Once a writer of deftness and skill- she did radio commentaries for Dan Rather, speeches for Ronald Reagan, and a well-written book about her White House days.
Then she went to The Wall Street Journal and her soul was taken over by the wandering wraith of Time magazine's one-time column on the presidency, Hugh Sidey.
Sidey pontificated, and if you pulled one column out from this week and another from 18 months ago, you'd usually find the same themes being recycled.
Here's a Sidey sample from 1983 (check out the mention of Senator Alan Cranston in light of the last two years):
The Presidency/Hugh Sidey "A great disruptive fact was the baneful influence of elections almost continuously in progress, of campaigns never over, and of political uproar endlessly arousing emotions . . . It raised to ever higher pitch the passion-rousing oratory of rivals. They egged one another on to make more and more exaggerated statements."
Historian Roy Franklin Nichols was not describing our time. He was writing about America's chaotic years before the Civil War; this excerpt is from his classic work The Disruption of American Democracy, published in 1948. For some students of today's politics, there are alarming echoes. The issues are different, but a paralyzing partisanship is stronger today than at any other time in the past 30 years, fanned daily by the President and the six announced Democratic contenders, whose followers pick up on the rancorous debate and drag it into Congress's deliberations.
We are running headlong into muscle-bound military machines and mountainous deficits, but neither the White House nor the Democratic congressional leadership is willing to yield ground to cut spending and raise taxes enough to prevent more economic chaos. The sentiment grows in Washington for yet another presidential commission to resolve the deadlock: a device used for the dilemmas on the MX missile, Social Security, Central America and hunger. While it has helped produce notable results for the MX and Social Security issues, the resort to the commission procedure represents an admission of political gridlock.
Democratic presidential strategists say privately that the only way their candidates ever gain attention is to attack what Ronald Reagan says and does. Presidential Candidate Senator Alan Cranston practically points with pride to the fact that he is against virtually every major Reagan policy. Reagan, of course, got into office as a partisan fighter. He has calmed a bit, but the old instincts rise when the bands play and the G.O.P. elephants parade.
Sidey's shade has been wandering the canyons of Manhattan for almost five years, and now it has found a home and a willing set of hands to type his musings from Beyond.Thus Ms Noonan's latest:
We start with the president's dreadful numbers. People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we're like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs. But polls offer the only hard quick data there is, and when the temperature-taking consistently shows a worsening condition—the fever is not breaking but rising—you have to admit a sickness. And so the polls, the most striking of which this week was CBS's, which says only 13% of Americans feel President Obama's economic plans have helped them. After all the money he and Congress have spent, you'd think it would be twice that.
Oh, let's not do polls, they all say what they said months ago: Mr. Obama is down. Here I write not of something people dislike—the administration and, by the way, the Republicans—but of something I think they want, may even deep down long for. By they I mean me. But I don't think I'm alone.
All right, you know what I think people miss when they look at Washington and our political leadership? They miss old and august. They miss wise and weathered. They miss the presence of bruised and battered veterans of life who've absorbed its facts and lived to tell the tale.
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