Peggy Noonan: What a Conservative Commentator Is Doing at Liberal College

Scripps, obviously, is a liberal college. It is impermissible to be anything to the right of militantly pro-choice and vaguely socialist. Which is why the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program is so fascinating.

The speaker series, which began in the 2006-07 school year, specifically brings conservative political actors to campus for the purpose of “facilitating informed debate on topics of public policy.” This year’s speaker was Peggy Noonan, a woman whose roles have included author, columnist, political commentator, and speechwriter to both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (to the former in her capacity as a special assistant; to the latter during his 1988 presidential campaign).

I’m not an expert on Peggy Noonan. Anyone who has consulted on The West Wing gets a plus in my book, but I haven’t read enough of her work to form an opinion of her as a commentator. Her speech last Thursday revealed that she is as capable of poking fun at George W. Bush’s intelligence as anyone else, that she is a staunch member of the Reagan Revolution, and that she is deeply critical of the Affordable Care Act.

The structure of her speech was what the last five presidents (Reagan through Obama, all of whom she’s met) should have learned from their predecessors. President Obama’s main failure, in her eyes, is that he failed to garner any Republican support for the legislation he spent much of his first term building (and now, apparently, will be spending much of his second term altering). President Bush – whatever other faults of his she listed – managed to have Democrats “co-own” his legislative proposals, from No Child Left Behind to the war in Iraq.

But the Tea Party! one audience member asserted during the Q&A portion. How could Obama possibly accomplish anything with that intractable faction? Noonan was having none of it; although she acknowledged that the Tea Party’s power in Congress is “real,” she argued that the legislative process is “supposed to be hard,” that it was “set up to be a struggle” by our founders, and that such strife should be used to craft compromises between the parties. Of course, at this point, she also mentioned Reagan’s success with his Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, and that, despite the Tea Party, Boehner is moderate enough to actually want to work with Obama, if the President would just give the beleaguered Speaker a chance.

I’m not here to say whether Noonan was right or wrong about President Obama’s faults. I am, however, glad that she came to campus. It’s a well-known fact that we give more credence to facts and sources that confirm what we already believe, while we are all too quick to dismiss that which threatens to topple our preconceived ideas. Some of this is for good reason: we’ve also been taught to consume media critically, to ask if the source of the survey could be biased or to question what variables were left out of a politically-motivated poll.

I appreciated Noonan’s presence because, as the faculty members sitting at my pre-lecture dinner table pointed out, she’s not another old white guy telling us about conservatism (we have enough of those already). This is the eighth year of the program, but only the fourth with a female speaker. Interestingly, the first three years of the program all featured women, only to be followed by four years of men.

I’ve always found it useful to listen to (and subsequently debate with) people who don’t share my viewpoints, or who only share some of them, or who share them but for different reasons. I don’t learn anything from people who agree with me. For that reason, I’m personally glad that Scripps makes an effort to bring in speakers with a range of political viewpoints to campus. After all, conflict builds character.