Peggy Noonan has a great column this morning. She has one flash of brilliance – that president Bush’s heavy drinking as a father may have made him actually slightly afraid of his children – and one important point:
I have a theory that liberals and leftists prefer their leaders complicated, and conservatives prefer their leaders uncomplicated. I think the left expects a good leader to have an exotic or intricate personality or character. (A whole generation of liberal journalists grew up reading Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill on Bobby Kennedy’s sense of tragedy, Murray Kempton on the bizarreness that was LBJ, and a host of books with names like “Nixon Agonistes” and “RFK at Forty,” and went into journalism waiting for the complicated politicians of their era to emerge. They are, that is, pro-complication because their ambition to do great work like the great journalists of the 1960s seems to demand the presence of complicated political figures.) Liberals like their leaders interesting. I always think this may be because some of them have not been able to fully engage the idea of a God, and tend to fill that hole in themselves with politics and its concerns. If the world of government and politics becomes your god, and yields a supergod called a president, you want that god to be interesting.
Amen, if you’ll pardon the expression. I prefer the alternative locution: I’m a conservative in politics so I might be a radical in every other human activity. The point is: what is appropriate for presiding over a republic of laws? Modesty, simplicity, prudence. Anything more “interesting” can screw things up badly. And yes, that’s why my favorite presidents are Eisenhower, Truman and Bush. (Every now and again, of course, the times demand much more. If we’re lucky we get a Reagan. If we’re not, we get a Carter. But even in those circumstances, better for the leader to be uncomplicated and unconflicted.)
The Dish 