Peg Votes for Style, Not Substance

Freedom Fighter dissects Peggy Noonan's latest column. Peggy's piece in the Wall Street Journal started out well enough. In fact, the part featuring an excerpt from Obama's fictional post-midterm memoir (in which BO refers to himself in the third person) was quite clever:

"Obama was frustrated. He honestly didn't understand what the country was doing. It was as if they had compulsive hand-washing disorder. In '08 they washed off Bush. Now they're washing off Obama. There he is, swirling down the drain! It's all too dramatic, too polar. The morning after the election it occurred to him: maybe he should take strong action. Maybe he should fire America! They did well in 2008, but since then they've been slipping...

So Peg made some good points, but then she went into "Karl Rove mode" with her tea party comments. Like many of her friends in the Snobby Clique Class, Peg is more worried about style than substance, and more worried about The Clique's image than the nation's well being.

Peg preaches to the Tea Party:

"Electable means mature, accomplished, stable—and able to persuade."

I suppose, for example, that Joe Miller's biggest obstacle in Alaska is that Joe is unpersuasive and he has achieved nothing. Or maybe the race in Alaska is still not settled because of a petulant member of the Snobby Clique Class and a few of her closest friends. I won't name any names, but people like Lisa Murkowski and her buddy Orrin Hatch come to mind.

Here's a list of Tea Party candidates who did not win their elections in 2010, apparently because they didn't go to the Peggy Noonan School of Messaging. Click on the links to assess their communication skills:

• Anna Little
• Sean Bielat
• John Dennis
• Charles Djou
• Stephen Broden

On second thought, having heard these candidates speak, maybe their only problem in this election was that they were under-demeciated by the Ruling Class.

Peg knows exactly what the Tea party needs to do in 2012:

"...in the future the tea party is going to have to ask itself: Is this candidate electable?"

OMG! Why didn't any of the millions of Tea Party activists think of that in 2010? That's such a smart idea!

Let's not forget that you go to war with the army you have. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of tea party activists would LOVE to run a Ronald Reagan or a Jack Kemp or a Margaret Thatcher in every local, state and federal election, but we can't sit around waiting for perfect candidates. We have urgent work to do.

Discussion: Memeorandum

Cross-posted at Left Coast Rebel