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"Politics in a democracy are always 'vulgar' ? since democracy is rule by the 'vulgus,' the common people, the crowd."

Writes William Kristol, rankling at Peggy Noonan's "In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics."

I've read both columns, and it is Noonan's that moves me to quote more:

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

Noonan isn't looking for an eggheadedness, just coherence.

I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

And now I'm moved to go back to Buckley's column, which I only skimmed last week:

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget ?by the end of my first term.? Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain?who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic....

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a ?first-class temperament,? pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.?s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he?s a Harvard man, though that?s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days....

I?ve read Obama?s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I?m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O?Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren?t going to get us out of this pit we?ve dug for ourselves....

Buckley's explanation makes perfect sense to me.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 20, 2008 (boomark / email).