The structure of her speech was what the last five presidents (Reagan through Obama, all of whom she\u2019s met) should have learned from their predecessors. President Obama\u2019s main failure, in her eyes, is that he failed to garner any<\/em> 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 \u2013 whatever other faults of his she listed \u2013 managed to have Democrats \u201cco-own\u201d his legislative proposals, from No Child Left Behind to the war in Iraq.<\/p>\n But the Tea Party!<\/em> one audience member asserted during the Q&A portion. How could Obama possibly accomplish anything with that intractable faction?<\/em> Noonan was having none of it; although she acknowledged that the Tea Party\u2019s power in Congress is \u201creal,\u201d she argued that the legislative process is \u201csupposed to be hard,\u201d that it was \u201cset up to be a struggle\u201d 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\u2019s success with his Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O\u2019Neill, 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not here to say whether Noonan was right or wrong about President Obama\u2019s faults. I am, however, glad that she came to campus. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n I appreciated Noonan\u2019s presence because, as the faculty members sitting at my pre-lecture dinner table pointed out, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always found it useful to listen to (and subsequently debate with) people who don\u2019t share my viewpoints, or who only share some of them, or who share them but for different reasons. I don\u2019t learn anything from people who agree with me. For that reason, I\u2019m personally glad that Scripps makes an effort to bring in speakers with a range of political viewpoints to campus. After all, conflict builds character.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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