* OPINION: DECLARATIONS
* JULY 10, 2009

A Farewell to Harms
Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.
By PEGGY NOONAN
WSJ


Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her
plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits,
and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They
mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.


Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago
she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media
immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The
party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a
sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready
to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved
politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and
doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a
gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born
into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and
in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and
swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She
was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and
sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she
didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed
in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She
experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see
no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't
thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered,
illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of
self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm
standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was
actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to
poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have
taken to telling themselves Palin myths.
More Peggy Noonan

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite
of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and
even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and
just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track
coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures
of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her
working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the
sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know,
that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition,
appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She
represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or
Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism."
This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something.
Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier
College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated
in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on
its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top
national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first
Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a
Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of
unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or
refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the
party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her
and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites,
from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and
attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite
confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party
look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading
in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering
her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a
ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of
Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about
Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not
thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in.
Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation
harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're
perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire
generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What
the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story
going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her
mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of
division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George
W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why
wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has
never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning
powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for
conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a
profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy
and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities
getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source;
faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various
reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the
federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from
our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted.
There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the
time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get
serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up,
responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of
resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less
like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less
reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.