Peggy Noonan
Peggy Noonan
Margaret Ellen "Peggy" Noonanis an American author of several books on politics, religion, and culture, and a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She was a primary speech writer and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and has maintained a conservative leaning in her writings since leaving the Reagan Administration...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth7 September 1950
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The most moving thing in a speech is always the logic. It is never flowery and flourishes. It is not sentimental exhortation, it is never the faux poetry we're all subjected to these days.
The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.
I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.
Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive.
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.
could even shove Alberto Gonzales down their throats.
There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views.
The president - every president - works for us. We don't work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won't be.
Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.
Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to 'Demon Pass.'
You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.
I ought to pray as much as God's on my mind, because then I'd pray a lot. All I can tell you is God is real, and so that infuses everything.
Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out.