Agreement

Peggy Noonan seems to have come to her senses. Inexplicably, she was one of those conservatives who seemed to fall for the Obama Hope and Change nonsense during the campaign. Perhaps it was due to her anger at the Bush administration, or her disappointment with the McCain campaign. Perhaps she spent too much time with her colleagues on MSNBC or her neighbors on the Upper West Side in New York. Whatever the reason, this normally extremely sensible woman seemed to think Obama would be some sort of agent of change for the better. Maybe her essential decency fueled her hopes - she wanted badly for him to be the post-partisan, post-racial president he sold himself as. It's not a terrible thing hoping Obama would lived up to this billing. But to really believe in the possibility took a willful disregard of Obama's twenty years of radicalism prior to the campaign. While it is understandable that ordinary Americans were unaware of Obama's past during the campaign - after all the mainstream media went to great lengths not to report on it - it is inconceivable that Ms. Noonan was.

In her column yesterday she hit on some of the same point I did in my post last week, that distrust has crept into the public's opinion of Obama:

[The health care debate] has lessened the thing an admired president must have from the people, and that is trust.

that Obama is a political empty suit:

The president seemed like a man long celebrated as being very good at politics—the swift rise, the astute reading of a varied electorate—who is finding out day by day that he isn't actually all that good at it. In this sense he does seem reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, who was brilliant at becoming president but not being president.

and that the stimulus bill, seen as a victory at the time, was actually the point where things started to go bad for Obama:

Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill. It was a bad bill—off point, porky and philosophically incoherent. He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold. The Democrats of the House pushed it through, and not one Republican, even those from swing districts, even those eager to work with the administration, could support it.

This, of course, was politics as usual. But in 2008 people voted against politics as usual.

It was a real lost opportunity. It marked the moment congressional Republicans felt free to be in full opposition. It gave congressional Democrats the impression that they were in full control, that no one could stop their train. And it was the moment the president, looking at the lay of the land, seemed to reveal he would not govern in a vaguely center-left way, as a unifying figure even if a beset one being beaten 'round the head by the left, but in a left way, without the modifying "center." Or at least as one who happily cedes to the left in Congress each day.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Peggy Noonan is an important voice in the conservative community and her faith in Obama over the past year had left many of us shaking our heads. Seems she has finally concluded what most of us have seen as self-evident, that Barack Obama is a leftist, but one who comes to the fight armed with only a vague notion of policy, politics, history, and economics. He's in over his head.