Peggy Noonan: Columnist of The Year

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

Peggy Noonan
(Image credit: Fred Harper)

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.”

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