Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin after the speech

Read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

'Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.

'It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

'This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in '80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this country that never stops changing is.'

She could not be more right. From the time Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in 1953, conservatives have been fighting the collectivist idea that state-sponsored "progress" is presumptively superior to individual liberty, local custom, tradition, and home rule. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the wave he had helped create into the White House. In 1994, the Republicans captured both houses of Congress on the same wave. (How they squandered their opportunity to reform the federal government and deteriorated into the party of crony capitalism and the auctioneers of tax subsidies is a sad story.)

For the last twenty years, liberals have fought back, started think-tanks, publications, etc., and won national elections in 1992, 1996, and 2006. (Because I believe in "liberty," which comes from the same root as "liberal," I won't demonize liberals. Having grown up in the South, I have seen the word "conservative" used for all kinds of mischief and evil. I have seen both "liberal" and "conservative" used as epithets, but I prefer to use such words for the meanings intended by those who identify by them.)

We are gridlocked today. The conservatives (I mean the best of the bunch) are not going to persuade a working majority of the U.S. Congress to dismantle half the government functions added since 1933. The liberals are not likely to have a working majority in Congress capable of consolidating government and creating their dreams of single-payer healthcare, federally-subsidized daycare, union-shop laws in every jurisdiction, affirmative action enforced in virtually every sector, and a federal monopoly on the licensure of lethal force.

This is what I think Peggy Noonan meant when she said about the McCain campaign, "It's over." After she was caught cursing into an open microphone, she explained herself in this column. You know I like Ms. Noonan's columns very much. Some people will say that she was talking about the candidate. If she really was, she is entitled to her opinion, but she has watched a lot of presidential campaigns, and I doubt she or anyone else would declare this one "over" unless John McCain was "caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy."

What Ms. Noonan is saying in her columns is worth reiterating. The Republicans wanted a candidate like Sarah Palin who could articulate their faith, hopes, loves, doubts, and fears. Governor Palin can certainly do so, and perhaps millions of voters who might not have voted for a naval aviator who has spent half of his adult life in the Capitol will vote for this ticket. Nonetheless, millions of younger voters today have known nothing but suburbia, conformity, government-regulated everything, government-subsidized everything, Blue Cross-Blue Shield if you are lucky, institutional public-school mediocrity, unaspirational art, and the world's highest rate of incarceration. What Russell Kirk and Ronald Reagan once defended would now have to be recreated to a large extent. Do we have the moral imagination to do so?

Ms. Noonan is asking this question. I doubt we do, though I pray we rise to the occasion. If the Republicans can turn this election into one of ideas over fear, aspiration over despair, art over utilitarianism, poetry rather than sound bites, policies over slogans, education of voters rather than arousing of voters' ire, genuine strength instead of jingoism, catholicity rather than Manicheism, and persuasion rather than demonization, the country will be better off, even if the Republicans lose. Victory by hook or crook is not enough. Conservative slogans are not enough. I doubt seriously if we conservatives have the moral imagination to carry the country, even if our weathered pilings can hold against the storm for one more cycle.

If Barack Obama expresses aspirations bottled, stifled, busted, almost lost, and possibly resurrected, Sarah Palin expresses such things for a different kind of voter. Governor Palin will suffer much during the next few weeks, an intense dose of what Senator Obama has become numb to, if not used to. I am afraid, as is Ms. Noonan, that we are going to have a brutal election because a vocal and malicious minority in each party is sure that America is too small a country to nurture the aspirations of both those who cheer Senator Obama and those who nod their heads and smile at the words of Governor Palin.

I disagree with those whose America is so small. I will conclude by quoting a president whose aspirations were seldom matched by his deeds, but who spoke for all of us when he said during one of the debates with President Gerald Ford in 1976: "There is nothing bad about America that cannot be solved by something good about America."