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Noonan says:
The choice of Sarah Palin IS a Hail Mary pass, the pass the guy who thinks he has a good arm makes to the receiver he hopes is gifted.
Most Hail Mary passes don't work.
But when they do they're a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
Brian says:
Oh so true.
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Noonan says:
I do not understand the absence of humor, that powerful weapon, that rhetorical cannon, in this year's campaign. There are a lot of things to say here but let me tell you the first I think of. America is a huge and lonely country. We are vast, stretch coast to coast, live in self-sufficient pods; modern culture tends us toward the atomic, the fractured and broken up. When two people meet, as they come to know each other as neighbors or colleagues, one of the great easers, one of the great ways of making a simple small human connection is: shared laughter. We are a political nation. We talk politics. So fill that area with humor: sly humor, teasing humor, humor that speaks a great truth or makes a sharp point.
Brian says:
Amazing! I love humor. I love to joke around with people and about myself. It puts people at ease.
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Noonan says:
Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It's not going to be a little successful or a little not; it's not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history's accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we've never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.
Brian says:
Head: Black or white, Right or Wrong, no inbetween. I believe that is how it will go as well but McCain is like that!
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Noonan says:
Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent -- we're on one now, in Minneapolis -- where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren't there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication, and judge by the rules of Chevy Chase and Greenwich, of Cleveland Park and McLean, of Bronxville and Manhattan.
And again we know this, we know this is our limit, our lack.
But we also forget it.
And when you forget you're a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things.Brian says:
Wow! I believe that it be so true of the national media and even some of the local media. The KNOW what is right even if it isn't. Call it brash or whatever you want to but most of the time they are dead wrong and all we can do is share our collective heads.
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Noonan says:
Another Bubblehead blind spot. I'm bumping into a lot of critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. "You do the math," the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. "We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos."
Reetz says:
Respect your local mayor. They face some tough times. Ours in Lincoln is a good good guy who wants to do what is right. All of them do. They make tough decisions. Lincoln isn't a business town. It's a university town and a legislative town. It's tax rate is always going to be low because we are supporting those things. I'm fine with that. The business people aren't and are always going to complain but I for one want a well educated populace around me rather than rich snobs that want to tell me what to do!
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