Peggy Noonan Travels The Dusty Texas Plains, Where Deer And Third-Party Candidates Roam

“Dang it! Wake up, woman!”

She was at the bottom of a well, was Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Amytal Tepidness. Or not a well, but some deep, dark night of the soul, an abyss of a blackness so dark that no light could penetrate it that stretched above her, an abyss for which there was no end, an abyss in which time and space meant nothing and everything …

“Confound it!” The voice rang in her ears again, a tinny, high-pitched whine with a distinct Texas accent, like a leprechaun born in Amarillo.

“A lepre-what now? Peggy, you’re makin’ less sense than a steer in a salad bar. Come on now, stop with the dramatics. You’re just asleep.”

And so she was, she realized as she opened her eyes. That insistent little voice had reached down and pulled her back into consciousness. She had been dozing while sitting upright, her backside firmly planted on a hard and unyielding surface. A wooden bench, she realized. And what was the rest of this space? It was a tiny, enclosed carriage bumping across the ground. Frilly curtains. No legroom. Hot Texas air spiraling in through open windows. The scent of tobacco and body odor and horse manure assaulted her nostrils like Indians charging a wagon train. She was … she was in …

“Yep, it’s a stagecoach,” piped the leprechaun voice. She looked across at the face sitting atop a neck so skinny that the bolo tie knotted at its throat looked as large as a beach towel. Ears jutted from either side of the skull like flaps on an airplane wing. Something about the face was so familiar.

“It’s me, Ross Perot!” He did not so much say his name as squeak it. “And yeah, you’re in my stagecoach and we’re lighting out for the prairie! I coulda had us take my limo or my private jet, but where’s the fun in that? What would you rather do, get where we’re goin’ in modern comfort, or sit here and listen to me talk and talk and talk for days on end as we roll through this scorching and vast nothingness where there ain’t so much as a Howard Johnson or a Sizzler where we can take a break? Sure I’m dead, but I can still have opinions!”

“Ain’t no sense in that,” he added as she scrabbled for the door handle. “It’s a hunnert degrees outside and we’re a two-day walk from the nearest road. Maybe longer in that petticoat. Nah, best you just settle in. We’ll talk politics, that’ll pass the time, and if you want to, you just go on and scream. Nothin’ out there to hear you but some lizards.”

Seventy percent of his own party doesn’t want Joe Biden to run. More than half his party doesn’t want Donald Trump to run. Yet here at the moment we are, with this growing sense of sad inevitability.

“Well shoot, it’s April of 2023. There was pretty limited enthusiasm for Joe Biden in April of 2019, too. People like Biden, but they ain’t like MAGA folks, they’re not goin’ feral over it. And the primaries ain’t for but ten months yet, people got other things to do. As for Trump, the half of his party that doesn’t want him seems to mostly consist of wealthy donors who are constantly anonymously telling reporters they sure wish someone else would do somethin’ about stopping him. Not what you’d call a groundswell of anti-Trumpism, that’s for sure. Here, have some hyena jerky.”

Mr. Biden is unopposed because his party couldn’t rouse itself to do what Democrats have almost existed to do, have a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl. Sometimes party discipline is a failure and a mistake.

“Peggy, the last time Democrats had a big, mean, knockdown, drag-out brawl in a primary where the incumbent president was running for re-election was 1980. You remember a brawl with Clinton in ’96 or Obama in 2012? Not too many Democrats at the end of the day will want to damage the incumbent like Teddy Kennedy did to Jimmy Carter. Not if the stakes are keeping Donald Trump out of office.”

He ran an arm across his forehead. “This jerky’s dang salty, ain’t it? Probably shouldn’t have drunk all the water I brought an hour into the trip.”

I agree with those who say the problem isn’t only Joe Biden’s age but the implication his age carries: that if he is re-elected there’s a significant chance Kamala Harris will become president.

“George H.W. Bush won an election with Dan Quayle on the ticket. Then he got sick in Japan and nobody exactly ran for the fallout shelters. People are votin’ for the guy at the top of the ticket. They’re not seriously thinkin’ about the unthinkable when they’re in the votin’ booth.”

“Except with Sarah Palin,” he added after barely a moment’s hesitation. “Whew, doggie, that woman didn’t exactly inspire confidence in John McCain’s decision-making capabilities. Kamala Harris at least ain’t nuttier than an armadillo trapped in a oil well. Say, you sure you don’t have some water on you? Juice? Gatorade?”

I’m not going to pick on [Ron DeSantis] on the Disney fight. I thought Disney wrong to come forward, as a major corporation, and use its beloved name to take sides on a delicate state educational issue.

“Disney comes forward, they’re takin’ a side. They don’t come forward, they’re still takin’ a side. They didn’t want to take the side that would purposely exclude a good chunk of their customer base. Their whole brand is that anyone is welcome! Anyway, they ain’t gonna rise or fall on whether a bunch of bigots in Jacksonville won’t let their kids wear Mickey Mouse T-shirts.”

Perot’s left eyelid had begun to twitch.He took another jerky stick and shoved it down his throat like he was swallowing a sword.

[A] big challenge for corporations is to remember their mission. For more than a century Budweiser’s mission was to make beer and sell it at a profit. Disney has been entertaining America for nearly a century. They should do that. Except in the most extraordinary and essential cases they shouldn’t give in to the temptation to put themselves forward as deep-thinking cultural leaders.

“Wasn’t but a few years ago that conservatives were screaming about corporations having free speech rights. Now y’all want them to shut up and just put on Snow White costumes and cheerily wave to all the heterosexual nuclear families and not admit that trans people drink beer. Make up your dang minds!”

He licked his lips as his eyes rolled in their sockets like marbles soaked in grease. “Coca-Cola? Iced tea? Sweat? Nothin’ at all? Okay. Don’t know how you’re not going crazy with the thirst either. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”

Second, watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it’s provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We’ll see how that works.

“Same as it works every cycle: Credulous pundits will keep saying it could happen right up until the moment it doesn’t. There hasn’t been a solid third-party candidate since I did it thirty years ago, and back then the GOP wasn’t controlled by a bunch of pissed-off suburban used-car salesmen. Again, Donald Trump. Back in office. Lordy.”

Third-party enthusiasts tend to be moderate, sober-minded.

Perot began screaming. He threw himself at the stagecoach door and rolled himself into a ball and kept rolling across the dusty Texas countryside, still screaming. She watched as this little rolling ball of a man faded into the distance, a cloud of dust and his ever-more-distant screams the only indication that she was not having some sort of hallucination borne of a combination of medication and salty hyena meat.

She reached out and pulled the door closed and promptly forgot about the strange little man. There were miles of stagecoach travel to go, and a column to turn in at the end.

[WSJ]

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