Noonan: Barack, We Hardly Knew Ye

posted at 10:29 am on November 28, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
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That’s the latest word from Peggy Noonan re Barack Obama’s continued steady plunge in the polls. (His Real Clear Politics aggregate is now below 50%, albeit by the narrowest margin possible.) By way of explanation for this decline, Noonan cites remarks by Elizabeth Drew, whom she correctly characterizes as “a veteran [journalist] and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures.”

Among these remarks are the observations that “in Asia last week ‘a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man’.” Further channeling Drew, Noonan speaks of people who formerly “held ‘an unromantically high opinion of Obama’, and were key to his rise, but now . . . are concluding that the president isn’t ‘the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought’.”

First, lest my own motives in penning these words be misconstrued, let me state that I think Drew is right on point. Barack Obama has long struck me as self-absorbed, thin-skinned, and utterly lacking the seriousness and forthrightness of any president in my lifetime. What has magnified these flaws by many orders of magnitude is Obama’s own stated intention to be better than those who came before him. To borrow a Yiddishesque expression I used to hear my grandparents utter, “he should kuck so.”

But — and here’s where the problems arise with Noonan’s column — Peggy Noonan is not one of those observers who saw Obama for who he really was back in the day. I won’t go so far as to say she was a sometime booster, but her WSJ columns during the campaign and shortly after the election paint a very different impression from the one in yesterday’s column. She saw the “freshness and promise” of this “young, articulate man,” et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth. So who is she now to kick moodily at the gravel with her toe and disparage those who were fooled?

Another problem with this column is that she goes overboard in dismissing Obama. She writes:

No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they’re not dazzled and head over heels.

Wrong. I personally know people, reasonably intelligent people, for whom nothing about the Obama myth has changed. They adored Obama during the campaign, and they adore him still. And then there are the countless people I don’t know who continue to love Obama unconditionally, including the two woman recently interviewed in Detroit while waiting in love for “Obama money” — funds they thought would be issued to them from the president’s private “stash.” They voted for him uncritically in large measure and will support him to the bitter end.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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