Commenter Upper West points me to Peggy Noonan’s latest: a meditation on the reg’lar guy charm on W and the creepiness of Barack Obama.
Coverage of the opening of his presidential library Thursday was wall to wall on cable, and a feeling of affection for him was encouraged, or at least enabled, by the Washington press corps, which doesn’t much like Mr. Obama because he’s not all that likable, and remembers Mr. Bush with a kind of reluctant fondness because he was.
[…]What was nice was that all of them-the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons-seemed like the old days. “The way we were.” They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren’t . . . creepy.
Yes, “creepy” is probably a synonym for “black”. But it would be wrong to reduce this to racism. Nooners is on the Sunday shows every week, Bri-Wi thinks she deserves a Pulitzer, and her columns consist primarily of speculative psychologizing and third-grade name-calling.
I wonder if this is what French establishment pundits sounded like in early 1789.