It’s funny to watch Peggy Noonan do her den mother routine, asking Republicans to take it easy and not play too rough with each other.
She’s been on a book tour which I’ve noticed has also involved a spike in cable news appearances. So, she’s talked to some actual “real Americans” in her travels and she feels like she really has her finger on the pulse of the electorate.
The base hates immigrants of the Latino variety. She’s sure of this now. Her cocktail buddies don’t really care about immigration, however, and they want to open their checkbooks for candidates who don’t care about it either.
There are also disagreements over whether to gut entitlements in a time of economic hardship or to build the biggest, shiniest military and what might be appropriate uses for it.
But Noonan doesn’t risk having an opinion on these lofty subjects of dispute. None of them really matter to her, but they are things that could cause a lack of unity. And disunity is bad because it could lead to electoral defeat. And that does matter to her.
So, why does Noonan want the Republicans to win?
She doesn’t say. They could win with a xenophobic, militaristic, anti-free trader who wants to protect Medicare or a pro-amnesty, isolationist who loves the TPP and wants to privatize Social Security. The important thing is that the kids get along and present a unified front.
She gets paid pretty well to produce this stuff, you know.
