I spent the better part of today at two separate "Awards Assemblies." One for my first grader and one for my third grader. For K-2, these things always have a certain insufferable quality to them--partly because the "awards" mean so little (it’s understood that every kid will "eventually" get one and one teacher doesn’t even bother with the pretense . . . she just gives them out in alphabetical order!) and partly because some parents persist in the belief that they mean everything. Still, one is expected to attend and, because the expectation is coming from those ones whose expectations matter most to me (i.e., my kids), I go.

For the third graders, however, things become a little more serious. In third grade they start to get real "grades" (i.e., A,B,C as opposed to "proficient" and "needs improvement") and the question of honor roll and the various gradations thereof start to hold some real meaning. At least the honors are not doled out to everyone because they are "special" and can fog up a mirror. My daughter, to her surprise (because she did not know that such a thing existed before today) made honor roll. But she did not make the "President’s Honor Roll" because she did not have straight A’s. (It appears that the child has inherited her mother’s math gene. I won’t even tell you what happened when I tried to correct her word problems one evening!)

Earlier this week, I noted this article, which offers an account of a conflict between long-time residents of Statesboro, Georgia and the Georgia Southern University students who temporarily reside there.

Well, preliminary results are in, and it looks like the merchants who mobilized the students to promote their businesses didn’t do quite as well as they needed to, coming up just short of a city council majority.

I brought this up today in the context of a talk I gave to colleagues--"Tocquevillian Reflections on Teaching Civic Engagement" (copies of my notes available if you send me an email). Had I been on the Georgia Southern faculty, I would have regarded this as the proverbial teachable moment, raising a number of questions with my students about the quality and value of their civic engagement. Most of them are recent and relatively short-term residents of Statesboro, a community in southeast Georgia on that long stretch of I-16 between Macon and Savannah. Absent the modern Georgia Southern (created in the 1980s when the university rode extraordinary Division I-AA football success to statewide prominence, becoming a destination of choice for students who wanted relatively bigtime college football, but couldn’t get into or didn’t want to go to the state’s flagship university), Statesboro would be a fairly sleepy smallish south Georgia town. The University is, for the most part, its lifeblood. There are merchants who want to cater to the wishes of a party-oriented student body (largely, I’d bet from the Atlanta suburbs), building for them the sort of commercial scene relatively affluent suburban kids want--big box retailers, Abercrombie & Fitch (ugh!), and bars, bars, bars! These merchants would use the political support of a transient population to alter tremendously the character of a town whose permanent residents have something on their minds other than the weekly sequence of happy hour deals. As they’re protrayed in the press, and as the merchants hope they voted, the students seem to be thinking like consumers, not like homeowners and heads of households, i.e., not like responsible burghers. Student engagement in Statesboro politics, however justifiable by Georgia registration laws (which, like registration laws everywhere, make only the most minimal civic demands of potential voters), doesn’t necessarily promote citizenship and community, but rather runs the risk of being destructive of it.

Rich Policz writes about his father and his fellow soldiers and the bloody battle on a hill in Vietnam. It is good to remember such men on any day.    

Tomorrow is the birthday of the Marine Corps, by the way. So all honor to the warriors, which includes these few friends. God bless you all.

Our friend Matt Franck neatly sums up the case against the trustworthiness of Rudy Giuliani on abortion issues.

Giuliani would have us believe that his "honest" refusal to pander on abortion is superior to the inconsistent flip-flopping of others. Matt effectively disassembles the honesty of Giuliani’s position, showing how slippery it really is. He also shows that, in politics, trustworthiness depends upon clearly articulating principles to which you can be held, a standard somewhat more readily met by candidates other than the former Mayor of New York.

Read the whole thing.    

Sorry for the long absence from the blog, folks. I’ve been driving hard trying to finish Age of Reagan II by the end of the year--I have the remaining three chapters roughed out, but still have a long way to go and a lot of gaps to fill in--but I was also just out on the Hillsdale College cruise for 11 days (along with fellow speakers Paul Johnson, Andrew Roberts, Phyllis Schlafly, and Ed Meese), and have you ever tried internet on a cruise ship? It is unbelievably expensive, and excruciatingly slow. I think cruise ships must transmit data packets by carrier pigeon or smoke signals or something. So no blogging. Anyway, a fun time was had by all, and hey--when is the Ashbrook Center going to have a cruise? Or maybe a motorcycle trip with Peter?

I’m in southern California at the moment, having flown out yesterday to give yet another speech on global warming. My seatmate on the flight to Los Angeles was the very chatty and convivial Lanny Davis, whom cable viewers will remember for his nightly appearances defending Clinton during the impeachment unpleasantness. He regaled me for at least an hour with the case for Hillary’s brilliance and greatness (I was unpersuaded). He also told a number of off-the-record things about Clinton White House in the 1990s, and other things. Nothing earth-shaking that you can’t guess or suspect, but I shall want to honor his confidentiality; I’m not a journalist after all.

But the most interesting point was our discussion of an aspect of the current political season that I see is the hot topic of conversation this week; namely, the way in which the political fights of the 1990s, and Bush hatred today, are part of the saga of the baby boomers continuing their intra-generational fight that began in the 1960s. This is the one aspect of Obama that is interesting: he’s been trying to make "goodbye to all that" a key theme, just as Jimmy Carter tried to make trust and goody-goodyness his leading trait after the disaster of Watergate. Obama went to college in the late 1970s right after I did (I have close friends who knew him at both Occidental and at Harvard Law School), and I do recall that the whole 1960s cultural divide seemed alien and remote to most of our cohort.

But is Hillary the answer to this? Isn’t she a continuation of the problem, with her sixties background? (Just read her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky some time if you want to read something scary. I am sure she doesn’t believe much of that anymore, but that fact that a person from a top university could once have written such radical tripe is still unnerving.) Lanny Davis assured me that Hillary is supremely conscious of this and has learned her lesson from the 1990s--and from the failure of Hillarycare--and this morning Joe Scarnborough was saying the same thing on MSNBC.

I’m skeptical but it bears watching. Back in early 2004 I had a notion to write an article about how if John Kerry was nominated, we’d end up refighting the Vietnam War. I’m still kicking myself for not doing the piece, since the Swift Boaters swiftly confirmed this. Now I suspect the Hillary nomination is inevitably going to open up another, but hopefully the last, chapter in the Hatfield-McCoy aspect of the baby boom saga.

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint write convincingly (if not originally) about the need for blacks to stop thinking about themselves as victims and to find it within themselves to overcome deep feelings of inferiority that become self-fulfilling prophesies. Cosby should be commended for lending his name and well-deserved reputation for decency and common sense to this effort. It is a good and noble thing he seeks to do.

Given that, I am troubled and--to put it mildly--deeply irritated by Cosby’s recent comments about Clarence Thomas on the Larry King show. Cosby was asked by King about the possibility of any affinity between his views and those of Thomas. Cosby denied him (more than three times) asserting that Thomas doesn’t "care about anybody" and that he is a "brother light." King emitted an insipid laugh in response to this comment.

This display does not square at all with Cosby’s own (?) words in the essay to which I link above:

Many people who are trying to make it find themselves struggling against fellow African Americans so lost in self-destructive behaviors that they bring down other people as well as themselves.

In D3 men’s golf.

Byron York talks to Rudy Giuliani. And Pat Robertson says something with which I’m inclined in large part to agree:

“To me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorism,” Robertson told reporters. The second-most important issue, Robertson said, is fiscal discipline. Only after that, he suggested, are the social issues, with the overriding priority being the makeup of the federal courts. “Uppermost in the mind of social conservatives is the selection of Supreme Court justices,” Robertson said, and Giuliani “has assured the American people that his choices for judicial appointments will be men and women who share the judicial philosophy of John Roberts and Antonin Scalia.”

This doesn’t mean I’m going to vote for Rudy G., but Robertson (for once?) makes some sense. Where I part company, and what gives me pause about RG, is that the President has some influence over the moral tone in the country. In terms of what’s possible in the states, judicial nominations matter a lot. But the way in which someone can speak for or against the proverbial "culture of life." I’m not confident that RG will consistently say what I’d like him to say. Judges are good, indeed very good. But the tone and example of the presidency matter too.

RG has some strengths here, not just weaknesses, and he should articulate the former in this context, talking about civility, responsibility, and opportunity. He does it reasonably well, and he can appeal to social conservatives on these grounds.

Robertson, I’ll say it again, is right: social conservatives can do complexity. But they can also recognize obfuscation and weaseling.

"Faith and Public Dialogue: A Conversation with John Kerry."

I don’t have time now to do amything other than observe the absolute windiness of it and to note that JFK is singing from the Democratic common ground hymnal, in which an obligation to help the least of us becomes an obligation to support government programs that purport to help the least of us. Plenty of folks I know give a lot of money and time to the poor, but, apparently, their failure to vote for Democrats indicates their mean-spiritedness.

Stated another way, the common ground in principle yields to a big disagreement about policy. But it’s not in the interest of Kerry and his allies to descend to that level of detail.

Here’s an unsurprising summary of how various religious groups regard the leading Democratic and Republican contenders. We learn that evangelicals are the outliers on Giuliani, apparentlty narrowly favoring Fred Thompson (see this post).

Will Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Giuliani change this? If you agree with the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza that Pat Robertson is "one of the most influential figures in the social conservative movement," you might think so. That statement might have been true in 1988 (if you didn’t take into account that charismatics like Robinson don’t always generate warm fuzzy feelings from non-charismatic evangelicals).

The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus notes that George W. Bush, who allegedly is insulated from all contact with anyone who might say anything even the slightest bit unsettling, has been more available for unscripted exchanges with the press than Clinton and Obama have.

O.K., it’s the campaign and it’s easier to stay on message if there’s no informal give-and-take with reporters. But the only semi-plausible defense of our intolerably long campaign season that I’ve heard is that it’s an audition for governing (well, if governing is the same as campaigning...woe be unto us!). This doesn’t bode well for the availability of a President Clinton.

Patrick O’Connor at the Politico describes efforts on the part of GOP leaders in Congress to forge a new and improved image. To do this, GOP hot shots have turned to private sector marketing techniques and advisers. While there may be some limited merit to this approach, it appears to me to be a rather pathetic attempt to shove a sheep into sheep’s clothing. In other words, haven’t we had enough of this sort of thing in recent years? Our problem is not so much an inability to sell what we offer but an inability to offer anything coherent to sell. For example, see the description of the problems existing between the moderate, Mike Castle and the conservative, Mike Pence. (I tend to think that moderates like Castle are less concerned that the GOP agenda is too conservative than they are worried it may be too conservative to get them elected . . . but that’s another matter.) The point is, how do you market indecision and confusion?