She's Coming Around

Peggy Noonan unloads again on President Obama, and his “wasted” first year:

It was not worth it—not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public’s concerns and the administration’s are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security.

Those were not only the two topics on the public’s mind the past 10 months, they were precisely the issues that presented themselves in screaming headlines at the end of the year: unemployment and the national-security breakdowns that led to the Christmas bomb plot and, earlier, the Fort Hood massacre. “That’s two strikes,” said the president’s national security adviser, James Jones, to USA Today’s Susan Page. Left unsaid: Three and you’re out.

But then there’s this:

Which gets us to the Republicans. The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ’08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious.

All I can add is — they’d better be.