Who Is Terrifying Who?

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan puts the blame for the rancor of the health care debate squarely on the back of Barack Obama in a column titled 'You Are Terrifying Us.'

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

Obama is terrifying them? What about the Republicans on the floor of Congress railing about the old people who are going to be killed by health care reform? What about Sarah Palin's screed about "Obama's 'death panel'" that would kill little Trig? What about Rush Limbaugh calling Obama a Nazi and Glenn Beck calling him a racist and fascist? What about the Republicans' uninterrupted fear-based campaigns of the last forty years? What unadulterated crap!

Noonan has the gall to accuse the Democrats of being "crude and aggressive" and of damaging "political civility." She says they are being "unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative." Glenn Beck makes jokes about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, but it is the Democrats who are "mocking and menacing concerned citizens." Noonan says the Democrats "should be attempting to persuade," but that can be difficult when organized wingnuts are shouting them down.

Noonan correctly asserts that "[f]or normal people, it's not all about Barack Obama," but many, although not all, of the protesters are not normal people. They are not the people who "hired" Obama to represent them in Washington. They are the birthers who still believe that Obama is a Muslim who pals around with terrorists. They are that wing of the Republican party that is dominated by the southerners who abandoned the Democrats after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. They are the ones who according to Kathleen Parker "have seceded from sanity."

Last fall, Noonan was sufficiently (and justifiably) terrified by the prospect of Sarah Palin wallowing in her ignorance within a heartbeat of the Oval Office that she decried the nastiness of the Republican presidential campaign. Now that that danger has passed, she is happy to play on the fears of the most backward elements of her party in order to defeat a policy that she does not favor. Like her hero Ronald Reagan, she does so under the guise of promoting civility, but it is nonetheless the same politics of resentment that the Republicans have relied on for four decades.

Kicking Around Palin

I have been reading Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein and I was struck by how completely the political pundits wrote Nixon off after he lost the California’s gubernatorial race in 1962 and announced “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Is the current certitude that Sarah Palin has ruined her chances for higher office similar wishful thinking? Pat Buchanan seems to think so, and he should know. He helped Nixon exploit the same working class white resentment that Palin feeds off.

The most important difference between Nixon and Palin is that Nixon was a genius—an evil and paranoid genius but a genius all the same—while Palin is a nitwit. Nixon understood the populist appeal of railing against elitism, but he wasn’t a one-trick pony. He understood economics and foreign policy and how to make himself palatable to whatever constituency’s support he was seeking. It is difficult for me to believe that Palin will ever be able to broaden her appeal simply because she would rather have narrow adulation than broad respect.

Peggy Noonan wrote a devastating critique of Palin in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.

“In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

Noonan is of course being vilified by the Palinists, but as a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, her conservative credentials seem pretty solid.

Reagan of course was also a master at exploiting white working class resentment. I have always thought it pretty “horrifying” that he launched his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech supporting “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but I guess that didn’t bother Noonan. Reagan was never particularly well known for his command of the facts either, but he was capable of speaking in complete sentences. He also surrounded himself with advisors who knew things about the areas in which he was ignorant.