Noonan: There’s a New (Old) Meme in Town

There’s a new meme in town and Peggy Noonan is here to tell you about it:

There’s a thing that’s out there and it’s big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it.

Now, if you’re like me you automatically said “‘Ignorance,‘ Peggy, that thing out there you sense? It’s called ‘ignorance.'”

But Peggy has a different take on it:

I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed…

Yes. Well.

If this really is the emerging meme (and, really, what else does McCain have if not “oldness”) then I think it’s over. And if you don’t believe me, ask President Dole.

I’ll be blunt: America is about the “new,” not the “old.” Throughout the decades, America is that “army of steamrollers” that rolls by, the one James Earl Jones talked about in Field of Dreams. America is that army of steamrollers erasing everything like a blackboard, rebuilding it and erasing again.  And, yes, it will be rebuilt yet again because that is what we do. Good or bad, happy or sad, it is what it is.

It’s what Obama is talking about in this new ad, running during the Olympics:

Now McCain may want to be “the one constant throughout the years,” but that is not a proper aspiration for a man — nor is it smart because it makes you as old as Methuselah (and, repeat after me, America hates the old and loves the new).

Not only that, but McCain (in wanting to be that one constant thing) is over-reaching.

In Field of Dreams we learn that the one constant thing was baseball. In this campaign McCain wants us to learn that it is McCain. And if McCain wants to equate himself with baseball (or apple pie or hot dogs or the flag or the troops or General freaking Washington at Valley freaking Forge) it’s just silly — and arrogant.

UPDATE: I almost forgot to give you the rest of my notes from Noonan’s op-ed:

• Shorter Peggy Noonan: McCain wants new wars, therefore people will elect McCain president because people do not want new wars.

• “[Obama] is a young black man from nowhere who’s been well-known for less than a year.” Stop. Just stop. Obama was born in Hawaii, raised in Kansas, schooled at Harvard and settled in Chicago. Only a person who lives in Washington DC would call that “nowhere.”

• “[Obama’s team is] young and they’ve never been in power and it takes time to know what you don’t know…” Luckily, Obama’s a quick study and he’s got great instincts and judgment. So he’ll be fine. And besides — if you win the election you get the job anyway, right?

She shares a couple of stories with us too:

Two weeks ago a journalist, a moderate liberal, [Note: David Broder?] spoke to me [at a cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard?] of what he called Mr. Obama’s arrogance. I said I didn’t think it was arrogance but high self-regard. He said there’s no difference. I said no, arrogance has an air about it of pushing people around, insisting on your way…

…as in, “You’re either us or you’re for the terrorists.” Right, Peggy?

As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: “As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.” Oh, that was good.

It was, as Jon Stewart so famously said, the sound of money being sent to Saudi Arabia.

P.S. Why am I not surprised to learn that Noonan wrote about Old America back in June.