Noonan Abandoning Bush for Romney?

In my last post I wrote about how Bush, Rove, Cheney, etc., were doing their best to divide the Democratic Party, it was just speculation -- who knows whether it's true or not. However, what seems to be very true is Bush's unintentional alienation of his own party. In fact, he has managed to alienate his own party at least as successfully as the Democratic leadership did theirs last week with their weak stance on the Iraq troop spending bill. Seems like he forgot who he was talking too last Tuesday when many of the party faithful took exception to these remarks regarding his immigration bill:

"This reform is complex. There's a lot of emotions around this issue. Convictions run deep. Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don't like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people. Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all, so the people who wear the uniform in this crowd can do the job we expect them to do. Now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform. Now is the time for members of both political parties to stand up and show courage, and take a leadership role and do what's right for America."

Not only did he infer that opponents to the bill were unpatriotic but cowards as well. The NY Times reported that "Mr. Bush did not mean to impugn anyone’s patriotism, and that he had ad-libbed the line during a passionate address on an issue he holds dear." It was too late and many Republicans who are strongly opposed to his legislation were incensed that he would use the same rhetoric to question their patriotism that he has so often used on the Democrats.

Peggy Noonan spoke for many disillusioned Republicans in her 07/01/07 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:

"The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic.... What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks. "

She has finally seen the light or at least a glimmer of it.

I first heard about her opinion piece when I was listening to a "progressive" talk radio show where her reaction was discussed but not what exactly had set her off. I assumed it was Iraq, because I guess I naively don't quite understand why the immigration issue is such a big deal (didn't most of us have relatives and/or ancestors who came here from another country?)

Noonan surprisingly admits:

".... that the beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq."

So for over two years and through one election she kept her doubts to herself and now because of the immigration issue she decides it's time to go public. Thousands of coalition troops, mercenaries, and contract workers have been killed and 100s of thousands of Iraqis; billions of dollars spent and she decides it's immigration that is so horrible that she can no longer give her support to Bush.

Rumor has it that Noonan is planning to go to work for Mitt Romney. Is this the reason she trying to publicly separate herself from the president? She concludes her op-ed with: "Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time."

Sounds a little like what Romney is trying to do with his ads like "He cares and he is fearless...", "Tested, Proven...", "Now is the time...", etc. in which he is critical of Bush's over-spending, squandering of military strength, education policy and other shortcomings.