Glenn Greenwald picks up on the other -- the British -- meaning of "poof" and knocks Peggy Noonan back into her corner. Noonan writes, convinced that she's being a reasonable grown-up: "We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it. John Edwards is not reasonable. . . . .[W]e can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't."
Peggy Noonan winds up in that dirty little back room with Ann Coulter. Let's hope she stays there (yeah, dream on!).
The other presidential "poof" is getting serious. After all, if taking time in front of a mirror and "poofing" one's hair is a disqualifier, just about any woman is ruled out by conventional observers. Unlike men who generally lose much of their hair -- too much to spend a whole lot of time "poofing" -- it is written that wimmins have got to look good all the time. Can we forgive Hillary for her style?
Hillary, albeit riddled with personal ambition, has been galvanized by events in the real world, the world Peggy Noonan isn't really grown-up enough to live in.
The world is a scary place; the economy feels as though it's ready to collapse, healthcare bills keep going up and up, the country is mired in wars, and the government just doesn't seem to work right. And that's only the trouble we knew about Wednesday -- as Benazir Bhutto's assassination on Thursday made starkly clear, unexpected crises cross the president's desk every day.
"On Jan. 20, 2009, someone will raise his or her hand to take the oath of office in front of our Capitol," Clinton said as she launched her final bus tour of Iowa. "And then that person will go to the Oval Office. And on the desk in the Oval Office will be a stack of problems."
That's what Clinton's campaign is about now, right down to the clunky official name of the tour, "Big Problems, Real Solutions -- Time to Pick a President."
Me personally? I like the candidate with the very short hair. Oh, and I don't care who his hairdresser is, I want to know about who's advising him and whose advice he's taking.
