A Farewell to Harms
Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.

*
By PEGGY NOONAN


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.

.. . .


More at that great liberal newspaper, the wall street journal.