The Wall Street Journal’s Republican columnist Peggy Noonan gave some odd advice to Mitt Romney last month: “He should peer deep into the abyss,” she wrote, suggesting he, “Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” (Not really, no.) “How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play?” (It’s not.) “How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans?” In a post last night, Noonan keeps on her misguided Brooklyn kick, this time breathless about the borough’s diversity.
Noonan, it turns out, went to a street fair in Bay Ridge:
A Mexican woman across the way had a headset on and was telling everyone how to make the best salad ever with her Super-Hyper-Veg-O-Matic. She had a big crowd. Young Asian kids with iPhones were tweeting what they were seeing as they walked behind their grandparents. Two teenage Arab girls were sitting on storage boxes and laughing, and as I walked by I saw they were breezing through pictures on an iPhone and posting them on Facebook.
[…] There was a really loud kind of rap group, and I asked who it was because I didn’t get its composition—young black and Hispanic men, middle-aged white woman.
“The entire political future of America is on this street,” she proclaims. Um:
And they are politically up for grabs.
They are not Democrats and Republicans, they are citizens. And who wins them, wins the future. They haven’t inhaled a political persuasion, they’re getting a sense of both parties, they’re meeting them.
That’s not exactly true: About half of Bay Ridge’s registered voters are Democrats, while less than a quarter are Republicans. Noonan basically admitted as much elsewhere in her street fair gonzo dispatch. “At the Obama 2012 booth,” she writes, “some members of ‘Brooklyn Democrats for Change’ teased me, gave me an Obama button, and posed for pictures. (No Romney booth, alas).” But the colors! All of the colors can be downright intoxicating.
