In this column [Peggy] Noonan takes note of Biden’s patent incompetence to perform as president. Noonan recounts the story of Woodrow Wilson’s final years when Edith Wilson filled the president’s shoes. Gene Smith provided a popular account of the story in When the Cheering Stopped (1964). Noonan draws on Scott Berg’s biography Wilson (2014). It is at least worth noting in this context that I have referred to Jill Biden as “Edith” in posts extending back to “Quotations from Dementia Joe” (September 13, 2020).
I wish some cynical editor at the Journal had headlined Noonan’s column This Just In. Although it appears to have escaped Noonan’s notice, Biden’s decline has been visible to observers at least since since the 2020 presidential campaign. Mark Halperin states that he observed Biden’s senility up close in 2017. He hammers on Biden’s calling out to deceased Rep. Jackie Walorski at a White House event in September 2022: “Where’s Jackie?” This was in public over two years ago.
“Noonan calls herself a conservative,” but as Scott Johnson of Power Line wrote in August of 2020, she “all but endorsed Obama” at the end of October 2008, when it was obvious that Barry had the election virtually locked up, and Noonan wanted to jump aboard the bandwagon. During the 2020 election cycle she praised first Kamala Harris (“The daughter of East Bay professors grew up to become an excellent performer of politics,”) and then as Conrad Black observed in September of 2020, “Noonan’s decision to go full-metal-jacket for Joe Biden in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday opens a new flank in the Democratic assault on the incumbent president.”
Noonan would have regained some of the credibility she lost on the right for endorsing Obama if she had been willing during Biden’s term to consistently point out his obvious inability to lead, but that would risk being uninvited to Georgetown and Park Ave. cocktail parties.
UPDATE: Peggy Noonan Predicts A Romney Victory In The Most Anti-Nate Silver Column Imaginable.
Reason 4: Romney is winning the yard-sign battle, at least in Noonan’s eyes.
And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.
—Business Insider, November 5th, 2012.