Peggy Noonan
Margaret Ellen Noonan (born September 7, 1950), known as Peggy Noonan, is a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and contributor to NBC News and ABC News. She was a primary speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986 and has maintained a center-right leaning in her writings since leaving the Reagan administration. Five of Noonan's books have been New York Times bestsellers.
Peggy Noonan
- Political commentator
- political speechwriter
Noonan was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on America: A Tribute to Heroes.
Early life and early career[edit]
Noonan was born on September 7, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York,[1][2] the daughter of a merchant seaman. She is of Irish descent.[3] Noonan is a graduate of Rutherford High School in Rutherford, New Jersey, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.[4]
Noonan worked as the daily CBS Radio commentary writer for anchorman Dan Rather at CBS News, whom she once called "the best boss I ever had." From 1975 through 1977 she worked the overnight shift as a newswriter at WEEI Radio in Boston, where she was later Editorial and Public Affairs Director.
In 1978 and 1979 she was an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.[5]
Later career[edit]
Noonan worked as a consultant on the American television drama The West Wing.
In 2003, Noonan was a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq.[8]
In mid-August 2004, Noonan took a brief unpaid leave from The Wall Street Journal to campaign for George W. Bush's reelection.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Noonan wrote about Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in The Wall Street Journal. In one opinion piece, Noonan expressed her view that Palin did not demonstrate "the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office," concluding that Palin's candidacy marked a "vulgarization in American Politics" that is "no good... for conservatism... [or] the country."[9] Such commentary resulted in a backlash from many conservatives.[10]
In July 2022, in a column about the rise of remote work and empty office buildings, she wrote, "I don’t want America to look like an Edward Hopper painting. He was the great artist of American loneliness—empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone. We weren’t meant to be a Hopper painting. We were meant to be and work together."[11]
Noonan is an author, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and a commentator on several news shows, including CNN, where she distanced herself from more conservative Republicans and Donald Trump's presidency. She was one of the founding members of wowOwow.com, along with Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans.
In 2017, Noonan won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, for "rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation's most divisive political campaigns."[12]
Personal life[edit]
In 1985, Noonan married Richard W. Rahn, who was then chief economist at the US Chamber of Commerce. Their son Will was born in 1987.[13]
Noonan and her husband were divorced after five years of marriage. In 1989 she returned with her son to her native New York. In 2004, according to an interview with Crisis Magazine, she lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with her son, who attended the nearby Saint Ann's School.[14]
Noonan lives in New York City.[15] She is a practicing Roman Catholic[16] and attends St. Thomas More Church on Manhattan's Upper East Side.[17]
Criticism[edit]
While Noonan's speechwriting has been praised, her books and Wall Street Journal columns have been the source of criticism and mockery. Critics have singled out her reliance on personal anecdotes to make broad assertions about current events and changes in American politics and society.[18]
During Hurricane Katrina, she called for looters in New Orleans to be shot.[19] Henry Giroux called it a "barely coded rationale to shoot low-income Black people."[19]
Nate Silver wrote asking Noonan to present evidence concerning her charge that the IRS was auditing taxpayers for political reasons.[20]
In a March 2013 column, she used her experience staying at a short-staffed airport hotel to demonstrate the Obama administration's lack of focus on job creation and infrastructure spending, even though infrastructure was a significant component of Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which Noonan had previously criticized in November 2010.[21][22]
In August 2019, Noonan was mocked for writing a column on Donald Trump's support among Hispanic Americans which centered on a conversation she had with a Dominican friend who worked at the deli counter at her grocery store.[23][24][25][26][27] In June 2019, Noonan wrote a column about the loyalty of Trump's supporters that was based on conversations she had with her sister and her uncle.[28]
Recurring themes in Noonan's books and columns include the decline of civility, social graces, religiosity, patriotism, bipartisanship and statesmanship in contemporary American politics and society, as well as enduring praise for past conservative political figures such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. As a result, her writing is criticized for being overly nostalgic.[29]
In June 2019, after Noonan called on congressional Democrats to censure President Trump in the wake of the Mueller report, he attacked her on Twitter, calling her "simplistic" and claiming that she "is stuck in the past glory of Reagan."[30][31] In June 2022, Trump issued a statement calling Noonan a "weak and frail RINO [Republican In Name Only] ... who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his ability to speak" after she wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Republican Party was "rejecting" Trump in the aftermath of the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[32]