Peggy Noonan is eating some crow today. In her Wall Street Journal column today, she waxes adoringly on the boldness of the Palin pick:
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
Noonan's respect for McCain's "hail mary"--"the pass the guy who thinks he has a good arm makes to the receiver he hopes is gifted"--was called into question today by some accidentally-recorded comments she made to MSNBC's Chuck Todd.
It's over... [Is Palin] the most qualified? No! I think they went for this--excuse me--political bullshit about narratives...Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it.
So when Noonan wrote that "the Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work," she seems to have simply meant the second.
For more on Noonan's strange political outlook, check out Jonathan Chait's piece from a few years back.
--Amanda Silverman and Eric Zimmermann