COMM 337, 386: More on Peggy Noonan / ASSIGNED RREADING

Peggy Noonan, opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, keeps hitting home runs. Her latest is an assessment of GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that concludes:

In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn’t, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

This from a conservative pundit and loyal Republican who started out as a speechwriter for President Reagan.

But there's more to Noonan than that. Her writing is a little over-the-top sometimes for an old police-beat-and-criminal-courts reporter like me, but she touches on something important in the American spirit ... the kind of insights I'm more accustomed to seeing in writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Walt Whitman ... that most political columnists don't ever try for. Tunku Varadarajan, business school professor at New York University and opinion editor at Forbes.com, captures it in today's column, a basically an endorsement of Noonan's. He says:

Now ... she is writing with such transparent conscience that I believe that she captures, in her column, the American condition and the American voice.

By "condition" I mean all sorts of things: the spiritual essence, the political bent, the sources of America's passion and ideology and imagination, as well as of its aspirations and apprehensions. And by "voice" I mean the pitch, the inflections and the language by which discourse of the American condition is best conducted.

This is a very large order, especially on a newspaper deadline.

We will be looking at several of Noonan's columns, in COMM 337 for her style ... which is idiosyncratic but worth analyzing ... and in COMM 386 for her insights into American politics and the political process. She also has a book out, called "Patriotic Grace." It's on her sense that America needs to transcend its current blue-state, red-state divisions to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Linked to its blurb on Amazon.com is a 20-minute interview on how, and why, she came to write the book. One quote I like: "I think writers don't have a right to be boring." Noonan isn't.

Even more insightful than the Palin column, in my opinion, is one she wrote the week before (Oct. 10), headlined "Playing Frisbee on a Precipice." She explains: "One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it’s all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow."

I'll post a couple of more links as I find them. I'm going through the archives on Noonan's website, which is extensive, and I've found a lot of good clean base hits but not -- yet -- her other home runs.