Noonan on the SOTU

The Feline Theocracy's Holy Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media, Peggy Noonan, has a great piece today analyzing the president's State of the Union speech. What I like most about Peggy is how she analyzes things as a professional and not an idealogue. Peggy was a speechwriter for Reagan and often has shrewd insights about what a speech means and the internal mechanisms by which it was crafted. Here was one of her best points on this one.

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don't trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

Italics in the original. It's a great point and one that illustrates the problem with being a populist and a statist at the same time, particularly when your party has had partial control over the government for the last 36 months and total control for the last 12.