Sizing Up the Seismic Shifts

Like politics? If so, "you are waking up each morning with a spring in your step" because of this year's political hayride, Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative essayist sizes up the shifts—Democrats rebelling against the Clintons; Republicans thumbing their noses at conservative leadership—and declares it "the most exciting and confounding election cycle of my lifetime."

Noonan lauds the "principled" courage of Ted Kennedy for backing Barack Obama and thus dissing the Clintons. "All parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive." As for the GOP, conservative honchos prefer Mitt Romney over John McCain—but "Republicans on the ground" believe McCain "earned it."