Noonan On Palin
Noonan writes that Palin was bad for the Republicans -- and the republic:
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.
...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.
Would this be a good moment to remind everyone that Noonan took money from Enron, and that when she was caught, she said that she didn't remember how much she took but that she was kind of off the hook morally, because she didn't do anything to earn it?
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 8:49 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2009/07/10/noonan_on_palin.html#comment-1657872">comment from Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com]So...which of her characterizations above do you disagree with...all of them?
Amy Alkon
at July 10, 2009 8:52 AM
Would this be a good moment to remind everyone that Noonan took money from Enron ...
No.
Hey Skipper at July 10, 2009 9:07 AM
I would not trust Peggy "Savor" Noonan to tell me whether or not a person is "thoughtful" or not. This zombie leftazoid reflex to condescend first and find one's place (relative to the subject) later –as so comically demonstrated yesterday by Cheez & Tressider– is precisely the sin by which new media will supplant old without tears being shed. The fuckers deserve it; the fuckers have always deserved it.
Noonan complains that Palin doesn't read, the apple-polisher's favorite accusation. There's no way she could know this; when proven wrong, she'll instantly retort that she's been reading the wrong things, and we're all supposedly going to enjoy the discussion of titles which would follow. (We wouldn't.)
For thirty years I've taken close note of the first person singular in text and speech; at no point did Palin's use of it seem inappropriate, and certainly never egotistical. Again, Palin is the best example of modern feminism in political life. I suspect Noonan envies her this, and kinda takes it personally. "Personal limits".... Meeee-yow.
Noonan presumes we'd all agree that working class and middle class aren't the same thing; she is mistaken.
Our President is Harvard, his predecessor was Harvard and Yale, his predecessor was Georgetown, Oxford and Yale; and his predecessor was Yale. Noonan is mistaken: The United States has a troubling enthusiasm for East Coast/Ivy Leaguers, and Palin's background is refreshingly distinct.
To suggest that merely be selected as a candidate by the top of the ticket is to be graced by The Elite is to shamelessly elide the popular meaning of the term.
Peggy Noonan is full of shit.
If there's any way for me to further clarify these matters for you, please don't hesitate to ask.
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 9:28 AM
> No.
We notice that you couldn't say why.
———
And more about Noonan— Her streamy-conchy, weird-sentence style is not aging well. It's one thing to hear this from a fertile, sweater-wearing younger woman who might, in some very casual daydream, be regarded as kittenish. But nowadays we get the sense that when moving her pieces from the yellow legal pad to Microsoft word, she just didn't care enough to flesh out her impulse scratchings ("I'm I'm I'm") with complete sentences. It's not jazz-thinking, it's laziness. She's too old for that shit.
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 9:32 AM
"The elites made her...the base barely knew who she was"
Every conservative or libertarian-minded North American male with a taste for MILF knew about America's Hottest Governor long before the Republican convention. And there was a Draft Sarah for VP movement out there, promoted by Larry Kudlow & other reasonably prominent folks on the right, quite some time before McCain made his choice public. It was the Democrats & progressives who were clueless & taken totally off-guard by her, not the Republican base.
If you want to earn acclaim as a truly insightful pundit, you have to come up with your brilliant observations BEFORE the mindless herd of the MSM turns them into conventional wisdom. If you dig through the bowels of the Internet for coverage of her from 2006/07, you'll find an almost uniformly positive, admiring tone about the modern frontier woman who was the sexiest, and one of the most capable governors & corruption-fighters. If she really is nothing but the sum of her faults, why is this only obvious to Noonan & so many others after an all-out campaign of war against her by the Democrats & their allies in the media?
"a party of the easily manipulated"
What about the hordes of gay Obamabots who voted for him expecting unequivocal support for gay marriage everywhere & no more don't ask, don't tell? All the civil liberties types expecting a complete reversal of every Bush policy in the war on terror? Everyone gullible enough to believe Obama won't raise taxes on anybody making less than $ 250,000? I don't think Palin is the one who's left millions of easily manipulated voters with rotten eggs all over their faces.
Martin at July 10, 2009 9:50 AM
Martin, are you from the United States?
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 10:02 AM
Oh yeah? How Sarah Palin Will Become the Most Powerful Republican
vanderleun at July 10, 2009 12:21 PM
"For thirty years I've taken close note of the first person singular in text and speech; " And yet you've somehow failed to note that in politics "We" means "Me."
vanderleun at July 10, 2009 12:23 PM
A bitchy, petty, snarky column from an unpleasant bench-warmer.
Feebie at July 10, 2009 3:36 PM
It wasn't 'til re-reading hours later that I saw that I'd essentially accused her of being liberal. Which would be silly, except that she's proudly aligned with the bookish types. Who should be embarrassed, me or the Noonster?
I'll make it through the weekend, with only a modest serving of Cabernet to mask the shame.
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 6:17 PM
(Psssst!– Allusion!)
Crid [CommentCrid@gmail.com] at July 10, 2009 10:11 PM
> No.
We notice that you couldn't say why.
Because the "why" is glaringly apparent to anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with the blatantly obvious.
Hey Skipper at July 13, 2009 12:34 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/us/politics/13palin.html
A not unsympathetic portrayal by the Times. But ultimately, it seems to come down to"I don't think they got it, that they were in the arena."
CB at July 13, 2009 4:35 AM
"This zombie leftazoid reflex to condescend first and find one's place"
...from someone who was Reagan's speech writer and worked for Bush I.
Try again.
Or maybe it's just that she's not in the steadily shrinking Base. That's what makes her a leftist.
Jim at July 13, 2009 11:59 AM
...from someone who was Reagan's speech writer and worked for Bush I.
Perhaps you haven't been keeping track of recent events. Noonan endorsed Obama.
Jim Treacher at August 10, 2009 4:53 AM
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