Noonan disses youth, a Yarbro lesson
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan writes that America is in need of some adult supervision, yearning for the days of yore when elder statesmen provided sage advice and leadership based on years of experience.
Noonan’s context is largely politics and something of a slap to President Obama, with only a quick tweak of his predecessor George Bush. The context has to be politics because after all, adult supervision of Wall Street youthfulness helped cause the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.
Perhaps if there had been better adult supervision in the White House or in Congress in both parties, the mess might not have happened. She touches on Wall Street but not in the way she should have. She also points out the youth movement in media where few old hands are left to tell a young blogger, “Son, being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life.”
Noonan’s column, however, provides a lesson that youthful candidates running for office in Tennessee could learn. Thirtysomething Nashville attorney Jeff Yarbro is trying to unseat eightysomething Sen. Doug Henry. If he succeeds in winning the seat, he replaces a man with decades of institutional knowledge. The measure of his success won’t be how infuses youthful ideas — at the end of the day there aren’t new ideas, just new uses for old ideas — but how he works with the more experienced legislators in influencing legislation and fulfilling his own campaign promises.
Noonan noted that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy’s relied on the old for advice. She cites the 43-year-old Kennedy’s near daily reliance on advice from 68-year-old British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. She didn’t include that Kennedy also had turned to Dean Acheson, former Secretary of State under President Truman, bringing the elder statesman into the strategic advisory group dealing with the crisis.
This isn’t to say that Yarbro is anything like Kennedy, other than the same political party, but to point out with an extreme example how youth of the past leaned on the advice of elders. If he beats Henry, the wise approach may be to say, “OK, sorry I got the best of you, but I will need your help.” Henry, the Southern gentleman that he is, likely will do just that.
As Noonan notes, we gravitate toward youth because of their vigor and almost unrepentant hopefulness. But as we all learn as we get older, our parents get smarter as we get older. The same is true for the older, experienced hands in the world. For the most part they’ve been there, done that and have the scars to prove it.
