They aren't hard to come by these days.

Rats deserting the sinking ship and all.

So today, I give you Peggy Noonan.

Please note the reference to President Bush Sr., for whom Ms. Noonan was a speechwriter. Remember "1,000 points of light?" Yeah, that Peggy Noonan. The one who took a leave of absence from the Wall Street Journal to help the current President Bush with the 2004 re-election campaign.

Well, here's what she has to say about the man in 2006:

We are all shaped by experience. Lately I think the president could have used a time in his life when his father couldn't pay the rent. Such experiences tend to leave you unwilling to count on good luck coming, or staying.

Sometimes Mr. Bush acts as if he doesn't know you don't have to look for trouble, it will find you. When you are the American president, it knows your address by heart.

I know that on some level he knows this. The president has taken, those around him say, great comfort in biographies of previous presidents. All presidents do this. They all take comfort in the fact that former presidents now seen as great were, in their time, derided, misunderstood, underestimated. No one took the measure of their greatness until later. This is all very moving, but: Message to all biography-reading presidents, past present and future: Just because they call you a jackass doesn't mean you're Lincoln.

In the end it doesn't matter if White House staffers suddenly listen to critics, to non-pre-vetted policy intellectuals, to questioners, complainers, whiners, Wise Men, if you can find them, and people who actually have something to say. But it does matter if George Bush does.

It matters that he becomes his broadest self and comes to tolerate dissent, argument, ambiguity. That actually would be daring. It would mark not the appearance of change but change, not the appearance of progress but the thing itself.

Go. Read the whole damn thing. Now.

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