Reagan speechwriter Noonan pans Palin: 'It's over' David Edwards and Mike Sheehan

Published: Wednesday September 3, 2008





Print This Email This Peggy Noonan--author, columnist and former speechwriter for Pres. Ronald Reagan--made some startling observations about McCain vice presidential pick Gov. Sarah Palin on the MSNBC set at the Republican National Convention today.



Overheard on open microphones along with fellow conservative Mike Murphy after an interview with Chuck Todd, Noonan says "it's over" in reference to the presidential race.



Todd is heard to say, "I mean, is [Palin] really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?" Noonan replies, "The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives and youthfulness and the picture.



"Every time Republicans do that," Noonan continues, "because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it."



Noonan's frank assessment is in some contrast to a rambling op-ed published in her name today at the Wall Street Journal in which she says, "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."



She continues, "Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.



"She could become a transformative political presence," writes Noonan. "So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick."



This video is from YouTube, broadcast September 3, 2008.









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