Peggy Noonan: Let me explain

posted at 8:24 pm on September 3, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Just posted at the Journal. She claims “it’s over” was taken completely out of context via video editing, which, given her specificity as to what that part of the conversation was really about and the fact that this did, after all, come from MSNBC and TPM, seems at least reasonably plausible. Not sure I buy the explanation about narratives, though:

It was just after the 1988 Republican convention ended. I was on the plane, as a speechwriter, that took Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, and the new vice presidential nominee, Dan Quayle, from New Orleans, the site of the convention, to Indiana. Sitting next to Mr. Quayle was the other senator from that state, Richard Lugar. As we chatted, I thought, “Why him and not him?” Why Mr. Quayle as the choice, and not the more experienced Mr. Lugar? I came to think, in following years, that some of the reason came down to what is now called The Narrative. The story the campaign wishes to tell about itself, and communicate to others. I don’t like the idea of The Narrative. I think it is … a barnyard epithet. And, oddly enough, it is something that Republicans are not very good at, because it’s not where they live, it’s not what they’re about, it’s too fancy. To the extent the McCain campaign was thinking in these terms, I don’t like that either. I do like Mrs. Palin, because I like the things she espouses. And because, frankly, I met her once and liked her. I suspect, as I say further in here, that her candidacy will be either dramatically successful or a dramatically not; it won’t be something in between.

That’s great, except that as I noted earlier, it’s precisely Palin’s narrative as the gun-toting, moose-hunting hockey mom that Noonan argued this morning has struck such fear into the left’s withered little heart. Quote: “Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.” It’s the narrative that terrifies them, in other words. In which case, if she doesn’t like narrative politics, what’s she doing trumpeting it in her column as some potential liberal giant-killer?

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