NOONAN: YOU'RE TELLING IT WRONG!

Peggy Noonan today, on President Obama:

... communicating is his obsession. He made this clear again in his interview last week with Charlie Rose. "The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right," he said. "But, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism."

I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?

Did you know that Peggy Noonan thinks presidents shouldn't try to tell us stories?

Funny, I seem to recall her expressing a different point of view in her memoir of her Reagan years:





She's got nothing against presidential stories per se. She just doesn't want Obama muscling in on her hero's turf.

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Noonan also has a curious theory about why Mitt Romney won't release more tax returns:

The reason Mitt Romney isn't releasing more tax returns can be reduced to three words: Bill Clinton's underwear. When he first ran for president, Bill Clinton put out his tax returns. Lisa Schiffren, an enterprising young writer for The American Spectator, went through them and found that the Clintons, when they were in Little Rock, had gone to great lengths to limit their tax bills, to the point of itemizing each contribution to local charities, including Mr. Clinton's old underwear. Hilarity ensued. This is the kind of thing everyone in national politics fears.

Yeah, that must be it. It couldn't possibly be because there's anything in them that would expose him as a stinking-rich greedhead who successfully gamed the system through ruses and loopholes that simply aren't available to us peasants.

It must be that he wants to avoid the kind of small one-day embarrassment that, in 1992, befell Bill Clinton. Who won the election by 5 1/2 percentage points.