Peggy Noonan is an American original. She is a conservative with both a mind and a heart. OK, you don't believe she has a heart. Well, you're wrong. Her heart was part of the genius of Ronald Reagan, an intuitive genius that gave him the rapport with the public that in modern times only Franklin D. Roosevelt could sustain. After that, we had Bill Clinton whom no one trusted on anything, although his lack of trustworthiness was also a sort of gene of genius.
Ms. Noonan now writes a Saturday column, "Declarations," for the Wall Street Journal. I never fail to read it and almost never fail to be provoked, in good ways and in bad.
She has long ago given up on George Bush. And her article this past weekend testifies to why she has given up on him and why other conservatives, in Lubbock, Texas and in Fresno, California, for example, have also given up on him. When she spoke there against Bush no one, not one single listener, spoke up on his behalf. Why? Because he is out of it. He is president of a country he doesn't know. Do you remember his father, also a president who could only beat Mike Dukakis, marvelling over a cash register he literally had never seen? It's like that -- how out of it the son is.
I suppose Noonan is for John McCain. Why wouldn't she be? She doesn't have much patience for Hillary Clinton, though more surely than I have.
But she does have a soft spot for Barack Obama, a real spot. Actually, like a lot of conservatives who see a truly civilized person in the persona. (This is a hidden vote, I suspect, voters who couldn't vote for the overbearing soul in Hillary but could easily cast a ballot for the flexible mind of Obama.)
Anyway, she is onto something about the Obama campaign. I hope he and his advisers read her column. More than that, I hope Obama feels it in his guts.