Let us pray for Peggy Noonan, important dingbat Wall Street Journal columnist, for she is in a state of sadness, despair. She despises today's elites, the Youths: the politicians, the bloggers, the "Facebook jockeys." Who shall smite these incompetent infants?

In today's comical jumble of foggy Victorian wrist spasms, "Youth Has Outlived Its Usefulness," Noonan lashes out at Earth's toddler authority figures and their petty, corrosive effects on discourse. They are incompetent, pre-pubescent. Why do these middle-aged men have no midwives or governesses to monitor them as they sway in the cradle?

Mr. Obama is young, 48, as is British Prime Minister David Cameron (43), with whom he meets next week, and as were Bill Clinton (46 on Inauguration Day) and the somewhat older but still distressingly young George W. Bush, sworn in at 54. Mr. Cameron's partner in governance, Nicholas Clegg, is also 43. Stephen Harper of Canada is 51, Nicolas Sarkozy of France a youthful 55. Youth is supposed to bring vigor and vision. In general, however, I think we find in our modern political figures that what it really brings is need-for greatness, to be transformative, to leave a legacy. Such clamorous needs! How very boring they are, how puny and small, but how huge in their consequences.

And who enables these petulant 50-year-old rapscallion devils? The bloggers, who are somehow even younger! Look at them, on their "Internet" machines, slamming the typing boards like unmedicated Jacobins.

On the Internet, you read the fierce posts of political and ideological writers and wonder, Why do so many young bloggers sound like hyenas laughing in the dark? Maybe it's because there's no old hand at the next desk to turn and say, "Son, being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life."

(Eh, pays the bills. Sometimes.)

Bring Peggy your finest octogenarians, the oldest of the old, wisest of the wise! (Or at least some 50- or 60- year old Republican hacks/lobbyists.)

Who might benefit from a real, if not consciously felt, longing for the old, tried and true? Not a Facebook jockey twittering from deepest cyberspace. A frank, unshowy Sen. Tom Coburn? Gov. Haley Barbour, an old-style, gray-haired, shrewd-eyed southerner? Maybe [Indiana Gov.] Mitch Daniels, who is, as they say, an old person's idea of a young man. He has the style of a lovely normal boring person. Boring: that looks so good right now. Old, that looks so fresh, so new.

Someone, please bring this "Mitch" to her at once, to exact satisfaction.