’s lack of success in her role considering the impressiveness of her previous résumé—district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator.
I think she didn’t fully understand the nature of the vice presidency and thought she did. I think she let her political ego dictate her calculations. She was surrounded by friends and staff who had made a study of her but not the job and who assumed that by virtue of her first-ever status—first ever woman to hold the role, first ever black and Indian-American—she should be bold, remake the position, make her special significance and importance clear, be less an understudy than a co-star.
But you can’t effectively change a thing unless you understand it first.
She meant to establish her place as the future president by showing off her charm and ease. Which is how she got in trouble with dramatic interviews, winging it with ad-libbed, mad-libbed arias in speeches, and taking on portfolios—immigration during an immigration crisis—that were important but not promising, and in fact dangerous. In three years under bright lights she proved herself insubstantial—not seeming to understand issues in any depth, getting lost as she discussed them, laughing in ways that said “please see me as a happy warrior.”
In her previous life she never had to use the tools of seriousness. She rose in a one-party state. Charm, networking and picking your way through the intraparty progressive minefields was enough. But at the level of the vice presidency it isn’t.
Her attempts to turbocharge the role left the press free to judge her on different terms. Here it must be said that many jobs in the top level of the federal government are hard, but vice president isn’t one of them. Every morning you get up and put on clothing. You then often leave for a trip—to the funeral of a head of state, to the Detroit Economic Club for a speech, or a party fundraiser in Bismarck, N.D.—and what you talk about there is the administration’s policies and plans, its claimable successes.
It is a boring speech—vice presidents’ speeches are always boring, are prepared to be such, because the people at the White House want the vice president to be boring. They want the vice president to be substantive, but they don’t want any attention off the president, or any disadvantageous comparisons made. Another reason vice-presidential speeches are boring is you wind up repeating the same stuff—policies, plans, hopes. Another reason is that you’re always speaking of serious, not playful things—domestic challenges, approaches to the world.
But it’s OK. Because everyone you speak to—everyone—knows it’s your job to be boring and gives you a pass.
If this sounds like “Wow, no one should ever become vice president, how insignificant,” no. You get a mansion; you’re not under the most intense daily scrutiny; people take care of you. The boon and political gift of the job is picking up chits and forging relationships for when you run for president.
You also get to help the administration you presumably believe in, and thus help the American people with good policies. It’s a good job. And all the American people ask of you is that you seem serious, well-versed, and possibly, beneath the boringness, wise, so that if something bad were to happen they can feel secure that yes, you can do the job.
I don’t think Ms. Harris understood this, not the institutional history of the job or why it has been done by most of its holders with certain hard boundaries. With her faith in her charm and ability to be warm and relatable, as they say, she forgot to be modest or to imitate modesty. But people do expect humility of vice presidents, a grown-up sense that they know they’re the second banana, that today they’re nothing but tomorrow they may be everything, as the first vice president, John Adams, said.
But today is today so do your sturdy, boring job, and learn more every day about the inner workings of this thing called the federal government. Previous vice presidents have been a mystery. Our age is one of TikTok feeds, not mystery, but there is power in being a step away.
The way to approach the vice presidency is with low-key humility and carefulness. You don’t take the job and shape it to your persona; you take your persona and fit it into the job, which existed long before you and ideally will exist long after.
Peggy Sundowner
The Putin is not afraid of The Tater's full diaper.
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