From the Wall Street Journal, “Saddleback: The Inner Game of Politics” by Daniel Henninger The normally excellent Henninger stumbles here, clumsily working Peggy Noonan’s side of the street and lamenting that everything was better in a mythical yesteryear:
With all due respect to Dan Henninger whose work I greatly admire, the preceding is facile and jejune. Not all presidential aspirants between 1789 and 1964 shared a public “basic set of moral precepts” unless one considers the enslavement/repression of millions of people to be somehow divorced from one’s moral precepts. And that’s just citing one issue where “moral precepts” diverged. What’s more, it’s not a bad thing that we get to know our presidential candidates so well. The American people are smart enough to distinguish between what doesn’t matter (e.g., the price of a candidate’s loafers) and what does (e.g., a candidate’s service to his country). Although the process minimizes the contestants by making their lives such open books, it’s ever been thus. It requires a highly selective reading of our democracy’s history to conclude otherwise.
