Peggy Noonan sounds off

31 May 2010 |permalink | email article

THE Wall Street Journal’s conservative columnist has a deft touch with words and is someone I often disagree with but find hard to dislike. But her screed last week attacking President Obama as being incompetent was over the top.

She talks about his first 18 months in office as a series of unforced errors leading into the Gulf oil spill, and in her mind shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

Obama is ripped for his health care proposal and cost, his indifference to the views and hopes of a majority of voters regarding illegal immigration, and now his dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. Noonan has little faith that he can politically survive.

In running for president, she notes, Obama made much politically about the Bush administration’s distraction and detachment regarding Katrina, and predictably suggests that Republicans will go after O44 for having gone just once to the gulf while attempting to get Americans to associate the disaster with BP and not himself.

Noonan views Obama as “chronically detached from the center and immediate concerns of his countrymen.” One could, of course, have made the same general critique about hapless John McCain in 2008, or several right-wing conservatives already prepping for 2012.

Her strong rant against big government spending is revealing in terms of a recession triggered by Bush 43, and abetted by Wall Street greed – a mess that Obama inherited. For me, it suggests that as a conservative Catholic, Noonan would do well to brush up on key tenets of her faith – social justice and the common good - for starters.

Obama has major pressing problems. He needs to make key personnel changes and listen far more to the wisdom of senior wise men and women who have counseled presidents in the past. Colin Powell’s comment Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” despite Noonan’s distrust of Washington, verifies the need for the federal government, starting with the Oval Office, to move on Gulf leadership at flank speed.

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