Peggy Noonan Reads the Signs

For your consideration, here is a list of the “evidence” Peggy Noonan assembles to sustain her argument that “things are shifting” in the 2008 campaign:

• McCain’s YouTube videos have now received more hits than Obama’s.
• A friend of hers recently compared Barack Obama to Thomas Dewey.
• An historically unprecedented convergence of pundit wisdom has spontaneously concluded that Barack Obama is a sojourning, arrogant nothing in an empty suit he bought after a vacuous speech in Nowheresville (where a bunch of Europeans probably live).
• Following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, McCain secured the drunken biker/banana-fellator vote.

So far, Noonan has failed to discern a pod of dolphins bearing little John McCain to safety, but the election is several months off, so there’s time yet for miracles.

As for the substance of Noonan’s observations, I’m not sure it’s even worth pointing out that half the hits for McCain’s ads have likely come from embedded videos on progressive websites, where the head-scratching centers on the question of whether his campaign is more interested in dog-whistling racist assholes or scaring the pants of people who think the Left Behind series was a prescient vision of Things to Come. (Also, I’m assuming that Obama Girl is still handily defeating the McCain girls in the Equally Meaningless Musical Proxy Subdivision, so McCain’s advantage is probably a wash overall.)

Beyond that, I can’t imagine anything more absurd than the notion that the Sturgis biker rally somehow congregates the “silent majority” of American voters. I would think McCain could reach an equally representative cross-section of voters simply by attending a plushie/furry convention of some kind. But since a few thousand people dressed up like squirrels and pandas or masturbating to old Pepe le Pew cartoons wouldn’t comport with Peggy Noonan’s fantasies of a robust and reptilian “old America,” she’d probably just ignore it if he did.