Ohfertheloveof…Peggy Noonan now thinks Rick Perry may just be too darn much of a strapping hot tempered he-man for America’s good.
His primary flaw appears to be a chesty, quick-draw machismo that might be right for an angry base but wrong for an antsy country. Americans want a president who feels their anger without himself walking around enraged…
[T]he nation is roiling and restive. After Mr. Obama was elected, the right became angry, feisty, and created a new and needed party, the tea party. The right was on fire. The next time a Republican wins, and that could be next year, it will be the left that shows real anger, with unemployment high and no jobs available and government spending and services likely to be cut. The left will be on fire. The only thing leashing them now is the fact of Mr. Obama.
So there will be plenty of new angers out there. It probably won’t be helpful if the next president is someone likely to add to the drama with a hot temperament or carelessness.
Peggy, you need to let go of the feely stuff and do some research. You also need to spend a few minutes with Perry or people who have spent time around him before writing about him. He’s not walking around enraged, hot-tempered and careless. At all. People who lack self control don’t rack up 9-0 records in political campaigns. They screw up, and either gaffe or tweet their way out of office, or lose the public’s patience and then lose elections.
The Bernanke comment was not a gaffe. It drew attention to a dangerous policy that’s worth opposing, and set up a two-man race for the presidency.
These are not the ‘roids you’re looking for.
It fascinates me, how the very same columnist who completely misread Barack Obama’s temperament is now misreading Rick Perry’s temperament. She and other elitist types saw in Obama’s grin and gauze, a first-class temperament. Never mind he had no experience relevant to the job he sought, and no track record of working with people outside his narrow ideological band. Obama has turned out to be a very thin-skinned man with extremely poor leadership skills and no evident capability to cast his gaze beyond his very narrow and rigid ideology. Noonan herself has noted what a lousy leader Obama has turned out to be. Perry, by contrast, is actually gregarious, quick-witted, and capable of re-examining the world to the point that like Peggy’s former boss, he switched from Democrat to Republican as his former party left him. Perry also was the first major politician in either party to allow scientists to study his own campaign to determine which techniques actually work and which ones don’t, and then applied that new knowledge to both his 2010 campaign and his current one. Perry’s stewardship of Texas shows that he does know how to lead a very large state very effectively. Incapable of controlling himself? The man shot a coyote that attacked his dog, killing it in one shot, on a morning jog. That’s what I call gun control.
What I’m saying in all that, is that Peggy Noonan doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea what she’s talking about.
Look, we all get things wrong sometimes. Just about a week or so ago, I wrote a fierce little blog post, and went to someone who knew more about the subject than I did to double-check things, and my post turned out to be wrong. So I trashed it. It happens. You get carried away on a theme or a meme, past the point where the facts are keeping up with you. The proper thing to do is keep your mouse off the Publish button until you know more about your subject.
Peggy Noonan needs a fact-checker who knows the subjects she is writing about. She is a great writer but she has now publicly misread two pretty important figures in American life.
(h/t Hot Air)
Noonan has not realized the DNC Kool-Aid she’s been drinking has fermented.
Somebody has forgotten the ‘chesty, quick-draw machismo’ of LBJ.
but they remember W
– come undone.
“She is a great writer”
Is she, really? I’ve heard that, mostly from insider types, but I’ve never been as impressed with her as she seems to be with herself.
like most, if not all, elitists peggy noonan has no clue what the “tea party” is…
the tea party is an amorphous sentiment that erupted after the bush stimulus, the obama stimulus, and obamacare (the unholy trinity of governmental largesse) — the origins of this phenomena (though under the surface and, thus, out of sight/mind) began with hoover and fdr, gained more momentum with the great society and finally revealed itself to the ruling class in 2008/09
peggy noonan needs to pick sides in this fight if she wants some relevance again
Peggy & Kathleen Parker are securing their invitations to K Street cocktail parties for the next year.
Really – There’s a wide divide between the RINO Bush camp & the Perry faction, regardless the left’s view of two cowboys from the same state.
Noonan was a great speechwriter for Reagan, but I think that was because Reagan helped with writing his speeches and had a solid head on his shoulders. I think he kept her on track with the policy and idea stuff, while she focused on the word-smithing.
She should stick with speechwriting and stay away from commentary, for she lacks wisdom.
THANK YOU for noting that the emperor has no clothes. She epitomizes the ‘Rino’ aesthetic. Time for New Wineskins!!!
Talking to Perry would require, at the least, dialing a phone number that’s outside of DC, New York, or California. Her phone probably doesn’t have the right digits.
Poor Peggy jumped the shark with her opinion of the second Bush inaugural. She’s never recovered. Requiem for a once good writer.
Some of us were able to see the anemic, reactive, petty, divisive, name-calling, game-playing chameleon that lurked beneath the cool, pressed, intellectual, univeralist facade of the metrosexual who so effectively seduced Noonan and so many like her.
Leadership and politics are about power and pack dominance. Does it disturb me that Perry might have a spine, two testicles, a brain, some business sense, and some real-live, hands-on executive and governance experience? Not at all.
Does it disturb me that he has the grit, muscle and rough-and-ready attitude to challenge the Washington weenies? Not at all.
After four years of the chief spaghetti-O, we’re going to need someone tough, determined and extraordinarily AMERICAN to undo the devastation and get this country back on track.
“She is a great writer but she has now publicly misread two pretty important figures in American life.”
Define great writer. I cannot think of anything she has written that stands out as excellent analysis. Of course maybe that is because I don’t read her and only see references to the mountain of bad analysis she makes.
Peggy hon, the best place to view Irene is on your penthouse terrace…that’s a girl….
Like most of non Texan America, I am still learning about Mr. Perry, but it is pretty obvious he is a strong leader with a positive outlook. He strikes me as a classic American Alpha Male (which is a compliment since I am happily married to one). Perhaps some voters will not be drawn to that type of personality in a presidential candidate, but for a large majority of us, we welcome a politician who actually knows how to lead and make decisions.
HeartArt, I agree completely. American Alpha Males, men of action, nothing like them. I am positively allergic to the Alan Alda types like our current president, whose self regard is his most highly developed “skill”. Now where is that benadryl…
“Incapable of controlling himself? The man shot a coyote that attacked his dog, killing it in one shot, on a morning jog. That’s what I call gun control.”
I vote this to be PJM’s best line of the week.
“She is a great writer but she has now publicly misread two pretty important figures in American life.”
The last clause refutes the first. Replace “writer” with “stylist”, and I might agree.
“He’s not walking around enraged, hot-tempered and careless.”
Right. When he threatened to label Bernanke as treasonous and said he’d be treated ugly in Texas, he was choosing his words carefully.
“At all. People who lack self control don’t rack up 9-0 records in political campaigns. They screw up, and either gaffe or tweet their way out of office, or lose the public’s patience and then lose elections.”
Perry screw up? Never! He merely disavows his past statements, like those printed in his recent book, “Fed Up.”
But don’t get me wrong – I love this post! Nothing is more entertaining than seeing the GOPers throw their RINOs over the side on their march to the fringe.
“Right. When he threatened to label Bernanke as treasonous and said he’d be treated ugly in Texas, he was choosing his words carefully.”
Sure he was. What makes you think he wasn’t?
Was your god Obama intemperate when he made the remarks about being the only person between bankers and a pitchfork-wielding mob? Or about “hit back twice as hard”? Or about bringing a gun to a knife fight?
I have thought for some time the Reagan was Reagan’s speech writer and that Noonan was probably more of a stenographer and proof reader.
Noonan stopped being relevant quite a few years ago.
Pity the poor Wall Street Journal Opinion Page that has fallen so low as to continue to publish Miss Noonan’s viperous vagaries.
I miss reading Miss Peggy myself. I stopped reading her when she decided she would rather be identified as an elite rather than a conservative by buying Obama’s nonsense in the last presidential election.
VBB, I know your joking about “Pity the poor Wall Street Journal Opinion Page…”, I’ve moved beyond pity and cancelled my subscription after one too many editorials about wonderful illegal immigration as well as the bootlicker Keynesian Economist they insist are relevant….WSJ is reaching for the NYTime’s Gold Star.
I read the WSJ editorials and the IBD editorials. The WSJ has slipped. Peggy N has not aged gracefully as she edges toward retirement or irrelevancy. Either way the results are the same.
I too have noticed the WSJ has become less insightful and its articles are slanted toward the Left.
There is no who, who, when, where, or why? left in any newspaper. Advocacy journalism is the vogue in print and other media: Thus the thinking American flees to other sources of information.
Peggy Nooner has about as much credibility as any other Democrat Beltway hack–which is ZERO–NONE-NADA.
I’ve read Peggy Noonan for years, at least until the WSJ put her behind the pay wall. Although in later years I didn’t read her for content, but for style. I write for my customers and I use her style as one, of many, styles.
I’ll agree with most of the comments from #12 and later. But I regard her writings as a useful adjunct to Strunk and White’s magnum opus.
@ #22. Westie, & #23. James.
Having been a lifelong subscriber to the WSJ, I finally gave up on the once-greatest Opinion Page some years ago. Between the noxious Miss Noonan, the witless Joe Rago (their latest Pulitzer recipient, if you can believe that!), and the O.P.’s all too frequent lurches to the left, I cancelled my subscription. Enough was enough! (A decision whose wisdom was recently burnished by the O.P.’s Tea Party/Hobbits meme.) I am happy to report that since I stomped my subscription, I have enjoyed peaceful breakfasts of a Friday morning no longer tainted by Noononian-sparked outrage, no more dark mutterings at the computer screen, no more slashing letters to the editor. A great improvement.
But I have a True Confession of a deliciously guilty pleasure: I sneak back….. to read James Taranto’s Best of the Web…..every day….. The siren song of Le Taranto’s wicked prose is irresistable.
Now if Mr. Murdoch would just, please, get with the program sharpish, and give Nooners/Rago/the Lefties/& the Hobbit people the sailor’s elbow, all will be forgiven, and I’ll happily come about to hand over my Benjamins for a new subscription. I live in hope!
well said
Peggy has nothing in her toolbox left other than the ability to write wispy, willowy, yet meaningless prose.
Her ex-employer (i.e. the one that intemperate utterances included “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, “Evil Empire”, and “We start bombing in 5 minutes” (all of which had GOP elites wetting their panties) must be rolling over in his grave right now.