Time To Check in With Peggy Noonan of the WSJ Editorial Pages

Because She Writes Really Well Good Stuff (Better Than That Phrasing, for Sure)

On the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal on Saturday we have the delightful prose of Ms. Peggy Noonan.  The prose is not delightful for its opinion, with which we many times disagree, but for the way in which the opinions are expressed.  And more often than not after reading Ms. Noonan we find ourselves in agreement with what she says even if we did not start out that way.

Ms. Noonan starts out by discussing the recent “tell all” book on the White House.  Let’s dismiss this right now, since these books tend to be, well, journalism at its worse and the only question they really raise is why any White House would even agree to participate or co-operate in such a venture.

Turning the Presidential politics Ms. Noonan says this

Let me say here clearly what I've been more or less saying in this column for a while. It is that Mr. Obama cannot win in 2012, but the Republicans can lose. They can hand the incumbent a victory the majority of American voters show themselves not at all disposed to give him. (No column is complete without his latest polling disasters. A Quinnipiac poll this week shows Florida voters disapprove of the job the president is doing by 57% to 39%.)

a statement The Dismal Political Economist has also made.  It should be pointed out that as further evidence of Ms. Noonan’s point, Mr. Obama polls much better in Florida against Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry than his poll numbers, indicating that as much as they disapprove of Mr. Obama, Florida voters disapprove even more of his potential opponents.

To illustrate her point, though Ms. Noonan compares Mr. Obama’s speech at the UN on Israel with Mr. Perry’s response, and finds Mr. Perry lacking.  On Mr. Perry's response she writes

This was meant not to defuse but to inflame. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Perry that when you are running for president you have to be big, you have to act as if you're a broad fellow who understands that when the American president is in a tight spot in the U.N., America is in a tight spot in the U.N. You don't exploit it for political gain. . . I'd add only that in his first foreign-policy foray, the GOP front-runner looked like a cheap, base-playing buffoon.

Ms. Noonan seems to have lost the memo that the WSJ editors were supporting Mr. Perry, see Perry Is Right: There Is a Texas Model for Fixing Social Security. (The Texas model referred to is actually a Defined Contribution Plan that cannot be scaled up, but that’s a topic for another day).  

That’s okay Ms. Noonan, we like you even if your colleagues do not.