Peggy Noonan on the Week's News

On the President's speech:

What was needed was a definitive statement: As of this moment we will control our borders, I'm sending in the men, I'm giving this the attention I've given to the Mideast.

The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America's borders is so amazing--the people want it, the age of terror demands it--that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he's decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?

I continue to believe the administration's problem is not that the base lately doesn't like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn't like the base. That's a worse problem. It's hard to fire a base. Hard to get a new one.

And on the DaVinci Code Opening:

Speaking of the detachment of the elites, the second big news of the week--in some ways it may be bigger--is the apparent critical failure of "The DaVinci Code." After its first screening in Cannes, critics and observers called it tedious, painfully long, bloated, grim, so-so, a jumble, lifeless and talky.

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard?

"The DaVinci Code" could still triumph at the box office, but it has lost its cachet, and the air of expectation that surrounded it. Its creators have not been rewarded but embarrassed. Good. They should be.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

When I see Peggy Noonan interviewed on television I am struck by just how uncool she comes across before the camera. She has this hyper-sincerity about her that makes me somehow uncomfortable, probably because I want her to be cool and impressive and she never is. Interviews are not the vehicle that displays her genius.

This lady was a speech writer for Reagan and Bush 41 and wrote some of the best speeches that have ever been delivered by a politician. And, she was in her 30's at the time, for crying out loud.

I remember sitting with a friend in the summer of 1988 watching George HW Bush give his acceptance speech at the Convention. I'm sure Peggy Noonan wrote the following:

For seven and a half years, I’ve worked with a great President -
I have seen what crosses that big desk. I’ve seen the unexpected crisis that arrives in a cable in a young aide's hand. And I have seen problems that simmer on for decades and suddenly demand resolution. And I’ve seen modest decisions made with anguish, and crucial decisions made with dispatch.
And so I know that what it all comes down to, this election - what it all comes down to, after all the shouting and the cheers - is the man at the desk.
And who should sit at that desk?
My friends, I am that man.

At that point I turned to my friend and said, "George just won the election!"

The whole speech was good, but those couple paragraphs made Bush 41 look and sound presidential... like a guy you'd want to be your president. That's what put him over the top... and that's the genius of Peggy Noonan.