TOW #7 ObamaCare Is Taking On Water (Peggy Noonan)

Peggy Noonan was the speech writer and special assistant to Ronald Reagan, and has written five best-selling books regarding politics. She is a conservative, and in this article points out the recent faults concerning the Affordable Care Act's website. The website has been since October 1st, and is intended to make the process of signing up for federal health care simple and fast. Because of its heavy traffic, the site has crashed multiple times and is, currently, closed. Her purpose is to persuade the wide audience of the Wall Street Journal that "This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster." She does this with a biting tone, clearly opposed to ObamaCare. She asks rhetorical questions like "Does anyone believe the whole technology side can be fixed quickly?" and answers with a curt "No." Her opinion is clearly opposed to ObamaCare, and her confidence fuels agreement in her readers. Short sentences also emphasize her points throughout the article, such as when she says "So you'd think it would sort of work. And it didn't. Which is a disaster," and, after a comparison of ObamaCare to the Titanic, "The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic." These quick sentences summarize and quickly deliver her point of view, to be further elaborated in the sentences to come. To add to her tone and emphasis, Noonan includes small asides, such as "But–it has to be repeated–they had 3 1/2 years" and "Three and a half years!" to convey her contempt directly to her audience. Anaphora is also present to create better flow and connect her ideas. She writes that ObamaCare is a disaster, "not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks." Lastly, Noonan uses several allusions to make her points creative and relatable. The confusing website is "like a high-tech Möbius strip," a shape that winds around and always returns to it's starting position. The political cartoon above her article and her title point to her allusion of ObamaCare as the Titanic, though "The Titanic at least had three good days." I think that her article is not very effective, because the tone makes it seem as though she is just whining without proposing any sort of solution. She uses far too many rhetorical questions that make the article seem too based on assumptions and opinion.

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