Yes, Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Reagan and is a conservative. But she's a very good writer, and has often been spot-on during this campaign.
Here's an excerpt from her column today.
America dodged a bullet. That was the other meaning of the culminating events of this week.
Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.
We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.
They had a great and roaring fight, a state-by-state struggle unprecedented in the history of presidential primaries. They created the truly national primary. They brought 36 million people to the polls, including the young, minorities and first-time voters. They brought a kind of dogged brio to the year.
All of this is impressive, but more than that, they threw off Clintonism. They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact. They threw off the idea that dynasticism was an unstoppable dynamic in modern politics, that Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton could, would, go on forever. They said: "No, that is not the way we do it."
They threw off the idea of inevitability. Mrs. Clinton didn't lose because she had no money or organization, she didn't lose because she had no fame or name, she didn't lose because her policies were unusual or dramatically unpopular within her party. She lost because enough Democrats looked at her and thought: I don't like that, I don't like the way she does it, I'm not going there. Most candidates lose over things, not over their essential nature. But that is what happened here. For all her accomplishments and success, it was her sketchy character that in the end did her in.
But the voters had to make the decision. So, to the Democrats: A nod. A bow. Well done.
May this mark the beginning of the remoralization of a great party.
I truly believe this is the story of the 2008 election thus far. This point cannot be emphasized enough -- progressives have stood up and said "this far... no farther" to the "win at any cost" politics of the 1990s -- politics that arguably cost us the House and Senate, and subjugated the party to the ambitions of a select few.
In the interest of unity I will not take this argument any further, but I found Peggy Noonan's words very poignant. And Senator Obama's recent decree that the DNC will not take lobbyist money is another sign that we are (finally) heading down the correct path indeed.