Noonan For Obama's Press Sec'y?

After the veep debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Peggy Noonan looked like the sad lady at the end of the bar when she peered up at Brian Williams and said “she killed.”

One might have thought that Noonan, a avowed conservative and loyal keeper of the Reagan flame, would have been pleased with Palin having “killed” in the debate, but no – that was not the impression Noonan gave.

A pal of mine who writes for a “prestigious” magazine – if any of them that, anymore – confessed to me that he was puzzled by Noonan’s seeming dislike of Sarah Palin. He wrote: what is the bee in her bonnet?

I sent back my best guess:

I suspect that part of Noonan’s problem with Palin is that she sees Palin being compared to Ronald Reagan and that cannot be allowed to stand. Noonan’s near-worship of Reagan would be horrified that a g-droppin’ Annie Oakley could in any way share paragraphical or historical space with RWR; to her, one is gold and the other only brass and Noonan is so protective of Reagan she’s trying very hard to make sure that Palin cannot in any way tarnish Ronnie.

And too there may be some snobbery; it’s possible. DC-NY corridor has a difficult time wrapping their heads around bare-handed, pull-yer-bootstraps adventurists, and Noonan – for all that she still claims her middle-class Long Island roots – has breathed the rarefied air for a very long time.
Perhaps by comparison the common air seems unfresh.

Some of us have rather suspected that Peggy Noonan – over the past few months – has been playing pretty for a seat at the Obama table. Hey, a girl wants to be relevant, right?

I recall a rumor that Noonan had hoped to be named Dubya’s press secretary in his second term, and that when she was not, she soured on him. I never believed that. Lots of people were souring on Dubya at the same time she was.

But I can believe that Noonan, attending the wedding of the press to the Obama Machine, has decided she wants to dance the hokey-pokey and turn herself around. That’s what it’s all about. She’s still a dynamite writer capable of penetrating insights and soaring prose. She has watched the construction of the Gulag Conservico since at least 2005, and she does not want to go there with the rest of the right-wing punditry.

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense…that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

Over at Pajamas Media, Pam Meister takes a look at Noonan’s motivation:

…one of my sources, who is very well connected, tells me that Noonan was at first rumored to be looking to write a regular column for the New York Times. Why she’d want to work for a paper that is spiraling further down the economic sinkhole, with stocks that are near junk status, is beyond me. But the rumor has escalated beyond the Times and gone straight to the White House: my same source says now the word is that Noonan may be being courted for the job of press secretary for an Obama administration.

Bread meeting butter?

Our interesting times are getting more interesting.

Hey, if Noonan manages – like a few others from the right – to successfully anchor herself within the coming regime, more power to her, I guess. People have got to do what they feel called to do. I don’t know how she will square her small-government Reaganism with Obama’s large-government redistributism, and I still worry – as I do every day – about issues of free speech, but as one of my Aunties used to say, “first we’ll see, then we’ll know.” Perhaps Noonan, Christopher Buckley, David Brooks and Gen. Colin Powell will plead for the rest of us who’ll be snooped on and then cast into the Gulag Conservico along with Joe the Plumber and Barbara West.

Make no mistake – with Howard Dean woo-hooing about one-party rule, with Nancy Pelosi already talking about regulating the internet for both commoners and congress and with a Pres. Obama appointing far-left judges throughout the court system, to the Gulag Conservico some of us will go, one way or another.

Of course, the traditional polls of registered, likely voters have McCain within 2 – within the margin of error. This deal – not taking massive voter fraud into account – is not yet done.

Quite the gambler, our Ms. Noonan. Then again, she’s awfully talented. Perhaps it is not gamble at all.

Noonan for Obama's Press Sec'y?