I occasionally pause to gape in wonder at Peggy Noonan’s strange, vaguely crazy, and meandering columns because I can’t believe this woman is a respected member of the Beltway press corp. Today, she talks about the fight over raising the debt ceiling, and, quite predictably, she argues that the president should give the Republicans everything they want and ask for nothing in return. But then she quite typically lurches into a side issue. She decides to talk about Barack Obama’s character and performance in office. Take a look at this conclusion to a column that is supposed to be about the budget and our debt.
Barack Obama is different [than Bill Clinton], not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish.
He doesn’t know how to confuse his foes with “outreach,” with phone calls, jokes, affection. He doesn’t leave them saying, as Reagan did, “I just can’t help it, I like the guy.” And because he can’t confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.
This isn’t good, and has had an impact on the president’s contacts with Republicans. And it’s added an edge to an emerging campaign theme among them. Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce’s observation that all presidents have a sentence: “He fought to hold the union together and end slavery.” “He brought America through economic collapse and a world war.” You didn’t have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn’t understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.
Four words: He made it worse.
Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren’t his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.
How about “He shored up a collapsing economy, saved the automotive and banking industries, enacted universal access to health care, won the Nobel Peace Prize, enacted the START Treaty, killed Bin-Laden, and calmly guided the country through the turbulence in the Middle East”?
Seems like a good start. He hasn’t even had one term yet, you know. We can all find plenty of things to fault in all our presidents, including Lincoln and FDR, but it shouldn’t be hard to note Obama’s huge accomplishments, even if we’re dissatisfied with their form and scope.
But there’s something more to Noonan’s musings than their inherent unfairness and lack of generosity. She sees him as cold, aloof, and stand-offish. She also senses that he hates conservatives. I think there is something genuine here. I don’t think Noonan is just making up these perceptions in order to score political points. I believe she really does feel alienated by the president’s style and comportment. Maybe it has something to do with race. I notice that Noonan provides another example of a conservative letting slip that lack of racial tolerance is a key conservative characteristic. Look at this paragraph:
[Bill Clinton] absorbed not the biases of his region but of his generation and his education (Ivy League). He had ambition: Liberalism was rising and he’d rise with it. And on the signal issues of his youth, Vietnam and race, he thought the Democrats of the 1970s were right. But that didn’t mean he didn’t understand and feel some sympathy for conservatives, and as a political practitioner he had a certain sympathy for the predicaments of his fellow pols. That’s why he could play ball with Newt Gingrich and the class of 1994: because he didn’t quite hate everything they stood for. He had a saving ambivalence.
In this reconstruction of history, conservatives were on the opposite side from liberals on race in the 1970’s, and Bill Clinton didn’t agree with them but he had sympathy for them. Has something changed since the 1970’s? Are conservatives still pissed off about lifting the Jim Crow laws? Have they come around on Affirmative Action? And, more to the point, does Noonan expect a black man to have sympathy for the “predicaments of his fellow pols’ over issues of race?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s about more than race. Maybe Noonan doesn’t know how to relate to cool, urbane, sophisticated, super-smart, stylish, urban, and cosmopolitan. Maybe it comes off as smugness and arrogance. If so, though, it’s kind of odd because Noonan has been living in and around cities among upper crust sophisticated people for decades. Maybe the problem is her background and the kinds of people she surrounds herself with. But something is definitely wrong with her. Look at this:
Talks on the debt ceiling will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it’s always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can’t fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn’t bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism—”Come on guys, we have to save this thing”—ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton.
It’s hard to show a lot of warmth and high regard when your opponents are questioning your religious faith, questioning your citizenship, and calling you a socialist destroyer. I don’t actually recall that Bill Clinton was all that warm and fuzzy when he was being hounded by Kenneth Starr. If I’m willing to grant Noonan anything, it’s that the president doesn’t suffer fools very well. And he’s surrounded by them. It’s these fools that Noonan speaks for, and to.