It's Noonan America

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

We're at the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the slug, the word that captures its essence, is "Disconnect."

This is, still, a surprising word to use about the canny operatives who so perfectly judged the public mood in 2008. But they haven't connected since.

There is a disconnect, a detachment, a distance between the president's preoccupations and the concerns of the people. There's a disconnect between his policy proposals and the people's sense, as expressed in polls, of what the immediate problems are.

So, well-known Republican Noonan has turned on the President.

When Obama was in the ascendant, back in 2008, she wrote about what a brilliant tactician and thinker he was--how he was different, just what America needed. Now, when he's in trouble, she writes about what a bad job he's doing, and how he keeps making mistakes.

Is that what Noonan's punditry amounts to? She reprints conventional wisdom, slaps her name on it, calls it a day? I'm not insisting she be a contrarian, but we can all read the polls. Either Obama wasn't so brilliant as he seemed, or he's not doing so poorly as he seems, or maybe both. True insight means occasionally noting things aren't as they appear.