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Here's the letter to the editor I submitted to the WSJ in response to this latest bit of nonsense from Peggy Noonan. Alas, they chose not to publish it:

This article reminded of something I read in a biography of the poet Ann Sexton. The biographer noted that it’s always sad to learn that a great writer didn’t live up to the wisdom of her own words.

My favorite political memoir is Peggy Noonan’s “What I Saw at the Revolution.” One passage in that wonderful book stands out in my mind:

“I’ll tell you something surprising: This sunny man touched so many Americans in part because they perceived his pain. They saw beyond the television image, they saw the flesh and blood, they felt those wounds, they caught that poignancy. The reporters and correspondents and smart guys, they missed it. But the people saw. They thought, Look at the courage it took at his age to be shot in the chest by a kid with a gun and go through healing and therapy and go out there again and continue being president, continue waving at the crowds as he walks to the car. Think of the courage that old man had!”

Tens of thousands of ordinary Americans are standing for hours in the rain to see Sarah Palin because they see in this “sunny lady” the “flesh and blood”. The reporters and the smart guys don’t get it. Dear Ms. Noonan doesn’t get it either.

We see in Sarah Palin two qualities lacking in Washington, DC: courage and integrity. We see a woman who was brutalized by the media and the kooks on the left, and yet was plucky enough to step on stage and give a speech that wowed the world and then go toe to toe with a six term senator and come out the better. We see a woman who blew the whistle on the crooks in her own party – resigning from her first big six figure job despite the very real possibility that doing so would spell the end of her political career. We see someone who beat both an incumbent and a well respect former governor though she was outspent and didn’t have the support of her own party, the labor unions, the environmentalists, and the oil industry. She did it all by herself. And if you want to know what her governing philosophy is you need only look at her record. One of her first acts in office was to request that all government agencies reduce their spending by 10 percent or she'd reduce it for them.

The left is attempting to paint Palin as George W. Bush in a skirt, and some members of the right are buying into it. Palin governed as a strict fiscal conservative. Bush did not. Palin's populism is based on American values of self reliance and local autonomy. Bush's populism was grounded in what he called "compassionate conservatism" -- which translated into big government spending programs which were really only a more efficient variation of LBJ's Great Society. Palin doesn't promise goodies and programs. She simply promises to put government back on the side of the people by reining in spending and making sure taxes are low. That's basic Reagan Revolution conservatism.

Ms. Noonan strangely asserts that Palin doesn’t understand us. I disagree. I think she gets us quite well. Her closing comments during her debate struck a cord. She said:

"It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."

We're in the midst of billion dollar bailouts and government takeovers of private industry. We're becoming crippled by our dependency on foreign sources of oil. We're witnessing our Chinese bankers walk on the moon, and our former European welfare wards mock our current financial crisis and gleefully report that our days of economic preeminence are over. I think Palin has a point when she expresses the fear that our sunset years will be defined by a bitter nostalgia for all that we lost.

The permanent political punditry on the right and left still don't really understand the average smoes like me. The current batch of rightwing punditry are graduates of the Reagan years and yet they no longer really understand what made him new because they themselves have grown old. The rest of us don't spend our days chronicling Belt Way intrigues. We don't know what the "Dingell-Norwood" is and frankly we don't care. Many of us don't even feel the need to vote because we've come to expect government to be useless and politicians to be little more than pandering freeloaders. We pay our taxes every April 15 and expect that our elected representatives will do their job or at least not make things worse for us. We secretly suspect that they do next to nothing, or at least nothing really useful. They just live off our money. Fine, just don't burn down the house. And don't try to soak us for more money.

What do we “Main Streeters” hear in Sarah Palin? We hear a person who doesn’t make wild promises. She doesn’t promise to give everyone a pet unicorn and an eco-friendly magic carpet. She promises to protect our interests by reigning in the growth of this selfish beast that eats our tax dollars and finds new ways to bring our country to the brink. She promises to responsibly lead us in completing missions in distant countries where we never wanted to go and hope never to have to return. She doesn’t promise that the wars will be over tomorrow, but she does promise that we will listen to our generals from now on so that we won’t be seeing dozens of flag-draped coffins every month. She doesn’t promise that the whole world will love us again (if they ever did), but she promises that we will stay strong enough to deter those who don't like us, and we will become self-sufficient in the one area most crucial to our long term security -- energy.

She gave a clearer and simpler explanation of what America represents that any neocon I've read:

"America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights. Those things that we stand for that can be put to good use as a force for good in this world."

That might sound like boilerplate to Ms. Noonan, but to us it sounds true and heartfelt without seeming belligerent or arrogant. It’s simple, but not simplistic. It’s even humble in admitting our faults. And she said it all with a wink and a smile just like that other sunny optimist.

The pundits don't get it. They think it's either phony populism or politically savvy populism. It's not either. It's just "Main Streeter" Americanism.

Palin in this campaign has shown herself to be the quintessential happy warrior. Her jab at Obama’s “palling around with terrorists” was spot on. First because it applied the correct moniker to Bill Ayers and his wife – terrorists. People who blow up government buildings and plot to murder soldiers and their dates are terrorists. It’s shameful that the media is unwilling to acknowledge this. By describing his connection with this disreputable couple as “palling around,” Palin is not being flippant, she’s mocking Obama. She’s mocking the weird world of leftist activism in which an unrepentant leftwing version of Timothy McVeigh can magically be rehabilitated into a respectable edu-crat. Barack Obama palled around in that bizarro world of ends-justify-the-means leftist activism, and for that he deserves to be mocked.

As for “Joe Six-Pack” being divisive – oh, please. Come on. She didn’t specify whether it was microbrew or Budweiser, Sam Adams, Rolling Rock, Coors, Corona, or Alaska Amber. This is America and we like beer served cold on the Fourth of July!