Meant to mention this over the weekend…
Peggy Noonan tends to work ahead of time on her weekly column for the WSJ, which runs in the print version on Saturday. I can’t swear to this, but I think I’ve seen it posted early on Friday in the past.
That makes her more of a Cindi Scoppe than a Brad Warthen. Cindi always wrote a piece as soon as the idea had fully coalesced and she had all the legwork for it, even if it wasn’t to run for days. I never started writing a column until the day it was due. I take that back; “never’ isn’t quite right. Sometimes I would stay late on Thursday night trying to write my Sunday column (which was due midday Friday). But when I did, I usually scrapped it for a fresher idea, or completely rewrote it, on Friday. Which made the work ahead of time seem sort of pointless.
There was also the thing that I just wrote better under deadline pressure, which is why what I did on Friday was better than anything I’d written on Thursday, usually.
But the biggest reason why I didn’t write ahead of time was beautifully illustrated by Ms. Noonan’s column this past weekend. An excerpt:
It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis. The debt and the deficit are part of it, part of the general fear that we’re on a long slide and can’t turn it around. The federal tax code is part of it—it’s a drag on everything, a killer of the spirit of guts and endeavor. Federal regulations are part of it. The administration’s inability to see the stunning and historic gift of the energy revolution is part of it.
But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look…
That’s how it started. This is how it ended:
… Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it. He thinks he’s in a wrestling match about taxing and spending, he thinks he’s in a game with those dread Republicans. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs.
Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.
There’s little sense he sees this. Dr. Doom talks about coming disaster when businessmen need the confidence to hire someone. He’s missing the boat on the central crisis of his second term.
Unlike many of her columns, which range across several topics, the whole thrust of this one was what a failure Obama is on jobs.
And yes, that column ran the day after we learned the economy had added a surprisingly high 236,000 jobs in February, bringing the unemployment rate to its lowest point in four years.
Now of course, one can quibble about how good that news is. And indeed, her column was updated with the new unemployment figure, and she wrote, “The jobless rate, officially 7.7%, is almost twice that if you include those who have stopped looking, work part time, or are only ‘marginally attached’ to the workforce.”
But still. If she’d waited until Friday to write the thing, she’d have chosen a different topic. This was the worst Saturday in four years for making the argument she advanced in this one.
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I’m sure we’ll keep hearing from the conservatives why a 237,000 monthly job creation is bad news somehow. As for me I’ll take that number any day. A years worth of those numbers and we’ll be fretting over the economy heating up and inflation bearing down. But for now let’s celebrate this wonderful turn of events and try to work together to keep it going. And for heavens sakes let’s quit worrying about the damn budget deficit. Really folks it’s not a problem right now. It really isn’t.
Noonan is syndicated, which generally means her stuff is available for editors a few days early.
On the other hand, does Noonan really care about facts?
She’s trying to get herself back in the conservatives’ good graces, since she has had favorable things to say about Obama in the past.
It’s sad that she implies Obama is deceptive with the 7.7%. It was her boss, Reagan, who redefined umployment to exclude part time workers and those out of the work force for an extended period.
It takes some brass for her to complain about Obama following Reagan’s model.
“He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. …”
Noonan doesn’t remember the past either.