It's Obama's Moment: Hold On for Dear Life: Noonan

Peggy Noonan gives it up for Barack Obama today. “He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing,” she writes, and his election will “serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which needs rebuking.” He showed good judgment during the campaign, she allows. "He showed grace when he didn't have to."

John McCain, meanwhile, “rarely got down to the meaning of things.” McCain never achieved coherence in his campaign, though he did honestly want to help the country. And there is the danger that Obama’s administration will be, as Tim Pawlenty put it, a “runaway train,” of unchecked liberal initiatives. “But let’s be frank,” Noonan concludes. “Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life.” (More Election 2008 stories.)