MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said Monday that The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan’s recent piece criticizing Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris came off as “bitchy” and that conservative white women should keep their mouths shut on certain topics.
Ms. Noonan, a former speechwriter and special assistant to the late President Ronald Reagan, was slammed by liberals over the weekend for a column criticizing Mrs. Harris, California senator, as unserious.
“She’s dancing with drum lines and beginning rallies with ‘Wassup, Florida!’” Ms. Noonan wrote. “She’s throwing her head back and laughing a loud laugh, especially when nobody said anything funny. She’s the younger candidate going for the younger vote, and she’s going for a Happy Warrior vibe, but she’s coming across as insubstantial, frivolous. When she started to dance in the rain onstage, in Jacksonville, Fla., to Mary J. Blige’s ‘Work That,’ it was embarrassing.”
Ms. Wallace, host of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” and former communications director for President George W. Bush, said Ms. Noonan has no business talking about something she knows “jack bleep about.”
“I don’t know if right-wing Twitter can handle this, I’ll give them a second to get their tweeting fingers ready,” she said. “OK, here it goes. When you’re a white woman and you’re a Republican, there’s just certain stuff culturally that you don’t know jack bleep about, and you should keep your mouth shut when other people dance. And what is that line about dancing to a drum beat? This, to me, felt tone-deaf, it felt nasty, it felt personal and it felt bitchy.”
MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri, agreed, stating, “I have never been more disappointed in a woman that I thought I admired in my life.”
Earlier in the program, Ms. Wallace claimed it caused her “physical pain” to read Ms. Noonan’s piece.
“She’s someone I don’t just admire, I revere her words,” she said. “Some of the speeches she’s written I have devoted to memory. So to hear her take out her very skilled cudgel and smash it against a woman who has broken the kind of barriers that every one of us have faced — Peggy, too — is searing for me.”
