Peggy Noonan, Reagan's best speech writer, helped enable a presidency that I think will be considered - a hundred years from now - as a time of appalling social savagery.
Thing is, much as I dislike Noonan, she's a pretty smart woman, and sometimes has some good stuff to say - even if she's working for the farking WSJ . . .
Her Thursday's column here being case in point. She starts with a recent exchange on CNN between the smarmy Paul Begala and the elegant (if not the world's greatest campaign manager) Donna Brazile:
Mr. Begala more or less accused the Obama people of not caring about white voters: "[If] there's a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn't need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out." And: "We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans." That, he said, was the old, losing, Dukakis coalition.
Noonan then gives Brazile's response:
"Don't divide me and tell me I cannot stand in Hillary's camp because I'm black, and I can't stand in Obama's camp because I'm female. Because I'm both. . . . "
And then Noonan brings it home, laying into Hillary's "jaw-dropping" comments in Thursday's USA Today about white voters and saying this:
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
And, dammit, she's right. Hillary went right over the cliff today. Think of how we would have - rightly - smacked around Trent Lott or any of his ilk for crap like, "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again."
Think of how we would have clobbered George Allen with this.
How much slack does the party have to cut Hillary? How understanding do we have to be? How much "space" to deal with her own psychodrama are we expected to provide?
Nooner is right - the party ought to be celebrating the fact that Obama is now the nominee, not going through this waiting-game masquerade for the sake of Hillary's feelings. Because Noonan is saying what not enough democrats have been willing to say: Hillary's "white" comments are beyond the pale (so to speak) for any democrat, and are too blatant to be ignored.