Peggy Noonan, in all seriousness
February 7, 2009 by William K. Wolfrum
If there is one thing Peggy Noonan believes in, it’s seriousness.
William F. Buckley Jr., an architect of the movement and one of its authentic heroes, is castigated as a narrow-minded excluder; he, in turn, eases into a pair of tuxedo slippers to tap out editorials damaging the Presidential campaign
or the most rightward of the serious candidates in the 1992 race. Pat Buchanan.
The Democrats ceded seriousness to sentiment at their convention. But seriousness is your salvation. It means that if you win, you win with meaning, if you lose, you lose with class. The first gives you a mandate, the second adds heft to your historical reputation.
[Ronald Reagan] knew what he thought and why he thought it. He had thought it through, was a conservative for serious philosophical reasons, had read his Hayek and his Friedman, knew exactly why “that government governs best that governs least.
So often the most festive events Christmas, New Year’s, even the birth of a baby—trigger a letdown rather than a lift. I blame some of this on the Happiness Cult. It replaced the Seriousness Cult, which ended about the year 1900.
I don’t recall anyone who works for him ever granting any decency or right spirit to the other side. I can’t recall one of them saying, “I understand the serious issues involved, I understand there are decent people on the other side who feel that important principles must be upheld here, I respect their views, but mine are different.” Instead it was all the smirking snarl, the snarling smirk, all “You’re partisan!,” “You’re far-right haters” leading a “right-wing putsch.”
We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.
Harold Ickes, abused in the past by the Clintons, has what appears to be battered-wife syndrome—I can’t leave, he needs me!- -but is a serious ideologue who makes serious use of derived power.
I helped Steve Forbes with a speech in ’95, and worked on one with George Pataki in ’98. That’s it for politicians, but here’s a surprise for you: In many ways they seem better, I mean more serious and thoughtful, than businessmen.Maybe that’s not a surprise for you, but it was to me.
(John McCain) has captured your imagination. This may get serious. …
And suddenly you realize one of the biggest reasons you couldn’t get serious about the Boss’s Son is that your parents wanted you to!
What’s a fella to do? Come straight out swinging, with an opening statement that acknowledges with respect Clinton’s well-earned reputation for toughness. And acknowledge that toughness is appropriate, for politics is a serious and meaningful business that can make the lives of our people better, or worse.
You (George W. Bush) have to demonstrate once again on national television what you show on the stump: that you have the heft and height to be president, that you’re big enough for the job, that you’re a serious man familiar with the facts of government and governance.
George W. Bush was of course once famous for his charm. And Dick Cheney didn’t need charm, so full of heft, seriousness, experience and wisdom was he. …
Mr. Reagan was charming on the stump, where his speeches and comments were big and serious and marked by humor and modesty. …
Republicans are still capable of seriousness and substance leavened by sweetness and charm on the stump of course, but they’re no match on Oprah and Conan and Dave and Jay.
The Democratic operative Paul Begala has a book called “Is Our Children Learning?” that offers not a serious case for Gore or against Bush, or even a passionate one, but that simply asserts that Mr. Bush is a dullard. Democrats have learned the past eight years that you don’t have to make a serious case for or against; all you have to do is change the focus of the argument and heighten it. …
The Dan Quayle problem isn’t Mr. Bush’s great challenge. He doesn’t have to prove his intelligence. He’s obviously bright, he has had two successful terms as governor. But he needs to show solidity. He needs to show that he’s got a strong and even keel, that he is serious about policy because it grows from philosophy that grows from experience.
Men who talk like that aren’t stupid; men who talk like that are big, and serious, and right.
For the first time in years millions of Americans saw two political men who were in bearing, seriousness, sophistication and thoughtfulness like the public servants of old, or rather the public servants you respected when you were a kid …
Why do I think Mr. Cheney won? Because he was consistently the more compelling because the more ingenuous figure. Because he was a surprise. I knew and know he is a serious and thoughtful man …
I also see a coming debate, a big one, in conservative circles, over whether the Bush campaign should, as the Democratic strategist Pat Caddell and others, including me, have urged, do a big and serious speech about the meaning of the trampling of law and lowering of dignity in the past eight years.
You’re in danger. What you do or fail to do now could conceivably change the outcome Tuesday. So breathe deep, get serious and don’t get stubborn. …
Today or tomorrow, give a serious thoughtful speech about the scandal. …
Don’t let this story, and the ones that will follow, knock you out. Let it help you connect and be serious with all the other imperfect Americans.
So I thank principled and honest nonvoters, and hope that when we vote a lot of us think of you and say, “Thank you, modest people for not diluting my serious and thought-through vote. I will try to make the one I cast worthy of your generosity.”
Mr. Clinton now is sleek and sure, but that’s not how he started. He had to work at it. So does Mr. Bush. Everyone who supports him wants him to devote time now to working seriously and with commitment at the particular demands of the public presentation of the presidency.
Moreover [George W. Bush] has opened his staff not to talented and obscure young people but to the gifted and established—serious talents already proven in their fields. This suggests several important things. That this White House and president will take the written word seriously, and approach it, and writers, with due respect.
On some new level and in some new way George W. Bush burrowed into the presidency Tuesday night. Like him or not, he is a man to be taken seriously.
But now I think that it has completely changed. Republicans—well, not Republicans but conservatives—care passionately about the world of ideas, and about history. They write books. And Democrats seem to care about money, and they don’t write books, not serious ones. …
There was John Podhoretz’s bright and lively “Hell of a Ride” and a few serious and scholarly tomes that came along in the early ‘90s. …
One hopes for a serious book from a former State Department or Pentagon appointee or staffer about the making of policy in the Clinton administration, about the forces that collided and yielded this decision or that, this governing philosophy or that lack of one. …
As for the Bush people now newly installed in their White House offices, the good news is that so many of them are serious people, and several of them are writers, more than capable of creating classics that are a contribution to understanding our times. …
A friend who works for Mr. Bush and is a gifted writer mentioned the problem to me some time back, and we agreed that it was serious.
Mr. Bush’s staff strikes me as something new and unusual, maybe the best White House staff since . . . well, I’m not sure. Bill Clinton’s staff ultimately reflected his nature: young, immature, not serious. …
LBJ’s was talent-heavy, sophisticated and serious, but its White House was another victim of history. …
One hopes this seriousness—and literal soulfulness—will continue. If it does it could yield greatness. So far it has yielded a good beginning.
Those of us who lived in and feel we understood the age of Ronald Reagan have a great responsibility: to explain and tell and communicate who he was and what he did and how he did it and why. Where he came from and what it meant that he came from there. What it meant, for instance, that he came from the political left, was trained in it, and then left it—for serious reasons, reasons as serious as life gets.
[George W. Bush] is about to demonstrate the seriousness of his leadership by signing an arms agreement with the Russians that reflects the end of old enmity and the beginning of alliance; and that the signing itself shows his desire for and ability to achieve a safer world.
I hope the CDC’s advisory board isn’t consciously or unconsciously thinking this way. One hopes they’re being serious, respectful, and thinking imaginatively.
If Mr. Bush is serious about security—and he is—he should pick Mr. Giuliani. Who even comes with an easy nickname—“The Jewel.” Give the Jewel the crown.
[Joe Lieberman is] having fun and being serious at the same time. He’s keeping the spotlight, he’s investigating Enron and helping to fashion a Homeland Security Department, and he’s demonstrating to party leaders that he isn’t a creampuff, he knows how to be aggressive on the issues. By taking on Mr. Gore, he elevates himself from Beta Man to possible Alpha Man. Good work for a slow summer.
The Democrats on Capitol Hill have so far failed to mount a principled, coherent opposition. I am not shocked by this, are you? One senses they are looking at the whole question merely as a matter of popular positioning: Will they like me if I say take out Saddam? Will they get mad at me if we try to take him out and it’s a disaster? Will they like me if I say there’s no reason to go to war? Have I focus-grouped this? Such unseriousness is potentially deeply destructive. It is certainly irresponsible.
But it was Mr. Annan’s gravity, his moral seriousness, that provided a platform for the words of the visiting American president. …
Do I think he “made the case” for U.S. action against Iraq? I think he made a first and serious one but not the final one; I think his words and approach showed an appropriate respect for the opinion of mankind; I think more will, and should, follow.
[Norm]Coleman seemed to present himself not as radical or right wing or extreme but as a serious man who has and will work across party lines.
There’s only one candidate who can probably beat Mrs. Clinton at this point, and that is Gov. Pataki. … I wrote a speech with him once, a few years ago, and, though I could not call myself a friend, I did see him enough to know that he is intelligent and serious. These are good things in a candidate.
If the Democrats all too often treat race as if it were a card to be played in a game, and if the Republicans in contrast attempt to struggle through the issue and be serious and go out of their way to expunge the last vestiges of the old racial ways, isn’t that something we should be proud of? History is watching. It will know what we did. What will history think if it sees a new seriousness on race from the Republican Party? I think it will say: Good. And I think that matters.
Ike and the rest showed support because they were fully mature and serious. …
Does Mr. Clinton talk about Iraq and Osama so much because he is trying to hide in plain sight his own failures? He had eight years to get serious about them. He punted and dodged.
The American victory will mean that the United States has removed a great and serious threat to the innocent people of the world. An evil man who was gathering to himself weapons of mass destruction was, is, a danger to the world. And so, with the successful prosecution of the war, the world will be safer.
If George W. Bush begins to seriously compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too. …
You have grown profoundly unserious. …
The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the 1950s and ‘60s the party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. …
The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty talent for political process—message discipline, for instance. But what good is message discipline if there’s no serious and coherent message?
A number of thoughts and observations in this book became Officially Accepted Truths of the event and its aftermath, and were, to the best of my knowledge, said here for the first time. “God Is Back” spoke of the resurgence of religious feeling on the mean streets, “Welcome Back, Duke” celebrated the return of a certain kind of manhood, and “Courage Under Fire” attempted to make New York’s firemen more nationally celebrated and understood. I feared early on that what they did was not getting serious enough attention in the country.
[G]et coldly serious: Arm the pilots, fortify cockpits, man flights with marshals and profile passengers.
Another is that democracy is best served by excellent presidential nominees duking it out region to region in a hard-fought campaign that seriously raises the pressing issues of the day. …
They need to be in a serious fight before they fight seriously. …
Howard Dean’s rise is about two things. The first is the war. Most of the other serious Democratic candidates were reasonable about it, if you will. Dean didn’t bother to be reasonable, or to appear reasonable: Bush is a bum and his war is a fraud. …
He looked silly. He looked unserious. Mr. Dean is going to look that way, too.
I hope something surprising happens in Iowa, and New Hampshire, and in the South. I hope it becomes a real fight on the Democratic side, and I hope that fight yields up someone who is serious, substantive, and thoughtful. But that’s not what I see coming. What I see coming is a Dean nomination followed by a rancorous campaign followed by a Dean defeat.
John Kerry certainly looks like a president—the thick steel-wool hair, the Lincolnian planes and shadows of his face. He is tall and slim and seems serious. …
The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does not appear to be insane.
Similarly [Hillary Clinton] will take no serious part in telling her party how to turn itself around. She will keep her wisdom to herself. …
There will be serious drawbacks and problems with her candidacy.
If I were a Democrat right now I would think big and get serious. …
Don’t do “sound bites for blue heads in Dade County,” be serious. …
Hold a big public party meeting on taxes and spending. I am serious. …
Homeland security can always be improved, and immigration will only grow as a fact and an issue. Get serious. …
On all of these points they can be truly competitive. If they choose to get serious.
I always get the feeling with John Paul that if he could narrow down who he meets and blesses to those he likes best it would not be cardinals, princes or congressmen but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children. Especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way they understand more than most people.
Can a Republican beat [Hillary Clinton]? Sure. She’ll have to make mistakes, and she will. And he (it will be a he; it’s not Condi, because the presidency is not an entry-level political office) will have to be someone who stands for big, serious and solidly conservative things
So politically this is a struggle between many serious people who really mean it and one, just one, strange-o. And the few bearded and depressed-looking academics he’s drawn to his side
The choosing of Benedict XVI, a man who is serious, deep and brave, is a gift. He has many enemies. They imagine themselves courageous and oppressed. What they are is agitated, aggressive, and well-connected.
Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time.
He compulsively chases women and is politically popular if unserious; she makes money, networks and burnishes their movement credentials. She knows of his philandering and looks the other way. They achieve the presidency and come in time to be seen as main-chancing Ivy League grifters.
Maybe a lot of them aren’t bothering to think. Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer in the habit of listening to arguments but only of watching William Rehnquist, and if he nods up and down she knows to vote “no,” and if he shakes his head she knows to vote “yes.” That might explain some of the lack of seriousness in the decisions. …
What are they doing? All this hair splitting, this dithering, this cutting and pasting—all this lack of serious and defining principle. All this vanity.
Imagine that there are already 100 serious terror cells in the U.S., two per state.
[Harriet Mier's] nobility makes her attackers look bad. She’s better than they, more loyal and serious. An excellent moment of sacrifice and revenge. …
As for Ed Gillespie and his famous charge of sexism and elitism, I don’t think serious conservatives believe Ed is up nights pondering whiffs and emanations of class tension and gender bias in modern America.
A lot of Bush supporters assumed the president would get serious about spending in his second term. With the highway bill he showed we misread his intentions. …
The Democrats right now remind me of what the veteran political strategist David Garth told me about politicians. He was a veteran of many campaigns and many campaigners. I asked him if most or many of the politicians he’d worked with had serious and defining political beliefs. …
Of the $100 billion that may be spent on New Orleans, let’s be serious. We love Louisiana and feel for Louisiana, but we all know what Louisiana is, a very human state with rather particular flaws. …
But conservatives also understood “compassionate conservatism” to be a form of the philosophy that is serious about the higher effectiveness of faith-based approaches to healing poverty—you spend prudently not to maintain the status quo, and not to avoid criticism, but to actually make things better. …
And shouldn’t the Bush administration seriously address these questions, share more of their thinking, assumptions and philosophy?
In 1986, George W. Bush reached a crisis point in his life and changed what wasn’t working. He dug deep and got serious.
The president would have been politically better served by what Pat Buchanan called a bench-clearing brawl. A fractious and sparring base would have come together arm in arm to fight for something all believe in: the beginning of the end of command-and-control liberalism on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senate Democrats, forced to confront a serious and principled conservative of known stature, would have damaged themselves in the fight. If in the end President Bush lost, he’d lose while advancing a cause that is right and doing serious damage to the other side. …
Robert Bork, serious thinker and mature concluder, became bork, living verb. Or rather living past-tense verb.
This column, and the world, have been very serious lately.
Actually conservatives have quieted down in spite of the myriad issues on which they disagree with the president—spending, the growth of the federal government, immigration—for reasons having to do with a certain maturity and seriousness. …
As for Judge Alito, he appears to be a serious man with a nice mother from a good place (Trenton, N.J.).
I have a view on what Washington itself should do. It should get serious. We have men and women in the field, on the ground, putting themselves in harm’s way for us, for our country, for our system, for the way we do things and what we are in history. They deserve—they require and have earned—our gravest sincerity and seriousness. …
This is not a mere domestic political battle. We need a serious presentation, one not weighed down with slogans.
How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?
Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats—the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean—the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.
To criticize the White House—if the criticism is serious, well-grounded and well-meant—is helpful, and part of a long and good tradition.
[T]he history recounted in “Cobra II,” and the testimony of Gen. Zinni, suggests a lot of generals—a lot—were against the war in the run-up, for reasons that were many and serious. If this is correct it begs questions: Did they feel they could not speak? Why? What dynamics went into the decision? Or did they speak and we didn’t hear, or didn’t weigh what was said seriously enough?
I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty. But I know why it exists. It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society’s way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.
In the past, Republican leaders in Washington bowed either symbolically or practically to the presumed moral leadership and cleanness of vision of the people back home. They understood the base wanted tax cuts and spending cuts, and for serious reasons. …
If the Democrats seek to speak for America, why not start with a serious and textured response, one that isn’t a political blast-back but a high-minded putting forward of facts? This would take guts, and farsightedness. Rebutting a wild-eyed man (Hugo Chavez) who says you can find redemption reading Noam Chomsky is a little too much like rebutting a part of your base.
But Mr. Hagel said the most serious thing that has been said in Congress in a long time. This is what we’re here for. This is why we’re here, to decide, to think it through and take a stand, and if we can’t do that, why don’t we just leave and give someone else a chance?
The Democrats of Capitol Hill will fill that one. And they seem—and seemed in their statements after the president’s speech—wholly unprepared to fill it, wholly unserious in their thoughts and approach. …
Right now, in the deepest levels of the American government, intelligence and military planners should be ordered to draw up serious plans for an American withdrawal, and serious strategies for dealing with the realities withdrawal will bring.
Serious and textured thoughts are, here, overdue.
Reagan’s meaning cannot be forgotten. But where does it get you if it’s 1885, and Republicans are pulling their hair out saying, “Oh no, we’re not doing well. We could win if only we had a Lincoln, but they shot him 20 years ago!” That’s not how serious people talk, and it’s not how serious people think.
In New York, in the Second Gilded Age, the age of the thousand-dollar pizza, wealthy Democrats, when they entertain, seem careful not to have things too physically perfect. It might suggest they’re unserious, that their thoughts are not always focused on the oppressed. Wealthy Republicans, on the other hand, will go all out to make it lovely. “The oppressed? I make jobs for them!” As for being thought unserious, one senses it does not trouble them. They made money in the world; they correctly apprehended the lay of the land and moved. That serious enough for you? …
Loyalty has nothing to do with it, not if you’re serious.
My larger point, however, is that [McCain] sounded like a serious man addressing a serious issue in a serious way. This makes him at the moment stand out.
Rudy Giuliani has to make himself serious … All the candidates save one, the obscure but intellectually serious Ron Paul …
[Fred Thompson's] relatively late entry suggests—suggests—his motives are serious, not just ego-related.
Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to be the first serious conservative president in generations.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.
For all their harrumphing about the crucial role they play in democracy (and it is crucial) and the seriousness of their professional intent (and it is sometimes serious), the mainstream media is full of the cattiest human beings in history with the exception of the vast political consulting/advising class of Washington, i.e., the gargoyles with BlackBerrys in the back of the SUV, whose job is not only to help their guy but hurt the other guy.
Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day.
Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women …
I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It’s not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn’t work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That’s the way to help.
Where Mr. McCain’s friend says, “be disciplined,” I’d say, “Get serious.”
Timing is everything. “Too late to get serious,” I wrote in my notes. For before this, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was all dreary recitation of talking points, rote applause lines followed by rote applause.
Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party’s fortunes from the president’s. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn’t be left with a ruined “brand,” as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.
What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s. More “this is what I saw” and “this is what is true.” Feed history.
John McCain has already got what he wanted, he got what he needed, which was to be top dog in the Republican Party, the party that had abused him in 2000 and cast him aside. They all bow to him now, and he doesn’t need anything else. He doesn’t need the presidency. He got what he wanted. So now he can coast. This is, in the deepest way, unserious.
Sam Nunn is that rare thing, a serious man whom all see as a serious man.
Shoes that are comfortable — I’m serious, shoes that are comfortable are a gift.
We must become more serious in the way we practice our politics, more equal to the moment.
But it comes at a key moment for Mr. Obama, because it gives him a certain amount of cover to be serious about what needs to be done. What’s at stake for him is two words. When Republicans say, in coming years, “At least Bush kept us safe,” Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, “unlike Obama.”
The party-line vote in favor of the stimulus package could have been more, could have produced not only a more promising bill but marked the beginning of something new, not a postpartisan era (there will never be such a thing and never should be; the parties exist to fight through great political questions) but a more bipartisan one forced by crisis and marked by—well, let’s call it seriousness.
Republicans shocked themselves by being serious, and then they startled themselves by being unified. But it was their seriousness that was most important: They didn’t know they were! They hadn’t been in years!
“I’m big on the word seriousness,” Noonan told Tavis Smiley last year while hawking her very serious book. Indeed she is, even if she has obviously never had the vaguest clue what the word even means.
–WKW
I’m still stuck on the image of Bill Buckley typing with his feet. Do ‘tuxedo slippers’ allow one to do that? Or was it in Morse Code?
That was a seriously big pile of manure to wade through. In all seriousness, does anyone, on the left and on the right, take Noonan seriously? The first two letters of her last name provide the answer.
[...] “In all seriousness, the seriousness shown by Republicans during this period is what the people have long clamored for,” said the media expert. “While Democrats are busy electing comedians, Republicans are not cheating on their spouses, quitting or being arrested. This is a very serious development that must be treated seriously.” [...]