Peggy Noonan's Rising Star

I was trying to come up with a catchy title of the blogpost to describe this interesting article about Peggy Noonan. It describes her own "intellectual journey," if I can use an overused phrase, from her youth, to her lack of interest in the protest movement of the 60s, to working for CBS and winning the respects of people like Dan Rather, despite her ideological conservativism, to serving in the Reagan administration as a speechwriter, to her now disillusionment with the Bush administration, and her growing popularity among the Obama crowd. Some of it is because she wrote scatching books against Hilary Clinton, which now turned out to be coincidentally appropriate for the times. She's branded an intellectual independent, and I think that makes her a fitting voice in this 2008 campaign. Here's an interesting description of life in the Reagan administration, and how she thinks it's so different from the Bush administration mileu (plus some of her own eccentricities for color).

"The White House I lived through was an abattoir," Noonan says, taking a sip of water. "There was blood on the floors. Everybody fought. They undercut each other, they tried to remove each other from the meeting. But the argument was held every day, and it went to the president every day, and things got adjudicated. That's the way it ought to be if you're serious. One of the things I have not liked in the past two administrations is this extraordinary inner-house awe for their president. You know, I loved Reagan, but he was a man and he was flawed and I wrote about that in my first book. I am astonished that the Bush people are so robotic. I am astonished that if you ever criticize your guy, he will banish you from the kingdom.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that most of Noonan's "fights" at the White House were not with her "guy," but with the holdovers from the previous two administrations. Noonan not only agreed with the president on the economy and the Soviet Union, she shared in his predilection for rhetoric that connected the administration's policies to the will of God. And she, like Reagan, believed in strange, mystical things.

When Noonan was in high school, she had a dream the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As she wrote in her 1990 memoir, "Things I Saw at the Revolution": "I saw Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre. He was sitting in a box and suddenly a shadow came from behind and Lincoln turned to look and there was a sharp retort and he slumped in his chair. But the moment before he was shot, I saw his face and he was black."

Shortly thereafter came another foreboding premonition about the murder of Bobby Kennedy. "