Peggy and Mitt

Peggy, Peggy, Peggy!!

We love Peggy Noonan, we really do, even when she goes off the reservation from time to time.

Writing in Saturday’s WSJ, she starts with a riff on whether governors or senators have what it takes to make the better president given the questionable premise that governors are better versed in domestic issues, but are at sea when it comes to foreign affairs.  Conversely, senators are seen to acquire more exposure, and presumably, expertise in the diplomatic realm, but are weak on domestic issues.

The waters get muddier when it is asserted that governors, for some reason, can more easily shore up their weak side than senators. In an effort at counterpoint to these assumptions I give you Messrs. Obama and Kerry and Ms. Clinton. All three have been senators but apparently didn’t get the memo on their accumulated foreign affairs expertise. We would argue that an evaluation of their collective diplomatic abilities is not improved even if we assume, as does Dinesh D’Souza, that the foreign relations goal of the current administration is to drag America down from world power status to world-class has been. Surely having the British prime Minister lobby the U.S. Senate on behalf of the president’s Iran strategy, is a new low.

We now get to the meat of Peggy’s piece, and his name is Mitt Romney.

Peggy’s credentials as a Reaganophile, of course, date back to her service in the Reagan administration and frankly, she has a lot of company, including ourselves. Her argument that Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan, while true, should also point out that Reagan clones are also non-existent among the rest of the list of possible 2016 presidential candidates. We are not sure that even a reincarnated Ronald Reagan could measure up to his own prior record.

One of the greatest failures of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is the way he has divided the country. Liberals vs. conservatives, haves vs. have nots and who would argue that there has been an improvement in race relations during his term and a half? We could go on.

When Peggy tells us that there is not, and never will be, anything like Romneyism, we see this as a backhanded smack against Mitt’s conservative bona-fides. We would argue that what is needed in a president is not another end-of-spectrum ideologue, but rather a well-organized and experienced manager who might be able to reign in of an almost out-of-control administration as reflected by a national debt in excess of $17 Trillion!

First of all, the government must be fiscally brought to heel by bringing back an effective budget control system. Living within our means may sound trite, but ignoring it has been putting us on the road to fiscal perdition.

As a supplementary effort, the federal agencies must be nudged back to their stated functions. The I.R.S., the Justice Department and the veterans Administration are a few for starters. Rahm Emanuel has said that the federal government is grown to the point that it is uncontrollable. We think he is right if the Chief Executive with the constitutional mandate to do the controlling has little administrative skill beyond neighborhood organizing. America is full of large entities that are generally well-managed. If anyone can prove Rahm Emanuel wrong, Mitt is the guy.

As far as any perceived lack of foreign affairs expertise is concerned, revisiting Mitt’s comments from the last campaign shows that this ex-governor knows a thing or two about the rest of the world. Moreover, it could be argued that the real problem with our diplomatic relations stems not from a lack of execution, but rather a mush-headed set of assumptions about America’s international strategy. A re-instatement of the country’s core values could go a long way towards putting our diplomatic relations back on an even keel. And as Peggy has told us. Mitt, as a former governor, has a natural leg up in getting up to speed in this area