Ur Losing Ur Mind, Peg

Peggy Noonan is in fine form today, with a substance-free (the critique, not Noonan) of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls. She offers one paragraph profiles: Dean is "bantamy," Lieberman is an egomaniac, Edwards lacks gravity, blah, blah, zzzz.... Equal parts stupidity and stuporousness. Of John Kerry, Nooner says

He brings his gravity with him; it changes the atmosphere around him. You imagine that in the balloon drop the balloons would come down fast and hard and obscure him at the podium.

Uh, that's not gravity, that's electrostatic magnetism. And drivel.

After realizing she can't get a whole column out of this blige, Nooner returns to Bush. And starts reading his mind. Apparently, there's not much there:

But George W. Bush also thinks a lot about '92. He saw what happened to his father up close and personal. And he knows part of the message of 1992 is that history can turn on a dime.

But he thinks there are other lessons of '92. He thinks history turns for a reason. He thinks not only bad luck but bad decisions and bad operations force history to turn. And he thinks none of that in any case is the Ur Lesson of 1992. To Bush the Ur Lesson of 1992 is: History does not necessarily repeat itself.

Two thousand four is not necessarily 1992; not all Bushes fall hard; new forces and facts yield new outcomes. History is more likely to repeat itself when you ask it to, when you unknowingly push it in certain directions, when you summon bad fortune. He doesn't intend to.

He thinks the Democrats haven't fully absorbed the Ur Lesson. He thinks however, that they'll discover it. And he thinks what they learn may someday be called the lesson of '04.

The other Ur Lesson of 1992: Don't hire an unmedicated psychotic as your chief speechwriter.