Just A Big Ego

For a writer who is usually too moderate and soft-spoken for my tastes, Peggy Noonan was in rare form today as she took a rhetorical howitzer and blasted away at the culture of hubris inside the Beltway.

My favorite passage was her powerbombing of Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), whose head is evidently swelling like a tin of Jiffy-Pop on a hot stove:

This week comes the previously careful Senator Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat - in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles."

Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.

You see the similarities.

Ouch. If a nice lady like Peggy Noonan leaves you in need of smelling salts and butterfly bandages....

Well, it's like a steel mill in my hometown when I was growing up. It was called the E.T. Pybus Company, and it was located at the bottom of Fifth Street on the banks of the Columbia River. The street ended in a boat launch ramp, leading to the popular slogan of their radio ads:

"If you've passed the E.T. Pybus Company" - SPLASH! - "You've gone too far!"

Ms. Noonan's version is, "Is it no longer possible in American politics to speak of another's greatness without suggesting your own?"

Perhaps; but apparently in inverse proportion to one's proximity to the levers of national power.