Peggy Noonan is one of the conservative columnists I read often, frequently disagreeing with her and sometimes even agreeing. Regardless, I do respect her talents as a writer. I did find the conclusion of today’s colunn a bit odd coming from Noonan:
The Founders, who were awed by the presidency and who made it a point, the early ones, to speak in their inaugural addresses of how unworthy they felt, would be astonished and confounded by the over-awe with which we view presidents now. We treat them as if they are the Grand Imperial Czar of the Peacock Throne, and we their ‘umble servants. It’s no good, and vaguely un-American. Right now patriotism requires more than the usual candor. It requires speaking truthfully and constructively to a president who is a man, and just a man. We hire them, we fire them, they come back for photo-ops. They’re not magic.
It’s not that I disagree with Noonan, but this conflicts with much of her other writing. It’s been a while since I looked at her book (which I do have in my library at home), What I Saw At The Revolution, but I do believe there was a fair bit of hero worship of Ronald Reagan in it. Not having the book handy, if I had more time I’d look through her columns for examples of hero worship, along with examples about George W. Bush before she began to lose confidence in him, but I see that Blue Texan has saved me the trouble.
I don’t mind seeing Peggy Noonan try to tone down hero worship of Barack Obama, but it doesn’t work to back hero worship selectively for presidents with an R after their name. I guess we will be seeing a lot of flip-flops of this nature this month. Peggy Noonan reverses her view on hero worship of presidents. Fox will flip from a Pravda-type defender of the White House and return to the stance of constant attack they held eight years ago. MSNBC (at least during certain hours) will do the reverse.