Tag: peggy noonan

Peggy Noonan Travels The Dusty Texas Plains, Where Deer And Third-Party Candidates Roam

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“Dang it! Wake up, woman!”

She was at the bottom of a well, was Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Amytal Tepidness. Or not a well, but some deep, dark night of the soul, an abyss of a blackness so dark that no light could penetrate it that stretched above her, an abyss for which there was no end, an abyss in which time and space meant nothing and everything …

“Confound it!” The voice rang in her ears again, a tinny, high-pitched whine with a distinct Texas accent, like a leprechaun born in Amarillo.

“A lepre-what now? Peggy, you’re makin’ less sense than a steer in a salad bar. Come on now, stop with the dramatics. You’re just asleep.”

And so she was, she realized as she opened her eyes. That insistent little voice had reached down and pulled her back into consciousness. She had been dozing while sitting upright, her backside firmly planted on a hard and unyielding surface. A wooden bench, she realized. And what was the rest of this space? It was a tiny, enclosed carriage bumping across the ground. Frilly curtains. No legroom. Hot Texas air spiraling in through open windows. The scent of tobacco and body odor and horse manure assaulted her nostrils like Indians charging a wagon train. She was … she was in …

“Yep, it’s a stagecoach,” piped the leprechaun voice. She looked across at the face sitting atop a neck so skinny that the bolo tie knotted at its throat looked as large as a beach towel. Ears jutted from either side of the skull like flaps on an airplane wing. Something about the face was so familiar.

“It’s me, Ross Perot!” He did not so much say his name as squeak it. “And yeah, you’re in my stagecoach and we’re lighting out for the prairie! I coulda had us take my limo or my private jet, but where’s the fun in that? What would you rather do, get where we’re goin’ in modern comfort, or sit here and listen to me talk and talk and talk for days on end as we roll through this scorching and vast nothingness where there ain’t so much as a Howard Johnson or a Sizzler where we can take a break? Sure I’m dead, but I can still have opinions!”

“Ain’t no sense in that,” he added as she scrabbled for the door handle. “It’s a hunnert degrees outside and we’re a two-day walk from the nearest road. Maybe longer in that petticoat. Nah, best you just settle in. We’ll talk politics, that’ll pass the time, and if you want to, you just go on and scream. Nothin’ out there to hear you but some lizards.”

Seventy percent of his own party doesn’t want Joe Biden to run. More than half his party doesn’t want Donald Trump to run. Yet here at the moment we are, with this growing sense of sad inevitability.

“Well shoot, it’s April of 2023. There was pretty limited enthusiasm for Joe Biden in April of 2019, too. People like Biden, but they ain’t like MAGA folks, they’re not goin’ feral over it. And the primaries ain’t for but ten months yet, people got other things to do. As for Trump, the half of his party that doesn’t want him seems to mostly consist of wealthy donors who are constantly anonymously telling reporters they sure wish someone else would do somethin’ about stopping him. Not what you’d call a groundswell of anti-Trumpism, that’s for sure. Here, have some hyena jerky.”

Mr. Biden is unopposed because his party couldn’t rouse itself to do what Democrats have almost existed to do, have a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl. Sometimes party discipline is a failure and a mistake.

“Peggy, the last time Democrats had a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl in a primary where the incumbent president was running for re-election was 1980. You remember a brawl with Clinton in ’96 or Obama in 2012? Not too many Democrats at the end of the day will want to damage the incumbent like Teddy Kennedy did to Jimmy Carter. Not if the stakes are keeping Donald Trump out of office.”

He ran an arm across his forehead. “This jerky’s dang salty, ain’t it? Probably shouldn’t have drunk all the water I brought an hour into the trip.”

I agree with those who say the problem isn’t only Joe Biden’s age but the implication his age carries: that if he is re-elected there’s a significant chance Kamala Harris will become president.

“George H.W. Bush won an election with Dan Quayle on the ticket. Then he got sick in Japan and nobody exactly ran for the fallout shelters. People are votin’ for the guy at the top of the ticket. They’re not seriously thinkin’ about the unthinkable when they’re in the votin’ booth.”

“Except with Sarah Palin,” he added after barely a moment’s hesitation. “Whew, doggie, that woman didn’t exactly inspire confidence in John McCain’s decision-making capabilities. Kamala Harris at least ain’t nuttier than an armadillo trapped in a oil well. Say, you sure you don’t have some water on you? Juice? Gatorade?”

I’m not going to pick on [Ron DeSantis] on the Disney fight. I thought Disney wrong to come forward, as a major corporation, and use its beloved name to take sides on a delicate state educational issue.

“Disney comes forward, they’re takin’ a side. They don’t come forward, they’re still takin’ a side. They didn’t want to take the side that would purposely exclude a good chunk of their customer base. Their whole brand is that anyone is welcome! Anyway, they ain’t gonna rise or fall on whether a bunch of bigots in Jacksonville won’t let their kids wear Mickey Mouse T-shirts.”

Perot’s left eyelid had begun to twitch.He took another jerky stick and shoved it down his throat like he was swallowing a sword.

[A] big challenge for corporations is to remember their mission. For more than a century Budweiser’s mission was to make beer and sell it at a profit. Disney has been entertaining America for nearly a century. They should do that. Except in the most extraordinary and essential cases they shouldn’t give in to the temptation to put themselves forward as deep-thinking cultural leaders.

“Wasn’t but a few years ago that conservatives were screaming about corporations having free speech rights. Now y’all want them to shut up and just put on Snow White costumes and cheerily wave to all the heterosexual nuclear families and not admit that trans people drink beer. Make up your dang minds!”

He licked his lips as his eyes rolled in their sockets like marbles soaked in grease. “Coca-Cola? Iced tea? Sweat? Nothin’ at all? Okay. Don’t know how you’re not going crazy with the thirst either. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”

Second, watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it’s provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We’ll see how that works.

“Same as it works every cycle: Credulous pundits will keep saying it could happen right up until the moment it doesn’t. There hasn’t been a solid third-party candidate since I did it thirty years ago, and back then the GOP wasn’t controlled by a bunch of pissed-off suburban used-car salesmen. Again, Donald Trump. Back in office. Lordy.”

Third-party enthusiasts tend to be moderate, sober-minded.

Perot began screaming. He threw himself at the stagecoach door and rolled himself into a ball and kept rolling across the dusty Texas countryside, still screaming. She watched as this little rolling ball of a man faded into the distance, a cloud of dust and his ever-more-distant screams the only indication that she was not having some sort of hallucination borne of a combination of medication and salty hyena meat.

She reached out and pulled the door closed and promptly forgot about the strange little man. There were miles of stagecoach travel to go, and a column to turn in at the end.

[WSJ]

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Peggy Noonan And The Case Of Gutter Punk Ron DeSantis

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She had left the Upper East Side behind. It had been an unseasonably warm winter in New York and Peggy Noonan, sister in good standing of the Order of the Triazolam Numbness, felt a need to stretch her legs, to stop staring at the same view out the same windows of her rooms. So she left her pied-à-terre and wandered in the general direction of Lower Manhattan. It was nearly eighty blocks. She was feeling spry.

She noticed things as she walked. Noticing things was her specialty. She noticed the store windows full of dresses and hats and the ladies walking in and out of them. She noticed rundown apartment houses. She noticed what looked to be a ’57 Buick, tailfins angled back just a bit as if bent there under speed. She noticed cafeterias where lonely men took their supper, dawdling over turkey and mashed potatoes and apple pie, in no rush to return to their small and lifeless apartments. There were a lot of ’57 Buicks. A lot of fifties-model cars, come to think of it.

A cloud crossed the sun. She looked up and noticed the sky had gone gray. The next moment, rain poured down in a rush. The strangest storm, she thought. There had been no warning, no drizzling ahead of the main force. The clouds had rolled in on a dime and wasted no time releasing their moisture on the stunned denizens of New York.

Of course she had not brought rain gear. The forecast had called for sun and warmth. Now here she was, caught out, becoming soaked right down to her socks. That was when she noticed the neon sign dully shining behind dirty glass. She hurried for the shelter it promised.

Fortune was with her, for she found herself in a bar. A rundown saloon of the sort one didn’t see much in New York anymore. Battered wooden tables, battered wooden chairs, battered wooden-faced men and women hunched over chipped glasses filled with glorious amber-colored liquids. This was a serious bar, for serious drinkers, people for whom drinking was not for lubricating social outings or celebrating milestones. Here drink was not a means to an end, but the end itself.

She found an empty stool, right near the cigarette machine – a cigarette machine! How quaint! – and the hard-looking gentleman leaning against it. He wore a fedora, a long raincoat, and a suit of an older style and vintage. He had a Lucky in his mouth, which he only removed to take a swallow from the glass of rye in front of him.

He waited until she had ordered a gin and tonic from the surly bartender. Then he spoke.

“Don’t see dames like you in this place much.” The voice was growly, well-cured by alcohol and tobacco. “Not with that fancy outfit. You people stick to uptown. It’s no less of a sewer, but you can go to cocktail parties and tell each other you’re keeping your fingernails clean.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “Name’s Hammer. Mike Hammer. I’m a private detective. I got an office, a great secretary with fabulous legs and I spend too much time crawling around in a gutter with the worst scum that ever oozed off the sidewalks of this city. But my forty-five shoots straight. What else can a man want?”

The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after.

“You go to hell, lady.”

Mr. DeSantis is a big dawg, and it isn’t only Donald Trump trying to take him down. A prospective competitor called recently to share his thoughts: “DeSantis is a cheap imitation of Trump, it’s Fox News soundbites and cowboy boots with 2-inch heels.”

“Sounds like quite the punk. Listen, the only man alive who should be wearing cowboy boots is Lorne Greene. Anyone else is a sharpie running a game on you. Say, is this Trump fella any relation to Fred Trump, guy who owns a bunch of slums out in Queens? The papers don’t say nice things.”

I don’t think he’s running as Trump without the psychopathology, I think he’s running as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative with populist inflections.

“The hell is antiwoke? Sounds like something those Greenwich Village beatniks would hang their berets on. You think the lushes in here care about something like that? They want a bed to lay down on at night, a little security. If they had those things, they wouldn’t be in here pouring bourbon down their throats day and night.”

“Maybe someone to take care of the communists too,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “If they think about it at all. Does this DeSantis fella hate commies? I’d vote for him, if I voted. Which I don’t. Whole goddamn system’s rotten. You want a smoke?”

His leadership in Florida has been “a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground.” They are a “ruling class” that controls the federal bureaucracy, big business, corporate media, big tech, the universities. “These elites are ‘progressives’ who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of ‘experts’ who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt.”

“This guy wants to be president and he talks like a goddamn Columbia professor.” He gestured at the bartender, who brought over a bottle of rye and poured three fingers into Hammer’s glass. “Oh, did you want a clean glass for your second gin and tonic?” Hammer said to Peggy. “Not that kind of place, sister. Bar at the Waldorf’s probably open, though.”

My favorite part had a Mickey Spillane feel. Assigned as a naval officer to Northeast Florida, he sees a beautiful woman on a golf course. “She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed.” He thought her a college golfer: “She looked the part and had a great swing.”

“Golf, huh? The mug who hates elites wants to brag about nailing some tomato because she was wearing classy golf attire and could drive a 3-wood. He married her? I expect the coppers down in Florida are going to find him in his yard brained with one of those clubs someday.”

Does he connect with voters on the trail? How does he play it when he gets smacked around in debate?

“Smacked around? Like he’s some wretched scum who thought he could put it to some capo’s daughter without a fuss?” He went to light another cigarette and found the pack empty. A few coins and a handle pull brought him a fresh pack of Luckies from the cigarette machine. He crumpled the old pack and lobbed it onto the floor.

“Let me tell you something,” Hammer snarled as he touched a lit match to the cigarette and pulled on it greedily, like a baby with a milk bottle. “This boots-wearing phony sounds like he’d fold like a bad poker hand if some fairy so much as looked at him crosswise. He’s not impressing you, is he? ‘Cause when you walked in here I thought you looked pretty smart. For a chippy.”

You’re not stooping when you explain your thinking, you’re spreading.

“Something’s spreading around here, anyway.” Hammer finished off his whiskey and threw some coins on the bar. “Sounds like a hell of a guy, this DeSantis. A damned sleazeball if you ask me. Anyway, that’s enough letting you bend my ear. Gotta be a murder being committed somewhere.”

Hammer pulled his fedora low and tightened his raincoat around him. He slunk out of the bar into the street, trailing cigarette smoke and midcentury machismo with equal aplomb. Peggy thought about taking leave herself, about going home to begin her column. Instead, she ordered another gin and tonic. After all, it was still raining.

[WSJ]

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Peggy Noonan Converses With Giant Talking Statue, And One Of Them Makes Sense

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Lord but she needed to pad out this week’s column. Peggy Noonan, sister in good standing of the Order of the Diazepam Insouciance, had uncharacteristically little to say. It happened to even the best writers, she supposed, so no surprise that her own well seemed to have run dry.

But there was so much going on in the world! She could write about the corporate malfeasance and rollback of government regulations that likely played huge roles in the disastrous train derailment currently despoiling a delightful corner of her beloved Robert Taft’s Ohio. She could write about the Chinese spy balloon that the feckless Joe Biden had allowed to drift across the North American continent like an Oriental Hoover, sucking up the nation’s secrets and beaming them back to Beijing. She could talk about the desperate Republican scandal to pretend that they did not in fact, despite decades of statements and actions to the contrary, want to destroy Social Security.

THE MANY COULDS OF PEGGY NOONAN!

Perhaps We Could Improve Railroad Safety Somewhat?

Peggy Noonan Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘Bout ‘Bortin No Babies!

Hi, I’m The Chinese Spy Balloon! Please Continue Going About Your Day, Citizens!

I’m Rick Scott And I Do Not Want To End Social Security And Medicare, Pinky Swear.

Bah! So common! So jejune! So boring to try and squeeze 800 words out about any of these topics.

A break. She needed a break. The weather was unseasonably warm in New York this week, balmy as spring, so why not take a stroll around the city, perhaps visit a famous site or two, and find some inspiration?

And what could be more inspiring than the Ellis Island ferry chugging its way out into the harbor, towards the place where the American dream began for so many millions of the unwashed masses? The thrills those refugees from the Old World felt approaching the vast terminal where they would disembark to begin their new lives, the great lady, the Statue of Liberty nearby on her own island, greeting their ships with her torch held aloft to the heavens welcoming to America those who yearned to breathe free …

“For fuck’s sake.” The deep voice boomed across the water, the shockwave knocking out the ferry’s engines and leaving it adrift. A cloud passed across the sun. The imposing stone face turned slowly, so slowly in her direction, the metal screaming in protest as the statue’s neck twisted to look down at her.

“Good Lord, would you give it a rest?” The statue dropped her arms to her sides and rolled her neck. “I haven’t heard such overwrought claptrap since Dylan Thomas kicked it.” She put her hands on her hips and slowly arched her torso, and Peggy heard a crack like the Earth itself was splitting open.

“Oy,” the statue said. “You think you’ve got lower back pain? You ever tried standing still in the same spot for a hundred and forty years while holding a giant torch straight up in the air? It’s amazing my vertebrae haven’t all crumbled into powder.”

The statue slowly stepped off her pedestal and lumbered down to the edge of Liberty Island, where she pulled up her tunic, plopped down on the ground, and stuck her giant feet in the water.

“Christ, does that feel good,” she said. “The least you people could have done was give me something to sit on. It didn’t have to be a fancy Eames chair or anything. A stool would have been fine. Now then!” She slapped her thighs, and the sonic boom caused the ferry to tilt precariously to port. Peggy looked around and saw that her fellow passengers did not seem to have noticed. They were all happily gathered at the rails, pointing excitedly back at the Manhattan skyline or out towards Ellis Island, snapping pictures on their iPhones and oblivious to the one-hundred-and-fifty foot statue soaking her feet in New York Harbor and glaring at them.

“So tell me, Peggy,” the statue said. “Are you feeling inspired yet?”

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself… An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

“Ha! 1990!” Lady Liberty laughed. “Peggy, I know you are going to pretend history ended when the first George Bush came to power, but the president you worked for in the 1980s had plenty of hoary clichés. Have you forgotten ‘Morning in America’? ‘Prouder, Stronger, Better’? That America had fallen behind and needed the great Reagan to lead it back to glory was the entire theme of his 1980 campaign! It was supposed to be the antidote to all the national malaise of the 70s.

“Shoot, he even used ‘Make America Great Again’ back when Donald Trump was busy discriminating against any Black people who wanted to rent his apartments. I assure you, outside of Hugh Hewitt’s brain, it was no less tired and phony then too. People might have bought it, but that didn’t make it any more authentic.”

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

“Ha!” The statue slurped harbor water from her cupped hands. “I know that’s simplistic and wrong, and I literally have an empty space where my brain should be.”

Connected to this, the second part of our column, on last weekend’s Super Bowl ads. What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot …

“To quote my old comedy improv teacher,” Lady Liberty said. “Yes, and?”

The ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken. I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.”

“You’ve met America where, at Ripon Society meetings?” Lady Liberty cackled as she used her torch to light a giant cigarette and blow a great plume of smoke towards New Jersey. “A feeling in this formulation is just another commodity for ad makers to sell people, like Doritos or Hyundais. And that’s fine! Not every Clydesdale has to have a story to inspire people. Sometimes they can just sell beer.”

Finally, the Academy Awards are next month. At the Oscar lunch this week the Academy made clear it wasn’t over the Will Smith slap. Good. It was a big moment … Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“Oh no.” The statue held her head and moaned. “I beg of you, Peggy.”

“Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage-to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment … As a public figure, I delivered exactly the wrong message and put forward exactly the wrong example. What we do in public matters, especially for the young. If we smoke, they’ll think it’s cool to smoke. If we use bullets and guns, they’ll be inspired to go in that direction … I’m going to continue to work on myself, and I ask you, as I close, not to applaud, if you were going to. After all the furor, let’s end it quietly and with thought.”

“America is not a racist country. Now allow me, an elderly white woman, to condescendingly lecture a successful Black man about his manners, and demand he beg forgiveness from a worldwide television audience. That’s the message you’re going with this week?” Lady Liberty sighed and flung the cigarette butt out into the harbor, where it bobbed on the surface like a dead whale.

“Well, back to the grindstone,” the statue said as she lumbered back to her feet with a sigh that shook the city’s bridges. “I mean this, Peggy, from the bottom of my heart. Next time you’re stuck for material, just take a week off.”

Lady Liberty picked up her torch and book, clambered up onto her pedestal, and resumed her usual position. Peggy watched her recede as the ferry chugged back to the Manhattan shore. Wise words for a statue, she thought. Not that she had any intention of heeding them.

[WSJ]

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