Peggy Noonan: Columnist of The Year

Meet the winner of The Week's Columnist of the Year award

We are absolutely certain that Peggy Noonan is a conservative. Yet we’re never completely sure where she’s going to come down on a given issue. In an era of rigid polarization, she embraces the nearly lost art of openmindedness. It’s one reason her columns in The Wall Street Journal are so engaging. As the late Tim Russert once said of Noonan, “The only predictable thing about her column is its unpredictability.”

Which is not to say that Noonan pulls her punches. She is well-known as a harsh critic of George W. Bush and an even harsher critic of Hillary Clinton.Noonan’s prose is subtle and striking, and the clarity of her observations can be devastating. In advance of the State of the Union address, she wrote of the president, “As a rule, when Mr. Obama speaks, he literally says too many words, and they’re not especially interesting words. They’re dull and bureaucratic or windy and vague, too round and soft to pierce and enter your brain.”

Over the past year in particular, Noonan has done an admirable job of calling the political moment. She was prescient in describing the rise of the Tea Party and recognizing that it was “not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it.” Early in 2010, she predicted that the passage of Obama’s health care bill would be a “catastrophic victory” for the Democrats, but also warned that the midterm elections could be a catastrophic victory for the Republicans, if they seized back power without a clear purpose.

“Peggy Noonan is a rarity among political columnists,” says Tom Goldstein,a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a judge for the Opinion Awards. “She is lucid,original, funny, and chatty. Most importantly,she arrives at her opinions after doing her own reporting.” Once a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Noonan is the best-selling author of seven books on American politics, history, and culture. Her essays have appeared in Forbes, TIME, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She is a frequent guest on political talk shows. In both her columns and in her latest book, Patriotic Grace, she has written eloquently about how polarized our political debate has become. In the book, she makes a heartfelt plea for Americans to come together.

Noonan concedes that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. She recently wrote that she believes President Obama is likely to lose the 2012 election: “The overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around.” And given the rise of the Tea Party and the cast of characters already lining up for 2012, among them Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin, it’s going to be a raucous contest. One thing we can count on: Noonan will be there to challenge — and surprise — us.

Read a Q and A with Peggy Noonan on the next page.