Well, Naturally We're Liberal

Dave Cutler for The Chronicle Review

February 7, 2010

Well, Naturally We're Liberal

By Jere P. Surber

I've never understood why some people find it so hard to explain the "liberal bias of the academy." A recent article in The New York Times walks us through a virtual museum of contemporary theories, most employing some of the shiniest state-of-the-art statistical and conceptual tools that current social research has to offer.

True, common sense puts in an appearance now and again, but any actual member of the academy will come to feel that it's a case of swatting a fly with a front-loader. For most of us, at least in the liberal arts, the answers are obvious and part of our everyday existence.

I add the qualification in that last sentence because it doesn't make sense to speak of the political persuasions of the academy as a whole. Anyone who has been to a faculty meeting lately, at an institution of any size, knows that faculty members from business schools are typically the most conservative, followed, in order, by the natural sciences, the social sciences, and finally those pesky liberals in the liberal arts.

Of course, not every liberal-arts professor is politically liberal, nor is every business instructor politically conservative. But by and large, this alignment is pretty clear to all of us without a lot of expensive research. If the academy seems to list to the liberal side in comparison with the general population, it's certainly not thanks to an overabundance of liberal business professors, pinko natural scientists, or Marxist social scientists. Rather, academe leans left because it takes a proportionally significant number of liberal-arts professors to hone the basic intellectual skills that we expect of college graduates: things like interpretive reading, cogent writing, critical thinking, and a sense of a shared historical tradition and the major issues currently confronting our society and world. If those abilities and insights aren't addressed by the liberal arts, then they certainly won't be in Introduction to Finance, Calculus II, or Biochemistry.

So the real question isn't why academe is so liberal, but rather, Why are instructors in the liberal arts so, well, liberal? I think there are three basic reasons, all of them what common sense might predict, all rather obvious, and none in need of fancy research involving such things as "occupational role modeling" and "vocational engendering."

First, as the Times article notes, virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation. There's no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study than business instructors and the equivalent of those in the natural sciences. Just as important, there are few opportunities for liberal-arts scholars to supplement their incomes by serving on government and corporate boards, filing patents and licenses, and, of course, obtaining generous research grants. You don't have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people's political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It's real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced—doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives—receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100? I wonder what would happen to the academic political spectrum if liberal-arts professors were compensated the same as those in other areas. If an enterprising sociologist wants to conduct such an experiment, I'll certainly volunteer as a subject.

Such an experiment, however, isn't necessary. Just look at countries where college and university professors across disciplines are paid more or less the same. In Germany, where I did a good deal of my graduate work and have been a visiting professor on numerous occasions, compensation is determined by civil-service rank rather than academic field. Probably because German conservatives have rarely attacked academe as a hotbed of liberalism, and privacy laws prevent such polling of civil servants, the sort of studies reported on in the Times aren't generally available. But my own experience indicates that German professors and instructors are paid roughly equivalently across disciplines and in comparison with other nonacademic professionals, so they tend, for the most part, to be moderate or even conservative. Although here in the United States we hear about radical European professors—Derrida and Habermas come to mind—they are notable precisely because they are so exceptional.

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Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida's best known work is Of Grammatology.


Jürgen Habermas (b June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theorypragmatism. and


A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history. Most (although, of course, by no means all) prominent historians of politics, literature, the arts, religion, and even economics have tended, as conservatives claim, to be liberally biased. Fair enough. But if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.

Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a "right side of history," Obama said­—the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don't study history, whether because it doesn't pad quarterly profits, isn't sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won't know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn't any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs. (I admit that "values" is sort of a tired, old-fashioned notion, but no other word covers the same territory.) More important, they've learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation. In a certain sense, from Plato to Hegel to Derrida, philosophy—the paradigmatic liberal art—has been engaged with nothing but those questions.

It is this open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate, the various ways they can be approached, and the different redefinitions or reconfigurations that they may assume that most differentiates liberal-arts faculty members from their colleagues in business, law, medicine, or the natural sciences. (I don't mention the social sciences here, because there is no longer any really meaningful line that can be drawn between the humanities and the social sciences.) All of those other fields are structured around specific values that remain relatively fixed: profit and exchange in business; justice and social utility in law; health and wellness in medicine; objectivity, explanation, and prediction in the natural sciences. The liberal arts are distinctive because they are open to considering any of those values outside their narrow professional contexts.

Despite all the panicky alarms sounded not so long ago by some conservatives against the "relativism," if not "nihilism," implicit in the (alleged) poststructuralist hijacking of the liberal arts, it turns out that there has proved to be much more agreement on what constitutes the good life than most of the critics realized. Or maybe they have realized: It is, just as they charge, some sort of a broadly liberal point of view.

It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a "right side of history," and we feel morally bound to be on it. Although we'd like to see some parity in compensation with our colleagues, we chose our fields with full awareness of the tradeoff. Part of our compensation lies in knowing that our studies can complement our standing on the "right side," rather than having our basic commitments dictated to us by the limitations of other, narrower professions.

So all you journalists and researchers: Enough with this assumption that liberal-arts professors are liberal as a result of naïveté, as if our tweed jackets and pipes, as the Times article put it (how much of that do you really see these days?), render us ignorant of the ways of the world. Drop this idea that we were somehow coerced into being liberals by peer pressure or role models. And most of all, don't condescend to suggest that we may just be, as one expert quoted by the Times did, free spirits (read: malcontents and misfits) who couldn't cut it in the serious professions (like Dick Cheney, Kenneth L. Lay, and Jeffrey K. Skilling did?) and found our impecunious niche in teaching the liberal arts.


We're here and mostly liberal by practical deliberation, factual investigation, and rational and moral conviction. We don't mind the lower pay (well, not that much), but don't demean us, when most of our conservative critics would be hard-pressed to make anything remotely approaching the same claims. Remember that one of our most vigorous critics, Sarah Palin, was reportedly unclear about significant events in American history (the First World War? Hmm, lemme think ...) and had to be given grammar-school geography lessons by her campaign staff. But who knows, if Palin had more of a grounding in the liberal arts, she might have ... nah!

Jere P. Surber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver.

Quid pro quo

Three days after awarding a lucrative state contract to a company connected to the Rev. Floyd H. Flake, one of New York’s most influential black pastors, Gov. David A. Paterson summoned Mr. Flake to his Harlem office Monday morning and sounded him out about his political support.

Pure coincidence, surely.

Mr. Flake said in an interview that while the two men discussed whom he might back in the governor’s race this year, there had been no quid pro quo and no commitment about a formal endorsement. He also said it was his first conversation with Mr. Paterson since he was sworn in nearly two years ago.

Right.

Politics and the Law

With Populist Stance, Obama Takes On Banks: A call for new limits on bank size and risk-taking reflects a shift in the administration’s focus and in the political climate.

It looks like a diversion, to change the subject from the failure of health care reform and the results of the Massachusetts election. Populism isn't Obama's schtick.


Obama’s Move to Limit ‘Reckless Risks’ Has Skeptics: The president on Thursday proposed legislation to limit the scope and size of large financial institutions.

President Obama, with many of his top economic advisers, speaking on banking issues Thursday at the White House.


Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Finance Ruling: The Supreme Court decision will increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups at the expense of candidates and political parties.

Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit: Overruling two precedents, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

1 year later

All of a sudden, the political game has changed. One year minus one day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as President, the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years went Republican. Despite protestations of independence, the victor and new Senator, Scott Brown, will make the 41st Republican vote opposing the President's agenda. How far the Democratic star has fallen is incredible.

Interactive Map
Massachusetts Election Results

January 20, 2010
Senator - Elect Scott Brown Pushes For Prompt Seating
By REUTERS


Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET


BOSTON (Reuters) - Scott Brown, who scored a big win for Republicans by winning a Democrat-held U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, said on Wednesday that given the wide margin of his victory he should be allowed to take up the seat very quickly.


Republicans hope that Brown can occupy the seat as soon as possible, replacing interim Senator Paul Kirk, a Democrat, and become the key 41st vote in the 100-member chamber and help block Democratic health care reforms and other legislation.


State law provides for some 15 days to delivery the final election results, but Brown noted at a post-election news conference that this had been circumvented in the past to seat Democratic lawmakers.


His campaign has requested that Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin make available an unofficial vote count, including the number of absentee ballots still outstanding.


"I'm confident that it will show the margin of victory exceeds the number of absentee ballots. Since the election is not in doubt, I'm hopeful that the Senate will seat me on the basis of those unofficial returns," he said.


Brown defeated his opponent, state attorney general Martha Coakley, by more than 100,000 votes on Tuesday.


Brown said the message sent by his upset win was that "people are tired of business as usual" in Washington politics, adding that he would like to see Congress move back to the drawing board on health care reform.




January 20, 2010
News Analysis
A Year Later, Voters Send a Different Message
By ADAM NAGOURNEY


BOSTON — Special elections come and go. And the party that wins the White House one year ordinarily loses seats in the next Congressional election that comes along.


But what happened in Massachusetts on Tuesday was no ordinary special election.


Scott Brown, a Republican state senator for only five years, shocked and arguably humiliated the White House and the Democratic Party establishment by defeating Martha Coakley in the race for a United States Senate seat. He did it one day short of a year after President Obama stood on the steps of the United States Capitol, looking across a mass of faces that celebrated the potential of his presidency.


As a result, Mr. Obama will spend the first anniversary of his inauguration watching Democrats tangle in an unseemly quarrel over who lost Massachusetts — Ms. Coakley’s pollster, Celinda Lake, called the Huffington Post four hours before the polls closed to blame Democratic leaders in Washington — and contemplating a political landscape that has been thoroughly upended in the course of only 10 days.


The implications are sure to be far-reaching, and the result leaves Mr. Obama with a long list of tough choices.


Stripped of the 60th vote needed to block Republican filibusters in the Senate, will Mr. Obama now make further accommodations to Republicans in an effort to move legislation through Congress with more bipartisanship, even at the cost of further alienating liberals annoyed at what they see as his ideological malleability?


Or will he seek to rally his party’s base through confrontation, even if it means giving up on getting much done this year?


Will he find a way to ram his health care bill through Congress quickly in the wake of the Massachusetts loss, so that his party can run on a major if controversial accomplishment? Or will he heed the warnings of Republicans, and now some Democrats, that to do so would be to ignore the message of Tuesday’s election, with its clear overtones of dissatisfaction with the administration’s approach so far?


It is not just questions of policy: for Mr. Obama and the Democrats, already worried about the coming midterm elections, the results could hardly have been more distressing. States do not come more Democratic than Massachusetts, the only one that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972, a fact that older residents still recount with fresh pride. By challenging the legacy of Edward M. Kennedy, the holder of the contested seat for 46 years and a liberal icon, the Republican victory could only be dispiriting to the left.


Most ominously, independent voters — who embraced Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and are an increasingly critical constituency — seemed to have fled to Mr. Brown in Massachusetts, as they did to Republicans in races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last November. It is hard not to view that as a repudiation of the way Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have run things.


“This is a giant wake-up call,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in Virginia last year. “We have to keep our focus on job creation. Everything we have to do is related to job creation. We have to do a much better job on the message. People are confused on what this health care bill is going to do.”


Even before the polls closed, the White House was suggesting the outlines of a recovery strategy, a combination of a more populist tone and an embrace of greater fiscal responsibility.


Mr. Obama has signaled that he intends to take a more populist stance on financial regulation legislation in Congress, seeking to position Democrats as defenders of the people against Wall Street, and to cast Republicans as defenders of bonus-laden bankers. And on Tuesday night, the White House brokered a deal that could lead to a bipartisan commission to recommend spending cuts and tax increases to address the nation’s fiscal condition. For months, Mr. Obama’s advisers had warned that the perception that budget deficits and the national debt were spiraling out of control was alienating independent voters already turned off by partisan battling.


David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said he did not view the results as a repudiation of the White House’s agenda, but he acknowledged that the administration needed to do a more effective job of signaling concern about the problems gripping Americans.


“We are the party in power, and as such there’s an element of responsibility assigned,” he said. “I think people need to know that their challenges and their concerns are the focus of our work every day.”


Ms. Coakley lost in no small part because of what many Democrats viewed as a stumbling campaign against a sharp and focused opponent. There is a good argument that the outcome was as much an anti-incumbent wave during tough economic times as it was an anti-Democratic wave. And there is still time before the midterm elections for the economy to rebound in a way that benefits Democratic candidates, and for Mr. Obama to make a case that the health care legislation, if he finds a way to sign it into law, will benefit the hard-pressed middle class.


Still, Ms. Coakley’s defeat could easily be seen as evidence that the Obama White House is out of step with much of the American public — pushing through a health care plan at a time when many voters are primarily concerned about unemployment.


Mr. Obama could find it more difficult to get moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats in Congress to cast politically tough votes.


It will be lost on few in the House or the Senate that the Democratic defeat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state came despite a last-minute personal appeal from Mr. Obama, who campaigned here for Ms. Coakley on Sunday. This suggests that Mr. Obama may be of limited or no help to candidates in close elections. No less important, he may not have much leverage to stop them from defying him in Washington.


“I think there’s been a misreading of where the public is at: having a health care debate when so many people were focused on their jobs,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic political consultant who managed the presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004.


“The failure to understand how anti-establishment the country has become is a big part of the problem,” Mr. Trippi said of Mr. Obama and the White House. “He actually led the way on that in the campaign and didn’t recognize what was happening as he was president.”

Ay, Cristina (Kirchner)

Martín Redrado, the chief of Argentina's Central Bank who is in an increasingly tense political dispute with President Cristina Fernandez, talks to reporters as he leaves the bank's headquarters in Buenos Aires on Friday. A court issued two rulings Friday, blocking the use of foreign-currency reserves to pay debt, and revoking her dismissal of the central-bank chief.

This is a contest of wills. President Kirchner, the current one, supported, of course, by the previous President Kirchner (Cristina and Nelson, respectively), is demanding that about $7 billion (or, about, 26 billion Argentinian pesos) be released from the central bank-controlled reserves, and used to service foreign debt. Señor Redrado refused. He got sacked.

A federal judge blocked President Cristina Kirchner from using foreign-currency reserves to pay Argentina's national debt and revoked her dismissal of the central-bank chief who opposed that policy.

The twin legal defeats for the government injected further uncertainty in the battle for control of the central-bank reserves. The dispute, which has put Argentina on the verge of a constitutional crisis and placed the president and the opposition-controlled Congress at loggerheads, led to a selloff in the country's bond and stock markets.


A selloff? I don't know who the hell owns any Argentinian securities. Talk about speculation.


Mr. Redrado said he was motivated by the principle of central-bank independence. "It's necessary to keep working for ideas," he said. "We have shown commitment to maintaining the prestige of the Central Bank."

Mrs. Kirchner defended using a portion of the $48 billion in reserves to pay debt.

"It's much better to use the reserves than to take loans at 15% interest," President Kirchner said in remarks at a political event. She added that Mr. Redrado had been guilty of misconduct, and she was within her rights to dismiss him.


I think the expression at loggerheads is apt.


Roberto Sifon Arevalo, a director in the Latin America Sovereign Ratings Group at Standard & Poor's said compromising central-bank authority is disturbing to investors.

"There is a conceptual reason why people focus on the independence of the central bank," he said. "In a context where you already have inflationary pressures, if you don't have that independence and you have a central bank that starts financing current expenditures, then that's going to get significantly worse."

The  US Congress is walking the same way, proposing to curb the Fed's independence.

Senator Dodd to retire

Senator Christopher J. Dodd in his office on Capitol Hill in September 2008.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the embattled Connecticut Democrat who was facing an increasingly tough bid for a sixth term, announced on Wednesday that he would not run.

5 terms, 30 years.

Mr. Dodd, 65, a pivotal figure in the major debates now confronting Congress, said he had made the decision two weeks ago, on Christmas Eve, as he stood in Arlington National Cemetery, where his close friend Senator Edward M. Kennedy was buried last summer. Mr. Dodd said he went there after the Senate had passed the bill to overhaul the health care system.


“In the long sweep of American history,” he said outside his home in East Haddam, Conn., “there are moments for each elected official to step aside and let others step up. This is my moment to step aside.” He said one reason for his decision was that he was in “the toughest political shape” of his career.

And then some.


His announcement came less than 24 hours after another Democratic senator, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, also announced that he would not seek re-election in November. The developments underscored the fragility of the Democrats’ 60-vote Senate majority, which is just enough to block Republican filibusters. Democratic incumbents also face serious challenges in Arkansas, Colorado, Nevada and Pennsylvania among other states.





On the other hand, there are some Republican seats are in peril.

Mr. Dodd was already considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats facing re-election this year, and party officials had been privately hoping he would step aside so the Democrats would not lose a seat that has been in their column for 46 years.


Interactive
Timeline: Christopher J. Dodd


Mr. Dodd’s move opened the way for another Democrat — Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal — to run. Democrats and Republicans said Mr. Blumenthal would be a much stronger candidate in what is a Democratic state, and on Wednesday morning Mr. Blumenthal said he had decided to enter the race. He said in a telephone interview that he would announce his candidacy on Wednesday afternoon.

He was already facing challenges from two potentially formidable Republicans: Linda McMahon, the wealthy former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, and Rob Simmons, a former congressman. With the election still months away, Ms. McMahon has spent more than $5 million on television advertisements, building herself a potent campaign organization.


Mr. Dodd has been a fixture in the Senate for nearly 30 years, and had been at the center of the recent debates on health care and financial regulation. But while the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, issued a statement saying Mr. Dodd “had always been on the front lines to make a difference where it counts,” many Democrats do not see his departure as a profound loss, even with their razor-thin balance in the Senate. He was vulnerable, and they had come to believe the party’s chances of keeping the seat would be better with a different candidate.



Political realism.


And, for Democrats, there was another what-if. Had Mr. Dodd lost to a Republican, President Obama’s agenda could have been narrowed for the rest of his presidency. So from that perspective, Mr. Dodd did his party—and the president—a favor by stepping aside.



Mr. Dodd’s numbers in polls have gone “down, down, down,” said Maurice Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, though he said there had been “a blip of an up” before another drop. “It’s partly self-inflicted, but partly he’s a victim of the times,” Mr. Carroll said. “People are sore at Washington, and there goes what’s been a good Senate career.”

That might cut both ways. See the post on South Carolinian Republicans attacking Senator Graham for cooperating with Democrats.


“I think he is just accepting the facts,” said Edward L. Marcus, who led the Democratic party in Connecticut from 1992 to 2000, “and you have to congratulate him for doing the right thing.”


And a blog post in the NY Times:

Democrats Face Shifting and Perilous Political Environment
By JEFF ZELENY AND ADAM NAGOURNEY


President Obama awoke on Wednesday to a dispiriting reality: Less than a year after taking office on the strength of a historic Democratic sweep, his party is facing a shifting and perilous political environment that could have big implications for this year’s midterm elections and his own agenda.

He is not doing well right now.

The rapid swing was underscored by the sudden announcements that Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota would rather retire than fight the uphill – and uncertain – battle toward re-election. Word that the Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, had made the same decision only heightened the perception that the party’s fortunes had turned after a year in which a conservative push against Mr. Obama’s ambitious agenda, a sluggish recovery from the deep recession and an outbreak of angry populism nibbled away at his political strength.

The White House knew, of course, that this would be a bleak political year. Seldom has a week passed where a Democrat, fearful of the outcome in the midterm elections, hasn’t switched parties or jumped ship entirely. But the decisions from Mr. Dodd and Mr. Dorgan, who have served a combined 46 years in the Senate, brought new attention to the party’s troubles.

And just one year ago the governing prospects were so bright; typically, the Democrats botched it up.


The prospect of Democrats holding their Senate majority – 60 votes to overcome Republican filibusters – is now clearly more difficult. While Mr. Dodd’s departure actually seems to increase the chances of his party holding his seat, Mr. Dorgan’s retirement gives Republicans a good shot at a pickup in a conservative-leaning state. And while legislative politics is always complex, even with 60 votes – just look at what it took for Democrats to get a health care bill through the Senate – Mr. Obama’s agenda will become even trickier to pass with each lost Democratic seat, especially in the Senate.

Democrats have tried and largely failed all year to win over moderate Republicans as they push Mr. Obama’s initiatives. The Democrats would become even more reliant on centrist Republicans like Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, should they lose their 60-seat majority.


Moreover, the moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats, like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, could also look at the changing environment and prove even less willing to go along with their party on difficult issues. Even before the November elections, the sense that Democrats face increasing peril could hurt the prospect of the more liberal House succeeding in extracting concessions on health care legislation from the Senate, whose bill had a more centrist tilt to it.

For Democrats, the time for real panic will come if those retirements create a domino effect among other vulnerable Democrats. If, for example, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas suddenly announces that she will not seek re-election – a prospect her aides say is out of the question – that would be a moment of real alarm for the party.

Democrats have a talent for snatching defeat out of the jwas of victory.

But even Republicans weren’t feeling entirely giddy on Wednesday. The Dodd-Dorgan decision may, essentially, be a political wash.

Republicans were optimistic about their chances of knocking off Mr. Dodd and picking up a seat in Connecticut. But even before he made his announcement official, the state’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, threw his hat into the ring. Mr. Blumenthal has a far stronger chance of holding the seat for Democrats, party strategists believe, so suddenly Republicans may have far less of an opportunity than they thought.

In North Dakota, Mr. Dorgan was already facing a tough re-election and Democrats were poised to write off that seat. And they can invest their money elsewhere in hopes of saving other seats or picking up a new one.

“There’s not an election tomorrow. There’s not an election next week. There’s not an election for 11 months,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The mistake that this town often makes is behaving as if things are static and acting as if the conditions that pertain today are going to describe the conditions 11 months from today. Things can change for the better and worse.”


Republicans face their own challenges. They have to defend open Senate seats in New Hampshire, Ohio and Missouri, after a spate of retirements of their own last year.

Jim Jordan, an adviser to Mr. Dodd and other Democratic candidates, dismissed the suggestion on Wednesday that the collection of retirements spelled doom for the party.


“These are individual political and personal decisions. I don’t think this is predictive of much or reflective of much, other than a handful of Democrats at the same time deciding that they want to do something else,” Mr. Jordan said. “It is indisputable that the environment is difficult, but it’s not much better for Republicans. They’ve had their share of retirements, too.”


So what blame does Mr. Obama bear for the Democratic troubles? Could he have made a more compelling rationale for his agenda? He is the leader of the party, so the burden to rebuild – and maintain that stronghold of only a year ago – is his.


As with other presidents who have gone before him, the history of midterm elections is running against the White House. The question now, strategists say, is not if Democrats will lose seats, but how many – and how effective Mr. Obama can be in improving the environment for his party over the balance of the year.

Signs of Polarization

December 22, 2009 - Sidebar

In Supreme Court Clerks’ Careers, Signs of Polarization

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON

A Supreme Court clerkship really brightens the legal résumé, and former clerks have their pick of the best jobs at law firms, in the academy and in government.

The career choices they make also say something important about the state of the Supreme Court. A new study has found that former clerks have started to take jobs that reflect the ideologies of the justices for whom they worked.

“It’s cause for concern mainly because it’s a further piece of evidence of the polarization of the court,” said William E. Nelson, a law professor at New York University and one of the authors of the study.

I am no longer so sure that the claims and beliefs that our times are more polarized than others is true or accurate.

Until about 1990, the study shows, there was no particular correlation between a justice’s ideological leanings and what his or her clerks did with their lives.

Clerks from conservative chambers are now less likely to teach. If they do, they are more likely to join the faculties of conservative and religious law schools. Republican administrations are now much more likely to hire clerks from conservative chambers, and Democratic administrations from liberal ones. Even law firm hiring splits along ideological lines.

Does that say anything about academia being a liberal bastion?

Earlier studies have shown the rise of ideological hiring of clerks by the justices. In recent years, the more conservative justices have overwhelmingly hired clerks who had worked for appeals court judges appointed by Republicans. The more liberal justices did the opposite, but a little less consistently.

The new study, published last month in The Vanderbilt Law Review and summarized in the autumn issue of The Green Bag, collected data from 1882 through 2006, which means it did not consider information about clerks for the most recent additions to the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor.

Before the 1990s, the study found, all sorts of former clerks served in the government under all sorts of administrations. That seemed to change in the Clinton years. The Clinton administration hired 96 former clerks, but only 16 percent of them came from the chambers of the four most conservative justices — Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy.

Of the 89 former clerks hired by the administration of George W. Bush, on the other hand, 68 percent came from those four chambers.

“The only other justice who provided five or more clerks for President Bush was the fifth justice who cast a vote in his favor in Bush v. Gore,” the study said, referring to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whose chambers provided eight additional clerks.

From about 1940 to 1990, the study found, about a third of all clerks became law professors. There was variation among the chambers, but it was not correlated to the justices’ ideological leanings.

The rise of the organized conservative legal movement, including notably the Federalist Society, seems to have changed that, perhaps as a result of the sense among conservatives that law school faculties are overwhelmingly liberal.

“Certain kids coming out of the conservative movement were not feeling comfortable with traditional law schools,” said Harvey Rishikof, another author of the study and a law professor at the National War College. (I. Scott Messinger and Michael Jo also worked on the study.)

Or perhaps colleges, law schools, were not seen as the appropriate forum to fight the conservative battle.

Only 19 percent of clerks from the four most conservative justices in recent decades joined the legal academy and only 7 percent went to one of the top 10 law schools in the annual survey published by U.S. News & World Report. A significant minority joined the faculties of religious or conservative law schools.

Clerks for the other five justices followed the historical pattern, with 34 percent joining the legal academy, about half of them at the elite schools. The study also showed polarized hiring at the law firms with significant Supreme Court practices.

Kirkland & Ellis, for instance, hired 22 former clerks from 1990 to 2006, all from the four most conservative chambers, according to the study. (A Kirkland spokesman added that the firm also hired two former clerks to Justice Byron R. White.) The firm is home to Kenneth W. Starr, the former Whitewater prosecutor who was solicitor general in the administration of the first President George Bush.

And President Clinton shadow. No surprise here.

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, on the other hand, hired 35 clerks from the five more liberal justices and only 5 from the other four. Seth P. Waxman, a solicitor general in the Clinton administration, leads the firm’s Supreme Court practice.

The emergence of “politically oriented practice groups,” the study said, reinforces the idea that the court is “a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law.”

Is that more partisan, or more realistic?

In his 2006 book on Supreme Court clerks, “Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk,” Todd C. Peppers wrote that “no other internship program in the history of the United States has produced as impressive and diverse a collection of individuals as the U.S. Supreme Court law clerk corps.”

Professor Peppers, who teaches public affairs at Roanoke College, said he was fascinated by the new study’s findings. But he added that the recent trends were in a way unsurprising. “Do justices select like-minded clerks?” he asked. “Of course.”

Exactly.

“And do these clerks go into private practice, government work and the legal academy and use their legal skills to promote ideological views that are compatible with their justices? Of course.”

That may be obvious, but it is not easy to reconcile with the view that that law and politics are, or at least ought to be, different realms.

Dream

Luis Donaldo Colosio

Hace diez años. Revelaciones sobre el magnicidio ordenado por los neoliberales mexicanos
El asesinato de Luis Colosio apunta al Estado mayor presidencial de Carlos Salinas
por Gastón Pardo*

Muestra un noticiario que el segundo disparo recibido por Luis Donaldo Colosio, candidato del PRI a la presidencia de la República, en México, hace diez años, le fue disparado en el interior de la camioneta que lo conduciría al hospital.

Luis Donaldo Colosio en una foto oficial por su partido político: PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Detrás la foto del presidente mexicano Carlos Salinas actualmente viviendo fuera del país. Foto PRI



Luis Donaldo Colosio en una foto oficial por su partido político: PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Detrás la foto del presidente mexicano Carlos Salinas actualmente viviendo fuera del país.
Foto PRI

Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta recibió un segundo disparo en la camioneta a bordo de la cual fue trasladado al hospital después de haber sido herido en la cabeza en Lomas Taurinas, Tijuana. Esto lo establece una videograbación aportada por la Universidad de Guadalajara.

La grabación es prueba indiscutible de que Luis D. colosio fue víctima de un complot en el que estarían involucrados miembros del Estado Mayor Presidencial que tenían a su cargo la seguridad de Colosio, encabezados por el general brigadier Domiro Roberto García Reyes. La grabación fue desvelada por el noticiario Esferas, que se trasmite en la ciudad de Guadalajara, capital del estado de Jalisco, donde acaba de tener lugar la III cumbre de la Unión Europea y América Latina.

La videograbación fue revelada al público al cumplirse 10 años del crimen del entonces candidato a la Presidencia de la República, y en ella, en cámara lenta, se aprecia el caos que hubo para el traslado de la víctima desde el sitio donde se le dio el primer disparo en la cabeza, hasta la camioneta que usaba en su gira, así como la intromisión en la escena de varios extraños.

En las videograbaciones obtenidas por La Crisis en la página web del noticiario jaliciense, se demuestra que Colosio, ya herido, es subido a la camioneta por la portezuela derecha trasera, y es ahí cuando el conductor de noticiero señala: «Observen al individuo que está atrás de la camioneta; un tipo corta estatura, de lentes, pelón, que luego se le ve por la portezuela trasera izquierda y luego se oye el clarísimo ruido de la detonación y el destello del fogonazo que ésta produce». A continuación el periodista, que pide se pase en cámara lenta la videograbación, va narrando punto por punto los hechos y encerrando con un círculo el destello que produce el fogonazo de la segunda arma utilizada contra el sonorense.

Y para no dejar ningún lugar a dudas, el narrador establece que: «entonces si el balazo no se lo dieron en el sitio del primer atentado, cuando iba cayendo al piso; se lo dispararon en el interior dela camioneta, y con ello se refuerza la teoría del complot en contra del candidato del PRI a la presidencia de la Republica».

Esto concuerda con la primera postura que se dedujo del informe forense de la doctora Patricia Obanel, especializada cardióloga, quien el día de los hechos participó en la autopsia realizada al asesinado y que, al salir del hospital regional de Tijuana, perturbada, declaró que no sólo había sido una herida, sino que tenía más y dejaba entrever que no fue uno el atacante sino varios. Al respecto, el fiscal federal dijo que en su oportunidad fue investigada la versión de la doctora, pero que ésta retiró su declaración argumentando que fue producto de la confusión.

De acuerdo con la investigación realizada por el Fiscal federal Diego Valadez a petición del senador Luis colosio, padre del asesinado, de se reabriera el caso, al señalar por primera vez que su hijo había sido víctima de un clima de profundo deterioro de sus relaciones con (Carlos) Salinas, presidente de la República en el periodo 1988-1994, no se demostró la hipótesis del complot, que al fin, quedó demostrada sin lugar a dudas.

La hipótesis del complot fue respondida las vísperas del décimo aniversario del asesinato del sonorense por el ex presidente Salinas de Gortari, quien aseguró que mantenía una relación muy cordial con Colosio y señaló que en todo caso a quien habría que preguntar es a Ernesto Zedillo, quien sustituyó al asesinado en la candidatura del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) y alcanzó la Presidencia de la República, además de que fue el principal beneficiario de la muerte de Colosio.


En el marco del décimo aniversario luctuoso de Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, el Gobernador del Estado de Nuevo León (México), José Natividad González Parás, develó una placa en el Monumento al ex candidato Presidencial del PRI que se ubica en la avenida principal de Ciudad Solidaridad.
Foto y texto Estado de Nuevo León (México)

Reabrir el caso Colosio

Mientras tanto, en la conferencia de prensa que dio el 16 de febrero pasado, la coordinadora general de Investigaciones de la Fiscalía federal (PGR), Maricela Morales, dijo que la PGR analiza los 178 tomos del expediente del caso Colosio para definir si el Ministerio Público llama o no a declarar a los ex mandatarios y añadió que el caso «no puede reabrirse por capricho». De tal manera, la funcionaria de la fiscalía se alinea con el autoritarismo inaugurado por Vicente Fox, quien se ha manifestado por el cierre del expediente.

La postura oficial señala que sólo hubo un asesino, Mario Aburto, quien cumple una condena de 45 años de prisión. Por ello, Luis Colosio ha pedido que la fiscalía interrogue a Salinas y Zedillo. Además pidió que en esta confrontación participe el ex regente de la ciudad de México y actual diputado del PRD, Manuel Camacho, quien participó de manera determinante en el empeño de entorpecer la campaña de Colosio. Al respecto, Camacho Solís aceptó el careo y pidió que se reabra el caso, para que se aclararen los puntos oscuros.

Esta postura fue apoyada por el jefe de Gobierno de la Ciudad de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, en declaraciones realizadas el 16 de febrero pasado. Dijo que era necesario abundar en todas las pesquisas para conocer quien se confabuló con quién para cometer el crimen. Camacho es el protector del jefe de la policía de la Ciudad de México, Marcelo Ebrard, a quien el periodista Héctor González acusó de proteger a 70 mil expendios de droga en la capital mexicana.

Ni Aburto ni Othón Cortés

La recuperación de la libertad de Othón Cortés Vázquez, detenido y acusado por Antonio Lozano, cuando fue fiscal federal, como el segundo que disparó en el crimen de Lomas Taurinas, con lo cual se fortalecería la tesis de complot, que manejó en su momento el subprocurador Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, que sería el puntal para llegar al Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), pues dejó abierta la posibilidad de que otro individuo haya hecho el segundo disparo.

Los peritos Alejandro García López e Isaac Manuel Urrutia Hernández emitieron una conclusión luego de analizar el certificado de la autopsia, un sin fin de dictámenes de balística y criminalística, diversas testimoniales, material audiovisual y juicios de colegas suyos: «Única: Que es prácticamente imposible que Mario Aburto Martínez hubiera podido desplazarse a la izquierda y por detrás del licenciado Luis Donaldo Colosio momentos después de que se produjo el primer disparo, por la rapidez con que que se suscitaron los hechos, la cantidad de gente agrupada y compactada en torno del hoy occiso, así como la acción inmediata de sometimiento de que fuera objeto Mario Aburto Martínez».

Pero vendría un conflicto de constitucionalidad. Mario Aburto Martínez ya fue declarado asesino solitario y condenado como tal. Por tanto, para la Fiscalía no puede haber un segundo participante.

Esta tesis del asesino solitario, que resultó la más favorable para que la clase política mexicana consiguiera impunidad cerrando el paso a una investigación más profunda del asesinato, es echada por tierra por la videograbación presentada en Guadalajara, a la que se ha tratado de desestimar.
Gastón Pardo

Under Murdoch, tilting rightward

Rupert Murdoch, a lifelong conservative, addressing the newsroom at The Wall Street Journal two years ago, when he took over.



Not that the Wall Street Journal was a leftists rag and needed a push to the right; if anything, they were a perfect match.

Glenn R. Simpson, who left the newspaper back in March, is not a fan of the newsier, less analytical Journal.

“Murdoch didn’t ruin The Wall Street Journal; he just rendered it into a much more ordinary paper,” he said.

But there are growing indications that Mr. Murdoch, a lifelong conservative, doesn’t just want to cover politics, he wants to play them as well.

He has always played politics. Perhaps he is becoming less covert, but the change is of style, not substance.

According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper’s Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper’s circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there’s nothing to suggest that The Journal’s readers don’t approve.

More conservative? I don't notice the change; the paper was always conservative. And subscribing to the paper does not equate to approving of its politics.

In response to questions about bias in the newspaper, a Journal spokesman sent along the following statement: “The Journal has always provided its readers with unique, objective news reporting from our Washington Bureau.”

Oy. Fair and balanced?

Tension between Washington bureaus and headquarters is a common feature of newspapers, and none of the people I spoke to suggested that either Mr. Thomson or Mr. Baker lacked savvy as journalists or leaders — only that ideology was baked into the coverage through headlines, assignments and editing in a way that had never occurred in the past.

Political cartoons

After humbling spiral, Kerry back to Form

John Kerry lost his race for president, became a campaign pariah and was passed over for secretary of state. But if he was ever adrift, he seems well anchored now.



at 65, after a humbling spiral — from almost-president to Democratic scapegoat to campaign pariah (2006) to wannabe secretary of state (passed over for Hillary Rodham Clinton) — Massachusetts’ new senior senator has settled into an influential role as legislative bridge builder, international troubleshooter and party elder statesman.

What if? What if he had won in 2004? Well, one thing: John Edwards, he of the out-of-wedlock child, would be Vice President. Oy vay.

Through experience and adversity, friends say, Mr. Kerry became a more fully grounded occupant of the Senate. “John always liked the high wire, aiming for the sky and all the action that came with it,” said Tom Vallely, the director of the Vietnam Program at Harvard University. “But when you’re 65 and you’ve been through some things, the high wire gets a little lower.”

Lawmakers say Mr. Kerry now lingers in hallways more often than before, cracking jokes and finding common cause with colleagues he previously had little to do with. He has bonded with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, over their shared love of the Pink Panther movies (“We even have a little dog called Clouseau,” Mr. Kerry said of his black schnauzer, named for the films’ detective.) This Pink Panther alliance recently grew into a partnership on energy and climate change that many see as the best chance of any bipartisan success in passing an energy bill.

“If we save the planet, it will be because of Inspector Clouseau,” Mr. Graham said.

From such alliances are political compromises made; at times, the liberal talking heads on cable fail to focus on such simple, yet crucial, matters.

Mr. Kerry is especially proud of his association with Mr. Obama, whom he selected to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, essentially catapulting Mr. Obama’s national career. Next to Mr. Kerry’s office fireplace hangs a framed invitation to the 2009 presidential inauguration. “I’m here because of you” is how the president signed it.

After Mr. Obama was elected, Mr. Kerry lobbied hard to become his secretary of state — too hard, some administration officials say.

Hutchison Chases Texas Right

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, above, in August announcing her candidacy to unseat Gov. Rick Perry, who is seen below with Texas Rangers in October.
















Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison may have won the backing of former Vice President Dick Cheney in her race for Texas governor, a key endorsement for a candidate seeking conservative support. But her drive to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Perry remains an uphill battle.

Ms. Hutchison, one of the Lone Star State's most popular politicians, was expected to mount a formidable challenge to Mr. Perry in one of the long-anticipated GOP primary battles of next year's elections. The GOP winner is an overwhelming favorite to be the next governor in this Republican state.

"We Westerners know the difference between a real talker and the real deal," Mr. Cheney said before a small crowd of about 100 Hutchison supporters and journalists Tuesday evening. "Kay Bailey Hutchison is the real deal."

Perry is more conservative than Hutchison; he even alluded to Texas seceding from the Union. But the Senator is an old Washington pal of Cheney.

But Mr. Perry has built a large lead in polls with less than four months to go to the March 2 primary. In part, he has scored points using what's shaping up as a popular strategy for many candidates during this election cycle, with rhetoric portraying Ms. Hutchison as a Washington insider out of touch with down-home Texans. He also has accused her of waffling on a pledge to resign from her Senate seat, which she had initially said she would do in October or November.

"It really does appear that it is slipping away for her," said Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Hutchison campaign hopes the backing of Mr. Cheney, who before being elected vice president was chief executive of Halliburton Co., then based in Dallas, will deepen the shallow conservative backing that has been long viewed as her principal weakness. But supporters of Mr. Perry, who has the backing of conservative groups and such governors as Haley Barbour of Mississippi, have tried to use the Cheney endorsement as evidence Ms. Hutchison is out of touch with Texas voters. "The Washington establishment usually sticks together," Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner said.

That is almost an insult to Cheney, the right's darling.

Let's be friends, plu-eez

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had lunch Wednesday with New York's incoming public advocate, Bill de Blasio, a Democrat.





Michael R. Bloomberg, stung by an election outcome that revealed resentment over his undoing of the term limits law and his extravagant campaign spending, moved quickly Wednesday to strike a conciliatory tone as he reached out to the Democratic establishment that backed his opponent in the mayor’s race.

As aides worried that the narrow win — by a margin of less than 5 percent — would embolden previously cowed lawmakers, the mayor made clear in meetings and telephone calls with Democratic leaders that he understood that the roughness of his campaign had upset some people.

It is to be hoped that someone develops some spine, and challenges Bloomberg, denying him the option to rule without opposition.

But in his conspicuous gestures, Mr. Bloomberg and his aides also sought to send another message: we are still in charge.

That is where they have it wrong: the people are, or should be, in charge.

But tellingly, when the mayor tried to meet with John C. Liu, the Democratic comptroller-elect, Mr. Liu said he could not find time on his schedule, a highly unusual slight.

Good. Great.

Later, Mr. Liu told a reporter: “A long time ago, the people of New York decided there would be no king nor a monarch in New York City.”

Amen.

The speaker of the City Council, Christine C. Quinn, another Democrat, summed up her conversation with the mayor Wednesday as: “It’s time to move on.”

Time to move on, indeed. But keeping in mind that the City Council should not be the Mayor's doormat.

Mayor Bloomberg believes people still like him, and support his mayoralty.

But the election results seemed to reveal a much more complicated relationship with those he governs. Despite at least $90 million in campaign spending, Mr. Bloomberg lost large swaths of the city to William C. Thompson Jr.: he was defeated in both Brooklyn, the most populous borough, and the Bronx, the poorest.

“There’s certainly going to be a lot of Council members who are going to take him on,” said Councilman David I. Weprin, who supported Mr. Thompson. “There is a lot of resentment.”

Good. I certainly expect them to do their jobs, which is not to kowtow to the Mayor.

As the city’s political establishment tried to understand the huge gulf between the cocksure rhetoric of the mayor’s campaign and his showing at the polls, Bloomberg aides said that they had relentlessly promoted the mayor as invulnerable in the race when they knew differently, saying it was the only way they for them to keep the Democratic establishment from rallying behind Mr. Thompson.

No one read poll numbers?

Said one top Bloomberg campaign adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect internal discussions: “If a poll had come out showing that the race was within five points, Barack Obama would have swung into town, the United Federation of Teachers would break for Thompson and Mike Bloomberg would not be mayor today.”

Too bad.

Morning after regrets

The Vote for Mayor, Block by Block


As the cheering dies down over at William C. Thompson Jr.’s headquarters, where close almost passed for victory on Tuesday evening, New York’s Democrats are left to consider a colder reality: This was a race most Democrats now believe they could have won. Numbering among the co-conspirators in the Democrats’ defeat, in the view of some party leaders and activists, are Democratic grandees, from President Obama — who did not campaign for Mr. Thompson — to the City Council speaker, whose support could not have been softer, to two powerful labor unions that remained studiously neutral.

Why were the grandees quiet? And why could the President campaign in Jersey but not in NYC? Curious.

By the next mayoral election, it will have been 20 years since a Democrat occupied the mayor’s office, and the second guesses were many on Wednesday.

“The conditions were there all along for a formidable challenge to the mayor,” said Andrew Breslau, an observer of city politics and the executive director of City Futures, a nonpartisan urban policy group. “There was class resentment in this economically fraught time.”

And yet, once again, Democrats struggled to run an effective mayoral campaign. The causes for this are many.

The Democratic political machines stand covered with rust, with bosses ruling as minor potentates rather than boroughwide forces. Mr. Thompson was Brooklyn’s native son, yet the borough president, Marty Markowitz, piped up that he was a Bloomberg guy. The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, a Democrat, endorsed Mr. Thompson with the enthusiasm of someone facing a tooth extraction.

Nice. Party loyalty, anyone?

Nor did Mayor Bloomberg offer an easy mark. He had good favorability ratings and lavished more than $90 million on his campaign, collecting prominent Democratic consultants as a schoolboy might collect stamps. He created an aura of gilded invincibility, which the media retailed. For labor unions like 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East and the United Federation of Teachers, whose leaders are acutely sensitive to power, it seemed wise to stay silent.

Wise, or prudent? Wisdom implies good judgment and savvy; what labor leaders, among others, exercised was pusillanimity (contemptible fearfulness).

A Discipline in Denial

Earlier this month, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma swooped in on the National Science Foundation budget, offering an amendment that would ban the organization from "wasting any federal research funding on political-science projects." The assumption that the money was better spent on "real science," seemed to cause the entire quarrelsome field of political scientists to rise as one in righteous opposition.

Senator Coburn strikes again.

Querulous academics often are their own worst enemies in these funding battles. They quickly wax hysterical, unaware that platitudes about supporting "free inquiry" do not cut much with the general public. Should NSF be spending $188,206 to support a study of "candidate ambiguity and voter choice," designed to ascertain how politicians benefit from being vague?

188 thousand out of a budget totaling 2.5 trillion dollars; wow, that will make an impact. Seems more pf an anti-intellectual charade than budgetary discipline. Coburn's at it again.

Still, the political scientists have a point. The program has been going since the early 1960s, and the dollar amounts have always been relatively small—the money for political science projects have amounted to $112 million over a 10-year period, compared to NSF's budget request for 2010 of more than $7 billion.

188 thousand out of 7 billion equals 0.00269%

There are other reasons to think that this battle may be ill-chosen. The very program under fire supported the work of Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize in economics this year for her work advancing the role of free institutions, rather than governments, in managing natural resources—an analysis Mr. Coburn might find valuable.

Mi sombrero, por favor

Manuel Zelaya, right, the ousted Honduran president, before a news conference Monday at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa.







First, depose a president. Second, hire a lobbyist.

In the months since soldiers ousted the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, the de facto government and its supporters have resisted demands from the United States that he be restored to power. Arguing that the left-leaning Mr. Zelaya posed a threat to their country’s fragile democracy by trying to extend his time in office illegally, they have made their case in Washington in the customary way: by starting a high-profile lobbying campaign.

The campaign has had the effect of forcing the administration to send mixed signals about its position to the de facto government, which reads them as signs of encouragement. It also has delayed two key State Department appointments in the region.

Costing at least $400,000 so far, according to lobbying registration records, the campaign has involved law firms and public relations agencies with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator John McCain, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs.

A tangled web, indeed.

In addition to the support of such cold war veterans — and partly because of it — the de facto government has mobilized the support of a determined group of Republican legislators, led by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. They are holding up two State Department appointments as a way of pressing the Obama administration to lift sanctions against the country.

“We have made a wrong call here,” Mr. DeMint said in an interview with Fox News after returning from a trip to Honduras last Friday. Referring to the de facto government, he said, “This is probably our best friend in the hemisphere, the most pro-American country, but we are trying to strangle them.”

I favor the ouster, and don't see it as a coup, and dislike seeing Chávez and Ortega and Morales and Correa gloating in the company of the man with the sombrero, but DeMint gives me the creeps.

Chris Sabatini, editor of Americas Quarterly, a policy journal focusing on Latin America, said the lobbying had muddled Washington’s position on the coup. The administration has said publicly that it sees the coup in Honduras as a dangerous development in a region that not too long ago was plagued by them, he said.

But, he added, to placate its opponents in Congress, and have its nominations approved, the State Department has sometimes sent back-channel messages to legislators expressing its support for Mr. Zelaya in more equivocal terms.

“There’s been a leadership vacuum on Honduras in the administration, and these are the people who’ve filled it,” he said of the Micheletti government’s backers. “They haven’t gotten a lot of support, but enough to hold the administration’s policy hostage for now.”

Certainly the Administration wishes the problem would just go away, for supporting Zelaya is a slimy business.

Oval Office Confidential

by Christopher Buckley
Where was I? Oh yes, trying to make Joe Scarborough into the GOP ‘It’ Guy. To be continued. Meanwhile…

… in a recent column Maureen Dowd quoted something Bill Bennett said to Wolf Blitzer, about a young man named Matt Latimer, author of a new book called Speech-less, an account of his adventures as a speechwriter for Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush:

“The guy is a worm … He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn’t read ‘The Inferno.’ The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.”

As Bertie Wooster might say, a bit much to spring on a lad with a morning head.

I hadn’t read Mr. Latimer’s book, but I immediately rushed out to buy it. Bill Bennett is arguably—no, make that inarguably—the most pompous, self-righteous ass in Christendom, so when he invokes Dante and casts a thirty-something kid speechwriter into the bowels of hell to have his flesh chewed along with Brutus, Cassius and Judas—honestly—well I flew to the nearest bookstore and said, ‘I wish to buy all your copies of Speech-less.’ Thank heavens they had only one left. But I’m going to go on Amazon and send it to everyone I know for Christmas.

I confess a(nother) bias here (you already know where I stand on Mr. Bennett): I’m a sucker for White House memoirs. I worked there for a time and once wrote a novel-length parody of the genre. They must, to be sure, be approached with caution, but a discriminating ear will easily detect the sound of knives being ground, and proceed accordingly.

• Lloyd Grove interviews Matt Latimer This is an old genre: What the Butler Saw. You can huff and puff (along with Bill Bennett) and be shocked—shocked—that people write these books; but like them or not, they are the records of eyewitnesses to power. The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors. The late Cap Weinberger nearly went to jail for having kept a journal. Bill Clinton and his friend Taylor Branch hit on a rather brilliant solution, witness Branch’s fascinating new book, The Clinton Tapes. So in the absence of White House secret tape recordings—oh, for the good old days—and diaries and such, these memoirs by the butlers are valuable—to say nothing of high entertainment.

Mr. Latimer comes across as an honest, if perhaps an occasionally naïve and dewy-eyed observer. He’s a deft writer, and has a good eye and a nice turn of phrase. You may find yourself surprised by what he has to report. I was. (Though as one Republican president used to say: Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not endorsing Mr. Latimer’s observations, merely remarking on them.)

Don Rumsfeld comes across not at all as the arrogant monster he has been everywhere depicted. In one instance, he talks Time magazine out of making him its Man of the Year (does anyone care about Time’s Man of the Year anymore?) and counter-proposes The American Soldier. In Latimer’s telling, he is smart and demanding, but fair and courteous and good-hearted. Latimer also reveals that the famous “Old Europe” snarky comment was a slip of the tongue. Rumsfeld had meant to say “Old NATO.” (More tightly focused snark.) He tried repeatedly to resign over Abu Ghraib, and took full responsibility for it. Americans admire stepping up to the plate (see Clarke, Richard, and Letterman, David), but Rumsfeld’s mea culpa fell on already hardened ears. But one can condemn the Iraq War (as I do) without unfairly demonizing one of its architects. Well, we’ll be hearing more from Rumsfeld and Latimer on this score; Mr. Latimer is assisting Mr. Rumsfeld with his memoir. I wonder if Bill Bennett has reserved a copy…

Another who comes in here for surprisingly objective treatment is—brace yourselves—Dick Cheney. Cheney shares with his erstwhile patron Rumsfeld a rare, indeed almost unheard-of quality in Washington: an utter lack of concern for the press’ opinion of him; indeed, contempt for the press, generally. I personally like the press; they are my brothers and sisters, but the older I get, the more I admire this kind of blitheness in a politician. Reagan had it. He just didn’t care what the New York Times said about him. Anyway, one can detest Cheney’s policies—fair enough—without indulging in the kinds of no-holds-barred contumely that occludes fair and considered judgment.

Well, I’m starting to sound as pompous as Bill Bennett, so let me simply admit to having been darned well entertained by Speech-less. There are some excellent moments here: Karl Rove behaving like a lunatic; Latimer not daring to return a phone call from Richard Gere about the Dalai Lama for fear that the press will say that the President was consulting with an actor; George W., worn down by crisis, growling about Hillary: “Wait till her fat bottom is sitting at this desk;” and about Obama: “This is a dangerous world and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you;” W. on the recently nominated Sarah Palin: “What is she the governor of—Guam?”

Latimer ends up, as most White House staffers do, disillusioned and disappointed. What a surprise. Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution is like most of these books, a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. She made her memoir problematic by dissing her beloved Ronald Reagan with the remark that never had so many battled for such barren terrain as Ronald Reagan’s mind. In light of the scholarship that has appeared since her book came out in 1990, Ronald Reagan’s mind has been revealed to be far more supple than Ms. Noonan had supposed. Despite, her book remains the gold standard and her ultimate conclusion the most enduringly true, namely, Don’t work for a politician—they’ll break your heart in the end. But Mr. Latimer’s contribution to the shelf is welcome, and worthy.

Christopher Buckley’s books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI.

No such thing as too much money

To market Bounty paper towels last year, Procter & Gamble spent about $63 million. To advertise Yoplait Light yogurt, General Mills spent about $62 million.

But these corporate giants have nothing on Michael. R. Bloomberg. To hold on to his job as mayor this year, he has spent $65 million of his own money, according to his latest financial disclosure report, released on Friday. Mayor Michael. R. Bloomberg, left, is expected to spend more this year than he did in his campaigns in 2001 and 2005.

Having much money qualifies him to buy political office, a decidedly undemocratic practice.



William C. Thompson Jr., Mr. Bloomberg's Democratic rival who is still scrambling to raise money from donors.


The mayor has spent 16 times as much as his Democratic rival, William C. Thompson Jr., who is still scrambling to raise money from donors. And at his current pace, Mr. Bloomberg is on track to easily spend more than $100 million by Election Day on Nov. 3

The City Council went along with his proposal to repeal term limits; ridiculous. And he became a Republican to win this first election, he has been a Democrat, and is now Independent. What the hell is he?

The disclosure of the figures drew expressions of outrage from Democrats and from supporters of campaign finance limits.

“It badly distorts the city’s democracy to have one candidate spend his own money like a drunken sailor — or more accurately, like a million drunken sailors,” said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization.

He described the $65 million figure as “grotesquely excessive.”

Grotesque is a good start; I'll add obscene, undemocratic.

But Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign, defended the spending as prudent. “We’re confident that Mike Bloomberg’s record of progress on job creation, crime and education will prevail over Bill Thompson’s record of failure,” she said. “But we’re not taking anything for granted.”

His campaign is spending so much money because Bloomberg has a good record?

According to the latest filing, as of Sept. 28, the mayor had spent $22 million to saturate television channels with his commercials, $10 million on campaign mailings and $3.4 million on wages for campaign workers.

Three and a half million dollars on wages?

By comparison, Mr. Thompson has spent $305,000 on TV ads, $2,000 on campaign mailings and $529,000 on wages for workers. Overall, Mr. Thompson, who has been the city’s comptroller since 2002, has raised $5.6 million, received almost $2.5 million in matching funds, and spent $3.8 million — equivalent, roughly, to Vermont’s annual advertising budget for tourism.

A blithering idiot

No Buyers for Palin's Speeches

If need be, she could always downgrade to the bar mitzvah circuit: The New York Post reports that the Washington Speakers Bureau—which also represents George W. Bush, Laura Bush, and Condoleezza Rice—is having a hard time convincing potential clients to book Sarah Palin for $100,000 a pop. One industry expert tells the Post: “The big lecture buyers in the U.S. are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot.” Palin is believed to have quit her job as governor of Alaska early, in part, to earn more money. According to the source, many big lecture circuits are subscription series, and bookers are afraid of ticking off subscribers by putting her on the roster.

Sarah's lectures a tough sell (from NY Post)

Sarah Palinis said to have pocketed a $7 million advance for the 400-page memoir she turned in four months early, but she might not have such an easy time on the lecture circuit. After quitting as governor of Alaska in July, Palin signed with the top-notch Washington Speakers Bureau, which also reps George W. Bush, Laura Bush,
Condoleezza Rice, hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger, LA Dodgers manager Joe Torre and magician David Blaine.

Palin's bookers are said to be asking for $100,000 per speech, but an industry expert tells Page Six: "The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot."

Many big lecture venues are subscription series, "and they don't want to tick people off," said our source. "Palin is polarizing, and some subscribers might cancel if she's on the lineup." Other lecture buyers are universities, which have a leftist slant, and corporations, which dislike controversy.

"Palin is so uninteresting to so many groups -- unless they are interested in moose hunting," said our insider. "What does she have to say? She can't even describe what she reads."

Palin likely quit as governor just months after losing the election as John McCain's vice-presidential running mate because of money. "She knew that if she waited until her term ended in 2010, these opportunities would be gone," said a source. "She would have lost millions by staying in office."

Palin's "Going Rogue: An American Life" is described by Harper publisher John Burnhamas "her words, her life, and it's all there in full and fascinating detail." Harper wouldn't discuss what Palin was paid.

Lynn Vincent, Palin's collaborator, wrote the book so fast, publication has been moved up from the spring to Nov. 17.

How much can there be t say?