Peggy Noonan: GOP Sighted on PBS

Although her ideological sinews cross with his, former Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan is good cop to House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s bad cop, the soothing purr versus the scratchy hair shirt. Noonan, with her soft, disarming, chummy television manner, is the conservative version of using women and children to shield the troops. It’s not fair, but it works.

This is no trudging babushka, though. Sliding quotable words into the mouths of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, it was Noonan who gave the latter his “thousand points of light,” his “kindler, gentler nation” and his “Read my lips: No new taxes.”

You not only read Noonan’s lips, you may even fixate on them at times during her three-part series on PBS, which returns her to the medium where she once worked as a CBS News-hand whose duties included writing radio commentaries for Dan Rather. And you thought those were his ideas.

This is a program that public television will use against its conservative critics, bolstering its argument against expulsion from government funding.

Each hour of “On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan” is split into three segments of talking heads, the least talky of which is hers. Noonan is a good listener. Nonetheless, she is the one who frames and guides these worthwhile chats about religious faith, families and freedom, while making no attempt to veil her own robust point of view. During one of these dialogues, for example, she declares, “I’ve heard some things that have made my little conservative heart very happy. . . .”

So much for the argument by some of Noonan’s fellow conservatives that PBS sings only the mantra of pointy headed liberals.

Next week, Noonan covers families with social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and writers Anne Lamott and Stanley Crouch, an African American critic of rap music: “In the old days, see, a white person (who) wanted to be around what he considered . . . a bunch of black savages had to put on a pith helmet, get injections, mosquito netting, go across the Atlantic Ocean, find a white hunter, get gun bearers, etc., to go out there to find it. Now all he’s got to do is go to Tower Records.”

Week three is on freedom, with Noonan sounding out Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), UCLA professor James Q. Wilson and African American social critic Shelby Steele, who faults the left for advancing concepts “by which white America is saying, ‘We’re going to redeem ourselves’ ” and who questions the sincerity of the right’s embrace of minorities: “When Dan Quayle talks about fatherhood, we don’t believe that he really cares about the people in South-Central Los Angeles.”

Very appealingly, “On Values” is that rare program that cares about ideas. In the case of tonight’s hour on faith, for example, the idea is that our values flow from religion and that this flow has been largely interdicted in contemporary life by cynical politicians and media.

Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who wrote “The Naked Public Square,” speaks at length about a “perverse understanding” of the separation of church and state. To him, it means “the separation of morality and public life.”

We require moral contours that emanate from God if society “is to remain human,” Neuhaus contends. “Which is to say, if there is no absolute moral truth, then everything is permitted. . . . Like, why shouldn’t I discriminate against, and even, if necessary, eliminate people who seriously get in my way? For minorities, especially, the naked public square is an extraordinarily dangerous place.”

Interestingly, though, this is less an argument for the existence of God than for the need for God’s existence as an omnipotent rule maker to restrain our self-destructive impulses.

Agreeing that the United States has “gone overboard in arguing for separation between church and state”--a seminal issue for Noonan and other conservatives--her second guest, Max Lerner, blames the left for not understanding “the psychological, ethical and spiritual dimension of human needs.” Yet Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, believes that in addressing that “dimension,” the right fails to address the importance of daily life, and that “it’s willing to say in the economic and political sphere, ‘Well, whatever happens to people, that’s what they deserve to happen.’ ”

Noonan disagrees. But it’s measured dissent, along the lines of those discussions that Bill Moyers has on PBS with provocative thinkers. In fact, when it comes to thoughtfulness, there’s much about “On Values” that resembles the Moyers interviews. And as if on cue, Noonan’s last contributor to tonight’s discourse on religion is Moyers himself, ironically the very left-of-center Baptist whom some myopic conservative critics of PBS see as the medium’s Antichrist.

It’s clear that Moyers, who shortly will begin doing commentaries on “NBC Nightly News,” is here largely to answer for the sins of the media. Inexplicably, he accepts Noonan’s argument that members of the “big media” are “more secular than average Americans. I mean,” she adds, “we weren’t sitting around going to church on Sunday when I worked at CBS.” Just how either of them is able to speak for all of the “big media” is not explained.

Moyers does tell Noonan that he sees “people searching for a new moral order, for a new social order, and religion brings values and ideas to that search.”

Then why, Noonan asks, “am I not reading about this? Why am I not seeing this on television?” Because, Moyers responds, religion is a “subjective language” and the media are “afraid of getting it wrong.” He adds: “We also have trouble when we can’t quantify a story. We can report that 80% of the people told the Gallup poll that they believe in God. But it’s hard to analyze what it means to believe in God. It’s even harder to decide what we mean by God.” And, he adds, news today is driven by conflict and sound bites.

“How do you reduce the search for meaning, the yearning for God to a sound bite?” Moyers asks. “I mean, what would you take out of the first book of Genesis--Dan Rather saying, ‘God created the heaven and the earth. Let’s go to Bob Abernathy and the Garden of Eden.’ How do you reduce these deep spiritual concepts for a sound bite?”

Noonan: “Oh, thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.”

Moyers: “And then you have to get into, though, does this mean that one can’t take one’s own life when one is suffering from a terminal illness?”

Noonan: “We’ll cover that in the minute-thirty piece.”

As this shows, when confronted by a good argument--one noting a gray area of the religious beliefs she holds--it’s Noonan herself who falls back on the sound bite.

Only rarely does that occur, fortunately. At one point, Moyers recalls William Blake saying, “There is in each grain the whole universe.” In Noonan’s series on values, there are grains, and there are points of light. Bless her little conservative heart.

* “On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan” premieres at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KVCR-TV Channel 24.