In a president, character is everything. A president doesn’t have to be brilliant; Harry Truman wasn’t brilliant, and he helped save Western Europe from Stalin. He doesn’t have to be clever; you can hire clever. White Houses are always full of quick-witted people with ready advice on how to flip a senator or implement a strategy. You can hire pragmatic, and you can buy and bring in policy wonks.

But you can’t buy courage and decency, you can’t rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him. If he does, they will give meaning and animation to the great practical requirement of the presidency: He must know why he’s there and what he wants to do. He has to have thought it through. He needs to have, in that much maligned word, but a good one nontheless, a vision of the future he wishes to create. This is a function of thinking, of the mind, the brain.

Those are words penned by Peggy Noonan.  Very few would apply those three necessary tenants to Barack Obama.  Courage, decency, strong moral sense?  Voting present 130 times or lying about their record doesn’t make someone courageous.  Throwing the race card around doesn’t make one decent.  And palling around with America-hating racist Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, unrepentant terrorist William Ayers who wished he bombed more, or a convicted felon named Tony Rezko doesn’t usually accompany someone with a strong moral sense.  Courage, decency and a strong moral sense do accurately describe both John McCain and Sarah Palin… but Ms. Noonan has besmirched them and seems to endorse what they are not.  While we fight Islamic terrorism abroad and a socialist rebuilding of America at home, Ms. Noonan has abandoned her tenants of “courage, decency, and strong moral sense” to wage an attack on Mrs. Palin and the rest of us real conservatives in America… from her lofty perch we are nothing but the new “vulgarization in American politics.”

And Ms. Noonan isn’t the only one.  In light of McCain’s deficit in the polls, many so-called “Conservative Elites” are jumping ship and hitching themselves to the Obama Train.  Ronald Reagan might be rolling over in his grave.  Forgetting his 11th commandment, these so-called Conservatives are eating the party alive and abandoning whatever is left.

They don’t like Sarah Palin, or that Ayers was brought up, or whatever… maybe they are just charmed by Obama’s ability to deliver a speech, or are afraid they too will be tagged as a racist.  So they abandon any conservative ideals they have held over the years and hang their hats with a liberal extremist who seeks to reconstruct American in the vein of Karl Marx.

And I say good riddance.  I respect Ms. Noonan’s eloquence as much as anyone… but we are rebuilding this Republican party after the election, regardless of the outcome.  And we only need the faithful being part of the process.  I’ll trade you one elitist columnist like Peggy Noonan for a liberal statesman like Joe Lieberman any day.  At least Senator Lieberman has convictions.  It takes courage to have convictions.  Those who think values can be changed like an old pair of shoes need not apply.

And before you think I’m going off in left field, let’s remember why Ronald Reagan, the standard bearer of the modern Republican Party, joined the party in the first place.

When Ronald Reagan was an actor in Hollywood, like most other actor-types, he was a Democrat.  But once he turned down a movie roll he was offered after figuring out that it would bump him up to the next tax bracket.  If that happened, he would only take home 10 cents on every dollar he earned, the other ninety cents going to pay taxes.  Why should he work for only 10% of his salary?  It was that realization that caused him to drift towards the Republican party, and he became a case study on the “progressive tax system” and how it discourages success.

Yet that very idea of penalizing and thus marginalizing success is the “spread the wealth around” socialist fight we are seeing in Obama’s campaign today.  This election has lasted too-long and President Reagan’s name has been mentioned too often.  But this time it fits.  This was one of Reagan’s causes… his very purpose for becoming a Republican.  And Ms. Noonan and other so-called “Conservative Elites” have defected from that very crucial fight.

So be it.  This is supposed to be a country of citizen servants, not career politicians.  If the Washington intelligentsia have lost all precepts of “we the people” than the Sarah Palins and Joe Plumbers of the world need to stand up.  Its time we take our country back.

This is the greatest country in the world not because people like Peggy Noonan tell us it is, but because people like Sarah Palin make it so.  They rise from the PTA to take on big oil and shake things up.  Its the way the founders intended.  Don’t let the Noonan’s of the world fool you.  Their inner beltline cocktail parties or Ivy League educations don’t make them more apt to deal with America’s problems, it just makes them arrogant enough to think no one else can.  And that is why they have failed us all.

It is ironic that the Washington Post editorial board disparaged John McCain for picking a Vice Presidential candidate not ready to lead while proclaiming Barack Obama somehow is.  Put their educations and passports aside and what do you have?  A Governor who has real accomplishments, who has achieved more than her resume would suggest… or a Senator who has never achieved anything, whose only accomplishment has been the nomination itself.  I’ll take the person who strives for greatness and gets results over the empty suit who thus far has failed to earn the sacrifices of those who paved his way.

Greatness is not eloquence or an Ivy League education.  Greatness is showing up and having the courage to fight.  Greatness is having values and ideals that you hold through difficult times instead of philosophies that change whenever the winds of hope blow.

This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

Those are words Ms. Noonan wrote about Sarah Palin, yet those are words she need apply to herself and not the Governor from Alaska.  Sarah Palin has been without healthcare, has worked her way up, has juggled two family incomes and raising kids while making a real difference in America.  Since leaving the speechwriters circle, all Ms. Noonan has done is write about those things.  Ms. Noonan “cannot, actually, imagine” the pain and difficulty of real Americans who she considers “vulgar”.  Nor is Ms. Noonan a leader of the Conservative movement.  She is just another snobbish elite who thinks she is knows better than the rest of us.  That, my dear, is the first step towards socialism.  So I guess its fitting she seems to follow what she imagines is the hope for America in Barack Obama… too bad the rest of us see him for what he really is, the harbinger of Marxist change.

Good bye Ms. Noonan, the Republican Party didn’t leave you… you left us, just when it was time to fight.  Ms. Noonan used to cherish character above all.  Or were those just words?