Understanding Peggy Noonan

I read the other day that Peggy Noonan voted for John McCain. What's news is that that is news.

You would think that we could assume a leading conservative writer didn't vote for Barack Obama, but Peggy Noonan has given us reason to wonder. After Peggy declared that “Palin's Failin'”, the notion was taken up far and wide that she wandered from the conservative fold. “Peggy, we hardly knew ye” has become a refrain among on-line conservatives.

But her wanderings didn't begin with that op-ed. I have read all of Peggy Noonan's books and followed her column faithfully for years; I can tell you that there has been a shift in her since 2005. A veritable Bush Bot during the first Bush administration, she has since gotten to the point of interrupting a column about Pope Benedict to make a snarky aside about President Bush. His offense? Meeting with the pope at the White House. This is a dramatic change. To get an idea of how dramatic, read Peggy Noonan's "The Crying Room", and then "American Grit".

We all know what Peggy had to say about Sarah Palin. There have been other things in her writing that you would not expect from a conservative. One is a certain softness about Barack Obama. Another is increasingly left-leaning views on Iraq - belief that the invasion was wrong from the beginning, opposition to the Surge, support for the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, the statement that Joe Biden has, for five years running, been more right on Iraq than the Bush administration.

I have watched this change in Peggy Noonan with fascination that has been morbid only some of the time. On a purely human level, it's a very interesting thing. Other people have noticed it too, and for years I have read with interest their theories. Now I would like to offer my own.

The first thing I would like to say is this: There have been many suggestions, going back to January 2005, that Peggy Noonan's judgments of President Bush, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin have been motivated by jealousy, elitism, financial gain, personal problems, and what is delicately termed a "change of life". I think all these should be put aside. As things stand now, there is little evidence for or against such explanations, making the discussion purely speculative and largely uncharitable.

Peggy Noonan's turning point has been identified as "Too Much God" - her column critical of President Bush's Second Inaugural Address. This is accurate: That is the time when the change was first noticed. But I would like to propose a different date as to when it began: June 9, 2004.

Don't bother thinking that long about it: I'm not referring to any momentous national event. More like a momentous personal event. June 9, 2004 was the day Peggy Noonan was in the Capitol, for a gathering of old Reagan hands. An alarm was sounded, the Capitol was evacuated, and as Peggy looked back toward the building, she saw the wheelchair-bound Oatsie Williams stuck at the top of the steps. Two policemen took hold of the wheelchair and carried the woman down, and, as Peggy writes in Patriotic Grace:

But something happened as I watched Oatsie being carried down the Capitol steps. A thought had come with the force of an intuition, though it was not that. Just a thought, barely carried in words. In time it sank in, and did not leave me for months, and then years.

It came to be for me a reordering thought. I'd felt a version if this sentiment since 9/11, and maybe you did too. But in some new way, for me, it...broke through. And stayed with me, coming to reshape or reorient my thinking, my attitude, about many things.

I came to think this: the old ways are over, the old politics are over. The weary going through the motions as each side brutalizes the other: over. A new time has begun, or must begin. We have to sober up, we have to change, the stakes are that high. This is a time for seriousness, for high-mindedness, forbearance, and reason. We have to try to sort of shake our heads and see each other new, and the landscape new.

What conservative would deny the stakes are high? What human being would say that any time is not a time for seriousness, high-mindedness, and reason? As for forbearance - well, there are no exceptions to the Golden Rule. If you love your country you should care about your fellow countrymen; hopefully they aren't your enemies. And if they are - well, Christ said to love your enemies.

So all this is very well as far as it goes. But how far does Peggy go? This we find out a few pages later:

All this came to change the way I do my work, which is writing about politics. It left me - it is a little embarrassing to say this, because it admits and acknowledges a previous lack - open in some new way to, and eager to hear, the stands and suggestions of those I'd previously seen as generally unhelpful (that would be liberals) and sometimes newly protesting of some of the actions of those whose views I'd previously found congenial.

That would be conservatives, I guess. So there we have it: Peggy Noonan is now more open to liberals' ideas and more hostile to conservatives' actions. Well. At least bipartisan still means that Democrats win.

I mentioned earlier Peggy's softness on Barack Obama. I would like to present the idea that her treatment of Obama is a prime example of her new thinking. In all fairness, she responded toughly to Obama's assertion that the question of when human life begins is above his pay grade. Two early articles on Barack Obama - "The Man From Nowhere" and "The Conceit of Government" - were very creditable also. But after Barack Obama became a serious contender, a curious feature emerged of Peggy Noonan's writings about him: She almost never addressed his policies or principles. His persona, his temperament, his eloquence, his blackness - but not what he believed or wanted to do. Here are some of her later comments:

Obama [is] worthy in his own way of admiration... [He does not] seem by nature inclined toward brute, gut-player politics. ... [Obama] seems temperamentally not inclined to be a killer, to encourage the dark side of politics. Patriotic Grace

Barack Obama has a great thinking look. I mean the look he gets on his face when he's thinking, not the look he presents in debate... I mean the look he gets in an interview or conversation when he's listening and not conscious of his expression. It's a very present look. He seems more in the moment than handling the moment. "The Trance"

[Obama] has impressed people, and not with money, résumé or clout but something rarer, natural gifts. That's not nothing. Big talent is rare, and deserves consideration. "The Trance"

Yes, I think [Barack Obama is reasonable]. ... Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books. "Be Reasonable"

The Obama campaign has been one of real dignity and cool, and in this it reflected its candidate. "Why It's Getting Mean"

[H]e gave me a keen look. "Who are you for, the election? I guess the Republicans." I paused. "I haven't had to decide yet," I said. "I'm just watching and trying to figure it out. But I'll tell you, it would be a delight to me if Mr. Obama shows himself to be deep enough, sturdy and sophisticated enough that one could vote for him in good conscience." Patriotic Grace

The only thing any principled conservative ever needed to decide in the 2008 election is: McCain or third party? That is not because conservatives are close-minded, not because they lack grace or anything else. It is because they have set philosophical principles; they know what they believe and they know what Obama believes. Once you have decided a candidate's principles are wrong and his policies are disastrous, you don't care if he has "natural gifts". You don't care if he is dignified or cool or sturdy. You don't care how sophisticated he is. You don't even care if he has a great thinking expression.

To reject a candidate because of his principles is an act of clarity and rationality. It cuts to the heart of the matter, to the root and substance of things. To borrow one of Peggy's favored words, it is high-minded, and you don't get any higher.

By contrast, does anyone else notice how fundamentally unserious some of Peggy's remarks on Obama have been? He's literate! He writes books! Way to call 'em! Reading Shakespeare and Hemingway is a prime qualification for running the country. And when we look at dark times and rough waters ahead - I say, let's put a writer in the Oval Office!

In Patriotic Grace, Peggy Noonan calls herself a political conservative. To this day she has written much that shows - and nothing that contradicts - that she is pro-life and believes in limited government. Now consider the fact that Barack Obama is rated the most liberal member of the Senate. He voted four times against the Infants Born Alive Protection Act; he said that he didn't want his daughters "punished with a baby" - thus supporting not only abortion, but the abortion of his own grandchildren. He opposed the Surge and once said that we should negotiate with Iran without preconditions. He believes that health insurance is a right and should be provided by the federal government. And I haven't even mentioned the company he keeps.

I know all this, and politics is only my hobby. Politics is Peggy's profession; she must know all this too. So what are we to make of this: Peggy Noonan sees a presidential candidate who thinks we should socialize health care and let babies die, and she wonders: Is this man deep enough to be president?

Peggy's new aspiration to what she calls "grace" may have given her higher sentiments, but it has also lowered her considerations. Her evaluation of Barack Obama indicates a severe loss of either seriousness, or perspective, or principle. She has put more importance on Barack Obama's sophistication than his beliefs - and I can't express what an appalling, what an extraordinary failure of judgment that is.

Perhaps it is a boggling failure of judgment; perhaps Peggy has, to some extent, become philosophically unmoored, and she's drifting left. I don't know. But it isn't good.

That is one revelation I experienced while reading Patriotic Grace. I had another. I'm happy I read that book - I'm finally cracking some nuts.

There has been a viewpoint - a recurring theme - in Peggy's writings that has puzzled me. Here are some examples:

That is the authentic sound of the aggression...of the Bush White House. "Palin and Populism"

[If Scott McClellan had resigned from principle, the administration] would have beaten him to a pulp...as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk. "But Is It True?"

The deeper story is not that those who've been silenced [by the Bush White House] have often come forward to speak in harsh terms. The deeper story is that the Bush White House hurt itself by using muscle to squelch alternative thinking--creative thinking, independent judgments... It was this tendency that led to the administration's gym-rat reputation, all muscle and no brains. "Now He Tells Us"

This complaint is actually somewhat unique - at least for conservatives. Most conservatives don't think the Bush White House has been too aggressive in dealing with critics; what they usually say is that it has not been anything like aggressive enough.

How many examples of the Bush White House's brutal aggression against its opponents can be named? Where have President Bush's "brutish" instincts been in evidence? George W. Bush may be the most insulted man in the world; he has been called everything from Hitler to a chimp, from a war criminal to a retard. Now, sit down to compose a list of the ten nastiest things he has said in response, and see what you come up with.

Consider also the total decorum with which the president has treated his former subordinates - no matter what they did, no matter what he could have gained by speaking against them. He could have defended himself by attacking Donald Rumsfeld, or General Casey and General Abizaid. He could have bolstered his reputation at the expense of theirs, but he never put them down. Even when his subordinates turned out to be rats - such as Scott McClellan, Paul O'Neill, and even, to some extent, Colin Powell and Dick Armitage - President Bush has never treated them with anything but unfailing grace. This is the man whose administration would have beaten McClellan to a pulp.

But, thanks to Patriotic Grace, I now think I understand what Peggy Noonan is talking about when she explains that the Bush White House would have crushed Scott McClellan had he talked. Here is a quotation from that book:

I think the Bush White House made a mistake that has not been fully noted. ... I believe they mobilized the blogs, the cable shows, talk radio, the comment threads, and so on, to advance the administration policy and to take down those who disagreed with it.

This is what is known as a conspiracy theory - or as I like to think of them, "stories without a leg to stand on". It has no empirical evidence, it creates questions rather than answers them, and it appears to arise from existing belief rather than observed reality.

I know of no evidence for this assertion, and neither does Peggy Noonan. She offers not a scrap of fact to support it. But she just knows that Bush staffers have been anonymously waging war against administration opponents, and she really is unhappy with them about it. As she also writes in Patriotic Grace:

I had my own rounds in this arena [of right-wing Internet forums] when, after years of arguing in support of Mr. Bush and his policies in essays and columns in 2000 and after, and taking time off from The Wall Street Journal to volunteer for him during 2004, I...wrote a piece for the Journal declaring the address to be what I thought it was: wild in its ambitions, immature in its thinking, and deeply ahistorical. Now I was treated as the enemy, too.

Peggy Noonan believes the Bush White House mobilized the blogs and the comment threads to take down its opponents. It would seem logical to say she believes they mobilized them to take down her. Here, perhaps, we have at last insight into her animosity against President Bush. She argued in support of President Bush - she took off time from work to volunteer for him - and then she was treated as the enemy. The ingrates. The traitors.

But if Peggy is sour on President Bush these days, at least she's chipper about Barack Obama. As she writes in her post-election analysis:

Mr. Obama won [his mandate] the old-fashioned way: he earned it. He confounded history to get it. And because he replaces a president whose unpopularity has impeded his ability to govern, he is, in a way, president from day one.

Well, what can a conservative say? Here I am, worried about the unborn and hoping America survives President Barack Obama, and she's feeling lucky to see him take the reins of state.

That's a pretty good theory.

It really is sad. The fact is, she was a helluva speechwriter and had some great columns over the years, especially right after 9-11. Her weirdness started to be noticeable, and then just went over the top, and I stopped reading her entirely a few years ago. Now she's on a path to join Ellen Goodman on the relevancy chart.

“I’ve read only one of PN’s books (”What I Saw at the Revolution”), but she’s always had the capacity to wander off the reservation or to express un-conservative or just plain odd ideas.”

That book started off well until she fell in love and moped her way through the second half of the thing, which was basically a bunch of incomprehensible drivel.

Her column is just more of the same nonsense. She is a member of the quislings that we detest most.

As much as I dislike President Bush, she misses the hope many of us had for him. He has made a ton of mistakes, but one of his chief problems is not defending himself. If he had caused even a portion of the libs the discomfort she implies, we'd all be fighting for him and cheering him on. She's a liar. She's a political whore. She sits in her penthouse and invents friends and enemies like a five year old having a tea party with dolls and plastic cups.

No no no, don’t come back. I think your piece is brilliant, a dead-on analysis. It also explains her antipathy to Sarah Palin, by the way: conservative popularism is too close to talk radio as a genre. It makes her nervous. Too much testosterone in the philosophy. The problem is, when private grief becomes public policy, the taint is not retractable, it’s pitch that defileth. Accept the fact, she’s adult, she’s smart, she’s made her choices, she’s gone.

Maybe Peggy Noonan is just tired of working at being a conservative. I last saw her on TV some months ago and it was painful to me to watch her dig for deep thought and cogent expression of same. She is a democrat at heart and is easing her way back to her comfort zone. She is unable to continue to straddle the Catholic Republican logic and the Catholic democrat liberalism that helped give America our FIRST Socialist President. If she is as knowledgeable as she seems to think she is, she would know that Obama and the forces that got him into the White House do not have the same goals of freedom that George Washington did when he became the FIRST President of the United States. All the pretty word pictures that Peggy paints of Obama are at odds with the reality of his outspoken socialism. All in all, IMO, Noonan is more to be pitied than scorned, as the saying goes, because she is clearly a very unhappy, adrift, woman.

But I would like to propose a different date as to when it began: June 9, 2004.

Noonan never got over the loss that came with the end of her excellent adventure with the Reagan adminstration. It was Noonan's own personal version of Camelot. She idolized Reagan and I believe resented anyone with the temerity to try and take his place. Relevance? Ronald Reagan's death June 5, 2004.

Wow. I think you nailed it.

Well said!

I’ve lost respect for Noonan.

How can one have respect for anyone who allows a candidate’s ability to put on a show trump what we’ve been led to believe are her political and personal values. I don’t hate Obama, but — based on his ultra-liberal political record, his lack of values (regarding any respect for human life), and his associates and associations — I do hate the thought of what I fear he is going to do to our country.

(I have nothing but respect for Palin.)

She's either a newly-outed leftist; insane; or -- most likely -- both.

I'm just guessing, but I think her memoir of the woman in the wheelchair being helped down stairs during an evacuation when it was palpably dangerous to stay, may have been a trigger moment for something Catholics in particular seem to be vulnerable to, viz., a "sudden conversion" moment.

In this case, the contrast would have been between the healthy Republicans hauling ass off the grounds, and the low-paid security workers patiently helping the wheelchair-bound woman down the stairs. Instant "moral inequation" slams her in the forehead:

Low-paid Democrat workers > well-paid, well-educated Republicans

I.e., the putative Democrats behaved more nobly than the putative Republican conservatives.

I would emphasize further that this is how she likely experienced the thought, but that it got past her higher thought and arrived instead as a plain, simple impulsive thought that was driven home by adrenalin, and the suspension of rational thought under stress.

It's simplistic "sidewalk psychology" and begs better comment by trained professionals, but under stress, I think Catholics and other morally-tweaked-and-trained people are vulnerable to that kind of conversion, which please note, is largely immune to rational interrogation or recension. It's psychological, not logical or rational.

Addendum:

Another ex-Catholic who experienced this "conversion syndrome" was the late Philip Agee, who left the CIA and collaborated with the KGB and Cuban DGI in writing "expose's" of the CIA, like Inside the Company. That his moral unhappiness with the messy work of antiterrorism (he was tasked against the violent Tupamaro urban guerrillas of Uruguay) might have led him to leave the profession is one thing, but the completeness of his unhinging, and his moral change of allegiance over to the Tupamaros is evidenced by his lack of trepidation at crawling into bed with the most bestial and blood-soaked secret-police organization in history, the KGB.

You sure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko

From Time.com:

Lady Sniper

Monday, Sep. 28, 1942

Junior Lieut. Liudmila Pavlichenko, Russian Army girl sniper who killed 309 Germans, had to cancel a radio interview in Manhattan last week because a dentist pulled one of her front teeth and the resulting whistle would have been noticeable on the air waves. But in a non-radio interview with Commentator Alice Hughes, she gave her unvarnished opinion of the U.S. woman's angle on the war:
"I am amazed at the kind of questions put to me by the women press correspondents in Washington. Don't they know there is a war? They asked me silly questions such as do I use powder and rouge and nail polish and do I curl my hair? One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat.
"This made me angry. I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn."
In battle, Lieut. Pavlichenko commands men as well as women, wears trousers. But, she insists, she is a womanly sniper.

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