Peggy Noonan today is in the vanguard of what could become a political wave: a call for older, more mature politicians who’ve had actual experiences in-get this-doing things.
All right, you know what I think people miss when they look at Washington and our political leadership? They miss old and august. They miss wise and weathered. They miss the presence of bruised and battered veterans of life who’ve absorbed its facts and lived to tell the tale.
This is a nation-a world-badly in need of adult supervision.
When Mr. Youth and Vi-gah himself was president, he relied on the counsel of oldies but goodies, including British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan:
Harold Macmillan, a veteran of World War I who’d seen the end of empires. President Kennedy had 11 months before he lost the counsel of his father, debilitated by a stroke. Macmillan was a father figure, and a good one-wry, pragmatic, sly when necessary, alive to human sentiment. When asked by ferocious young conservatives why he couldn’t get tough with the coal miners, he explained he’d been in the trenches with them, gone over the top with them. Margaret Thatcher came along soon enough with the needed toughness. It all worked out. Anyway, JFK knew to look to the deeply experienced and mature, which was important for him because he wasn’t the former or always the latter.
This is a hugely insightful column. Some might quibble with Noonan in her praise of the Wise Men, the experienced elder statesmen who used to have immense authority in Washington, who were done in by their support for the war in Viet Nam, and I find it ironic that she cited the fictional Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as an example of adult leadership. I love the book, but Flannery O’Connor rightly called it a children’s book. Atticus is a hero who enforces what you believed in all along. Be that as it may, Noonan’s column is probably the most provocative thing I’ve read this week.
Here’s something else I think we’ve had enough of: charisma. It’s another Kennedy legacy, but not a key ingredient in solving, say, the mammoth financial problems confronting us.