Reading over some of Peggy Noonan’s pieces from the past several years on Barack Obama, I felt that I was seeing an old political operative finally seeing that there can be something real in politics. When you look at a year or more’s worth of pieces from her, you see her coming to an appreciation of the young democrat slowly but surely.
I remember Ms. Noonan visiting my high school and speaking there; I was amazed that she could have been a presidential speechwriter, because she seemed like such a lightweight blowhard (I guess that says more about the youthful me than about her). And I felt that way for years, seeing her columns from time to time. But something has changed in her. The combination of obvious Republican fecklessness and incompetence and the emergence of Obama have brought a new kind of maturity to her writing. What she seems to realize now is that intelligent people do not have to be the servants of their less intelligent superiors. The cabinet members of your average politician – and certainly of your average president – are usually far more intelligent than the men who tell them what to do. Obama is probably the first president that she felt she had something to learn from. That can change a commentator, can’t it? It’s the difference between experiencing the leadership of another as opposed to merely your own inferior place in a hierarchy.
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