As expected, some on the Left are giddy with glee over the second thoughts most on the Right have been having about Sarah Palin. She was once seen as a star of the 2008 season, now thought of more as a solar flare that fizzled out quickly, having produced more commotion than light.
Fair is fair, and one can’t really blame the liberals. But it seems this regret-a-thon ought to be only half over. What we need now is a symmetric response from some on the Left (or perhaps the left of the Right is more like it) to confess that their raves on behalf of Barack Obama were still more misguided, and did a great deal more harm to the world and the country. And because he won, his shortcomings have had a great many gruesome real-life repercussions, which sadly have not ended yet.
Was it only yesterday (2007) when David Brooks stared at Obama’s pants leg and decided he’d make a “very good” president? He became president, but with millions seemingly permanently out of the workforce, and American prestige at a historic low point, he hardly seems a good one.
Christopher Buckley called him “a first rate intellect and a first rate temperament,” giving the back of the hand to his father’s persuasion. But the first rate intellect was an inch deep; the temperament was that of a petulant narcissist, who preferred feeding snark to his fan base to the much harder job of uniting the nation.
Was it just yesterday that Colin Powell and friends declared, more in sorrow than wrath, that the McCain-Palin pair fell woefully short of their very high standards of gravitas? It certainly seems that it was.
And there was presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who couldn’t wait until Obama took office to call his IQ “off the charts” (he said nothing about which direction), and call him the most gifted world leader to ever draw breath. This was after Obama’s speech in Berlin, in which he declared that the Wall fell because “the world stood as one,” a stunningly mistaken reading of history, but before he committed his most brazen errors of judgment – passing healthcare reform against mass opposition and expecting the law to be settled thereafter; and quitting Iraq without the residual forces which everyone with a brain in either political party had begged him to leave.
People who worried about Palin’s effect as vice president should look at what Obama has done to the world and his party and ask what she might have done that could have been more destructive. As vice president, she would have had to work and to learn things, and might also have learned to be serious. But Obama was naïve as she (though in a different way). Once free to indulge in his many misreadings of history, and with his head further swelled by intense adulation, he did so.
In 2008, both were huge, but unformed and untempered political talents, who needed at least four to six years in their previous office before stepping out of the children’s arena to reach the deep end of the pool. Neither got it, and neither attained what might have been their potential. Each reached the top of something with plenty of dazzle, but minus the wisdom and balance and judgment that might have helped them prevail. Each now, it seems, will go down as a failure — one in terms of her personal choices, and one in terms of the country’s most basic security interests.
One side at least, has admitted its error. The other side should, but won’t.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
