Peggy Noonan, at Zenith of Profession

I love Peggy Noonan. Not because she’s still beautiful at 58 (though she is), but because she’s the best I’ve ever read at tiptoeing along the line of sentimentality without tipping over into the slop. I’ve never read a columnist who can sympathize with the strategies and opinions of her intellectual opponents without in any way giving into them. I’ve not been a big fan of some of the big government triangulations of Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism.” What I like best about it is what comes out in virtually every column Noonan has ever written: an honest attachment to her own values and an appreciation for tough politics that does not preclude her from seeing the best in the ideas and strategies of her opponents. A longish excerpt from her latest on Obama will show what I am getting at:

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before
the European trip and continued throughout, is making
people see him as president. He's doing this when he
ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the
reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their
held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious
tour. That's what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous
crowds in foreign capitals. That's what presidents do.

He isn't doing this to show he's inevitable and invincible.
He's doing it to give voters the impression that they've
already seen President Obama. That he's kind of already
been president, he's done and can do all the things
presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October
a certain portion of the country is going to think he
already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he's
a young black man from nowhere who's been well-known
for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest
problems with older white voters is they just can't
imagine a young black man from nowhere as president.
He's helping them imagine.

It's not vanity, it's strategy.

I read that and thought, she’s probably right. I don’t know how she does it: is a section such as this the result of good reporting – i.e., she’s talked to those who know, and those who know have told her, “this is our strategy”? Or does she have the moral imagination of the great novelist, that enables her to get inside others, to divine the motives, to sympathize, to empathize, to understand that most people do what they do because they believe – they’ve somehow convinced themselves – that what they’re doing is right? Perhaps this is what allowed her to be such a good speech writer for Reagan (I say this taking their reputation on faith, because I am sadly unfamiliar with the speeches beyond the famous soundbites, not being into politics then). Either way, we’re lucky to have her watching us and writing about us, and though I have no use for those who whinge about negative politics, we’d probably be better off if more had her ability to understand the good motives of others. (And here’s my partisan sign-off: I think Krauthammer’s Law, enunciated in 2002, still is dead on the mark: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”)