Business-oriented Republican Matt Towery likes what he sees in the tea leaves he’s reading. (You can find his polling data by looking at some pdfs to which you can navigate from a spot on the right side of the page to which I just linked.)

E.J. Dionne, Jr. hopes that a statement, to be issued shortly by Third Way ("a strategy center for progressives," which is what center-left folks have to call themselves if they want to be card-carrying Democrats), will succeed in its aspiration to "end the culture war."

I’ll read the statement with interest, remembering, however, that Third Way is the Capitol Hill version of the DLC, which attracted exactly none of the Democratic presidential aspirants to its most recent confab and that the Blue Dog Democrats, elected in conservative-leaning districts in 2006, might more properly be called "Lap Dog Democrats." And I guess I don’t need to remind anyone how Bob Casey, Jr. has voted recently.

Almost exactly three months ago, I posted on Larry Sabato’s (bad) ideas for revising the Constitution and holding a constitutional convention to do so. (I’m all for civic education, but that strikes me as a singularly bad means of accomplishing it.)

Today, my father-in-law waved yesterday’s Atlanta paper in front of me. It had this announcement of a series devoted to Sabato’s proposals, and this interview with Sabato.

Among other things, LS apparently doesn’t like the Senate because it’s insufficiently democratic:

One thing we’re trying to do is remedy the unfairness of the Senate. Right now you have a population differential of 70-to-1 between California and Wyoming--70-to-1! The Founders could never have conceived of this. The population differentials among the early states were significant but not nearly to this extent. This is massive. Second, and this figure always shocks people, 17 percent of the people elect 51 Senators. The founders were concerned about the "tyranny of the majority," and I am, too. But there’s another evil at the opposite extreme: the tyranny of a small minority. It seems to me that when 17 percent of the people can drive the other 83 percent, we may have a problem. And it’s worse than that. Because in fact, since it only takes 41 senators to stop everything in the Senate, 11.2 percent of the people elect 41 senators. So 11 percent of Americans are driving the other 89 percent. To me that is tyranny of a small minority.

Oh, where to begin? How about with his implicit claim that minorities shouldn’t (ever?) obstruct overwhelming majorities? Kind of makes a hash of limited government, doesn’t it?

And then there’s his argument that current Senate procedures demand a constitutional response. Wouldn’t it be easier, if it’s really a problem, to change the Senate’s rules?

His most problematical argument--the most theoretical and least based on the kind of textured and nuanced political analysis for which he’s known--is his fear that small states will obstruct the will of large states. By my reckoning, the 26 smallest states are represented in the Senate by 22 Democrats, 28 Republicans, and 2 Independents. This is hardly a prescription for a unified tyrannically-minded minority, especially when you consider that the small states include almost all of New England (trending Democratic, with some Republican Senators who are hard to distinguish from their Democratic counterparts), Hawaii (which last elected a Republican when?), and a buch of states from the South and the West that you’d think would reliably elect Republicans (but include Democrats Jeff Bingamon, Byron Dorgan, Harry Reid, and Max Baucus, as well as Republicans like Chuck Hagel).

And if you pare Sabato’s obstructionist bloc down to the 21 smallest states, you get a 20/20 partisan split, with the tie-breakers being Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders.

Jonathan Demme, the man who brought us "Silence of the Lambs," is now foisting on us a movie that should be called The Screeching Sheep. But no: "The Man from Plains" is a documentary, out shortly, about our GEPE*, Jimmy Carter. See how he bleats.

Clarice Starling would no doubt prefer the company of Dr. H. Lecter over the Ham-Handed Hannibal of Plains, GA. Jimmy no doubt has "Inconvenient Truth" envy, and even though Gore is safe as the BEVPE**, Jimmy can’t rest too secure, you know.

*Stands for "Best Ex-President Ever."

**Stands for "Best Ex-Vice President Ever."

Contemporary liberals have (at least) two great nostalgic longings. The first, to be transported back in time to August 1964, to cast a vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution that authorized LBJ to escalate the Vietnam War. (Remember, even George McGovern voted for the resolution, though he later claimed that he immediately regretted it.) Thirty-seven years later, most liberals (including today’s leading McGovernite, John Kerry) voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution, a fact that fuels their fury over the war now that it is less popular.

The second great longing is for the Bobby Kennedy campaign—and presidency—that might have been. It was not just the Kennedy mystique and charisma that drove this extreme sentimentality. Just as significant was the advent of the supposed “New Politics,” of which Bobby was a supposed avatar. Now, just what was the “New Politics”? Good question. There appears this useful passage in An American Melodrama, the single best book written on the 1968 campaign by the trio of Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page (this account is leagues better than any of Teddy White’s Making of the President series—get it if you see it second hand somewhere):

Every year in the United States there is a new Ford, a new Chevrolet, a new Chrysler, and a New Negro. At less frequent intervals, a New Woman, a New Child Psychology, and a New South make regular appearances. At the beginning of 1968, New Politics were in the air. Politicians talked about them. Journalists wrote about them. Pundits and academicians cranked themselves up to talk about them. The only trouble was that nobody agreed on what they meant.

One is tempted to suggest the “New Politics” is like the New Coke—a gimmick destined to give way to the sensible old way of doing things after a momentary and insubstantial enthusiasm. In the 1960s, Chester, Hodgson, and Lewis write, the New Politics meant two things above all: “One is that appeals should be made directly to the voters through the mass media.” Today that would mean the Internet. Second, New Politics meant “the politics of ordinary people who are fed up with the superficial and hypocritical politics of the two major parties.”

But are either of these really unique or “new” in any profound sense? New media, such as radio in the 1920s and 1930s, television in the 1950s, and direct mail in the 1960s and 1970s, always affected political campaigns. And is not the “fed-upness” of voters to be expected in a nation of close partisan division where more and more of our social life is politicized, not to mention the normal cycle of disappointment in democratic politics? (And remember that “the personal is political” might also be said to be a product of the 1960s New Politics, at least for the leftmost part of the political spectrum.)

The New Politics always comes around again every few election cycles, though not always by the same name. We saw it with Gary Hart’s explicit generational appeal in 1984; we saw it after a fashion with Ross Perot’s appeal to the “angry middle” of disaffected voters in 1992, and we are seeing it now with Barack Obama (who is a two-fer, since he also qualifies as a “New Negro,” if you’ll pardon the archaic usage). The comparison of Obama and RFK has been explicitly made for months now, as has his generic post-boomer theme of transcending partisan differences. It is a simple matter to predict that this aspect of Obama’s candidacy will come to nought, as did Hart and Perot before him, and as RFK’s surely would have had he lived.

But the real historical comparison taking shape these days may be with Hillary and . . . Al Smith! My thesis is simple: Hillary is going to become the Al Smith of our age: an inevitable nominee, and a sure loser for similar reasons to Smith in 1928. It is not just that a woman president is likely unacceptable to a decisive portion of the swing vote (which will be loathe to admit this to pollsters), but also that she is just too emblematic of the Deep Blueness of the blue states in a way that her husband was able to conceal successfully.

These thoughts came to mind as I was reading a 1925 essay on Smith by Walter Lippmann, in which he judged:

The availability of Al Smith is glaring, indisputable, overwhelming. And yet he is unavailable. By the unspoken and unwritten law of the United States, as it stands today, he cannot be nominated by any national party.

Lippmann was wrong about this judgment, of course, but his broader analysis is correct on why Smith couldn’t win the presidency. The parallels aren’t exact, but close enough to prompt some reflection:

One cannot say that the new urban civilization which is pushing Al Smith forward into national affairs is better or worse than the older American civilization of town and country which dreads him and will resist him. But one can say that they do not understand each other, and that neither has yet learned that to live it must let live. The conflict is an inevitable consequence of our history. It seems, however, to be the fate of this genial man to deepen that conflict and to hasten it, and to make us face the conflict sooner than we are ready. . . The Ku Kluxers may talk about the Pope to the lunatic fringe, but the main mass of opposition is governed by an instinct that to accept Al Smith is to certify and sanctify a way of life that does not belong to the America they love. Here is not trivial conflict.

Here’s a story about this study of the political views of the American professoriate. We are, they find, more moderate than some culture warriors have argued. But if you focus on leading research universities and liberal arts colleges, and on the core undergraduate liberal arts disciplines, the liberalism increases and the moderation diminishes. I’ll have more when I have a chance to take a closer look at the study, which won’t be until I return to Atlanta this evening.

Update: Just a quick note to say that this report shows that conservatives remain clearly in the minority almost everywhere in higher education (which of course isn’t news). And I wonder how "moderates" react in a landscape where conservatives are hardly sufficiently numerous to provide a counterweight to the other side of the spectrum.

This TNR profile isn’t totally a puff piece, but it makes Huckabee seem admirably nuanced. He lacks foreign policy gravitas, but that distinguishes him only from Giuliani and McCain (and maybe Duncan Hunter) among all the aspirants, and he has the advantage of not having had to cast a vote for or against anything the Bush Administration has does anywhere in the world.

I’ve long ridden this hobbyhorse and am happy to see the NYT join the good guys, even offering this cool interactive graphic.

For me the bottom line is this: it’s ironic that a program often touted as being good for education relies, first of all, on the economic ignorance of its "core" customer base (quick: what’s the expected value of a dollar "invested" in a lottery ticket, compared with a dollar put in an interest-bearing bank account?) and, second of all, on an attitude (wishfully thinking that one can get something for nothing) that is antithetical to the connection between hard work and self-discipline, on the one side, and reward, on the other that we’d presumably wish to cultivate.

To me, lotteries indicate a failure of political leadership: they’re a so-called "voluntary tax" imposed by legislatures unwilling or unable to make the case for spending more public money on education. What are they afraid of--that the voters can’t be persuaded that the public education as it’s currently constituted is less marketable than the exploitative "entertainment" of a scratch and lose (er, I mean scratch and win) ticket?

Bill Kristol last paragraph in praise of Clarence Thomas’ My Grandfather’s Son: "Thomas’s memoir raises fundamental questions of love and responsibility, family and character. His book is a brief for the stern and vigorous virtues, but in a context of faith and love. It’s a delightful book--you really can’t put it down--but it’s also a source of moral education for young Americans. It could be almost as important a contribution to his beloved country as Clarence Thomas’s work as a Supreme Court justice. And it suggests one more contribution he could make. Thomas in 2012!"

I’ve been curious for some time about paleocons’ rejection of American exceptionalism. I originally raised this question as a comment on another thread, but never received a response, so I thought I’d try it here.

My question is simply this--how can the refusal to believe that America is exceptional be squared with support for an anti-interventionist foreign policy? I understand that anti-interventionism has a long history in the United States, but it has generally gone hand in hand with the argument that the nation can avoid foreign entanglements specifically because it was exceptional. There was a strong strain of this thinking in Jefferson--that America was an "empire for liberty" that, thanks to its very nature, was able to rise above the power politics of the old world. Hence his admonition that America avoid "entangling alliances." Generations of anti-interventionists since then, from William E. Borah to Pat Buchanan, have echoed this theme.

Of course, not everyone believed this, even during Jefferson’s day. Alexander Hamilton--as well as George Washington--believed that the United States had to play by the time-honored rules of international politics. This is why Washington in his Farewell Address rejects "permanent alliances" (after all, these were inconsistent with a strategy of realpolitik) but at no point denies the need for foreign involvement in general. Similar attitudes could be found in men such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, who were great admirers of Hamilton. For them it was because the United States was not exceptional that it needed to form alliances with foreign powers.

Michael Gerson writes a very good and thoughtful piece on the "not so new" trend of posting anything and everything on My Space or Facebook. I think he is exactly right in his criticism of the thing. But I also like that he maintains a sense of humor about himself and begins with this great line: Conservatives, ever allergic to fashion, have a habit of encountering social trends long after millions of their fellow citizens, then pronouncing themselves unamused. You have to admit (even if begrudgingly). . . that is SO true! Even so, Gerson does admit that these networking tools can be useful and thus (as in so many things) it’s not so much the technology as it is the users of it that are the problem. As for me, I think this can all be explained by this dreadful lack of reserve in our popular culture and which I noted here. What explains this lack of reserve? That’s too complicated. I’ll leave that for you all to discuss.