Noonan On Obama 'He Was Supposed To Be Competent'

Peggy Noonan exhibits some buyer's remorse:

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another. {...}

In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—"catastrophe," etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won't see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been, "I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful soundbite." But his strategic problem was that he'd already lost the battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow, the damage will already have been done.

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or trust it.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: "We pay so much for the government and it can't cap an undersea oil well!"

Of course, Noonan leaves out the fact that she actively shilled and voted for the Big Government candidate during the '08 elections,primarily perhaps because of her almost pathological hatred for Sarah Palin - just like most of her other buddies in the Beltway and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

All of a sudden, it seems that *gasp!* she's discovered that the man she had orgasms over during the campaign really is an incompetent serial liar with a deeply ingrained contempt for the American people.

Remember, this is someone who wrote speeches for Reagan and George HW Bush..until she quit the White House, moved to Manhattan and promptly adopted the social mores and opinions of the natives.

You bought the ticket, m'dear. Now take the ride and wallow in it...or at least have the guts to openly admit how wrong you were.

Oh, and you could address a sorry to Sarah Palin while you're at it.

Because whatever you might say about Governor Palin, she's proven that knows oil and she knows how to slap oil companies around and get action. Does anyone doubt that if she were in the White House, even as a sitting Vice President that this would have been handled a lot quicker and a lot better?

Noonan goes on to lament how bad it is to have a sitting president weakened and lacking broad public support less than halfway through his term. She alludes to how the Democrats treated George W. Bush and admonishes the GOP to go easy on Obama, believe it or not.

I disagree with her.

Tell me Peg...did the Democrats have any problems trying to destroy and weaken Reagan, Nixon, Gerald Ford or George W. Bush? Did you complain when people like Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid tried to openly impede our war effort while our troops were under fire? Not that I remember. The GOP has every right and considerably more justification to play hardball here...and you ought to agree, especially if you're now officially against Big Government like you say you are.

To quote Dick Cheney, speaking in a different context: "Freedom means freedom for everybody."

Second, Obama is no ordinary president, and the first rule in these matters is 'do no harm.' Barack Hussein Obama,thanks in part to people like Peggy Noonan who neglected to exhibit even a pretense of journalistic ethics managed to slither into the Oval Office as a cipher, as a man the American people simply knew nothing about.Now that he's finally a known quality, the more he is handcuffed and his agenda is blocked and thwarted, the better.

This represents a chance to finally defeat the last surge of the Gramscian warfare the Soviets unleashed on us 70 years ago designed to conquer America by corrupting its basic culture and institutions.Obama and his intellectual soul mates represent the poisoned fruit of that campaign that must be defeated if our Republic is to survive.

The Constitution in its wisdom provides a remedy for electoral errors in judgment like this, and there are a number of grounds - Obama's corrupt deal with Big Pharma, Sestak-Gate, any number of questionable appointments and maneuvers - to pursue this after the Midterms if the GOP takes the House and Senate.

We have some interesting times ahead.

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