Housecleaning

The right is finally starting to do it. It's only the very first stages -- sort of when you look around and decide whether to try to tidy up or just start in a corner with a shovel -- but it's starting, as witness this WSJ piece from Peggy Noonan. Now, I've accused Noonan of being ridiculous in the past (and she has been, in those cases, I'm still convinced), but she is one of the most respected voices on the right. She's taking Sarah Palin apart in this piece, but one paragraph struck me especially:

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

Noonan assumes that the McCain/Palin campaign wants to bring the country together. Perhaps McCain does, or would like to, when he stops to think about it, if he does at all. But the campaign is still locked into Rovian election strategies: smears, lies, false charges of vote fraud, dodging the issues, and, when push comes to shove, vote tampering (not proven, but then, never investigated) -- and Sarah Palin just . . . saying things, as Noonan notes. It's all about driving wedges into the electorate -- divide and win.

Uniting the country is not part of the agenda here. It never was. That doesn't work for the Republicans, because they are, when all is said and done, the minority party and the only way they can make a majority is through the tactics we've seen over the past eight years -- the tactics that Sarah Palin is using now. Take this example:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the "pro-America" areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

This is what one of Noonan's commenters called "a breath of fresh air."

(Here's a "clarification" of those remarks. OK -- I'm in Chicago. Does that make me "anti-American"?))

And let's face it: this sort of thing brought us the same idiot twice in a row; why not think it can bring us another?

(The comments, by the way, are 100% pro-Palin. The striking thing about this is that none of it -- not Noonan's essay, nor a single comment -- deals with issues.)

I wonder how this will pan out: the right's real substance, such as Noonan and Kathleen Parker and Christopher Buckley and Andrew Sullivan, at least those that have any credibility outside the inner circle, are the targets of attempted marginalization, while the pundit/whores like Ponnuru and Kristol are pandering to the base. It will be interesting to see who finally winds up at the fringe.