In a WSJ OpEd dedicated largely to trashing Bill and Hillary, and chiding Democrats for not understanding their perfidy for so long, Noonan concludes by taking off the gloves wrt George Bush's effect on her party.
George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Noonan concludes thus, presumably, to provide some counterbalance to her thesis in her opening passage of the OpEd:
the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans.
So the Clintons are "tearing the party apart" with their political style. Anyone want to speculate why 8 years ago, when the Bush campaign was rolling over McCain and others with a wonderful Rovian smear campaign, Noonan wasn't out there talking about Bush "tearing the party apart"?
There is a completely different test in place here. Sure, the Clintons are in many ways like the Bush team - street fighters ready to pull no punches to win.
But for their flaws, the Clintons don't just play to win, they play to govern. Noonan can't bring herself to say that all the failures she noted in Bush - failures of governance - are largely places where the Clinton Administration succeeded. Bush never intended to actually govern the country when he took office, he intended to turn government into an ATM for his cronies. And every failure that Noonan notes - his policies on spending, on government size, on war, on how war was prosecuted, on immigration, and on many other issues - stems back to that committment to using Government as a tool to reward the wealthy.
This can all be boiled down simply - the leading Democrats still believe government can be run competently, and be a positive force for America. The leading Republicans fundamentally believe that government can never be competent, and only exists to support the military. So Clinton surrounded himself with the most competent people available, whether they kissed his ass continually or not. Bush surrounded himself with ideological boneheads and money hungry sycophants.
So while many Democrats didn't like a lot of things about Bill Clinton in the 90's, for continuing to support the party we were rewarded with a national trajectory that promised a future of stronger, more competent government and a broader prosperity that would allow government to continue to protect those in need. And if Hillary is the nominee, even those of us who have her #3 on our primary ballots (and even #5 back when Richardson and Dodd were still in the race) know that she's largely going to be dedicated to those same ideals.
For years after George Bush's 2000 selection, it was anathema in the Republican Party to offer any criticism of him. The party was held together with duct tape not because there was a shared vision of what George Bush should accomplish, but because people like Noonan kept Republican voters in fear of what would happen if they didn't follow the personality cult of Bush.
So don't worry about us, Peg. A few nasty comments during the campaign season isn't going to convince people to abandon the Democratic party.
You might want to worry about your own party, though - since it's now been pretty much demonstratively proven that the end point of the Reagan Ideology is a party of grifters with no real care about the long term future of America, but only the long term future of their bank accounts. And that's a proposition that's a long term loser.