Week of Jan. 14, 2008

Rudy’s collapse is the mark of the worst presidential campaign in history. Think about it: Rudy Gulliani was the national frontrunner a year ago in many, many polls. He led virtually all of his Republican opponents, and several of the top Democratic candidates as well. Today, he has been drubbed in every race and is left in a do-or-die situation in Florida. Two of histories previous “worst” campaigns, Texans John Connally and Phil Gramm, were never considered the front-runners, never led in any polls and never had the continued, recent national exposure that Rudy has enjoyed. They spent far less money and accomplished really the same results. Generations of political historians will pick at the Rudy 08 corpse and wonder what the hell happened. Losing is one thing, but this glorious flameout is one for the ages.

If you are finding the presidential nominating campaign, which has now run longer than “The Mousetrap,” a trifle tedious, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that, like all good things and some bad ones, the campaign will come to an end within the next ten months. Probably.

The bad news is that an entirely different and potentially more insidious form of tedium is on the way. You may wish to plan a long, long ocean cruise for the summer, or hole up in the mountains somewhere until it blows over. For take my word for it, it’s going to get really, really tedious. Yes, ladies and gentlemen and eternal kids of all ages, it’s about to be the 40th anniversary of the Summer of ’68 of blessed – and no doubt richly enhanced – memory.

On Tuesday the pontiff canceled a speech scheduled for today at Sapienza University of Rome in the wake of a threat by students and 67 faculty members to disrupt his appearance. The scholars argued that it was inappropriate for a religious figure to speak at their university.

This pope's specific sin was a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago in which, they claimed, he indicated support for the 17th-century heresy trial against Galileo. The censoring scholars apparently failed to appreciate the irony that, in preventing the pope from speaking, they were doing to him what the Church once did to Galileo, stifling free speech and intellectual inquiry.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

At a time when George W. Bush arouses such intense vituperation among his critics, someone who wishes him well, like myself, criticizes reluctantly. But criticize one must; to pretend all is well, or to remain loyal to the person despite his record, does no one a favor. A frank recognition of shortcomings must precede their repair.

I respect Bush's benign motivation and good intentions while mourning his having squandered a record-breaking 90 percent job-approval rating following 9/11 and his bequeathing to the next president a polarized electorate, a military reluctant to use force against Iran, Hamas ruling Gaza, an Iraqi disaster-in-waiting, radical Islam on the ascendant, and unprecedented levels of global anti-Americanism.

In the end, this volume of reflections [THIRTY WAYS OF LOOKING AT HILLARY Reflections by Women Writers] corroborates Mrs. Clinton’s own long-ago observation that she is “a Rorschach test” for voters. It also suggests that like three other famous blondes (Marilyn, Madonna and Princess Di), she’s in danger of being turned into one of those indeterminate semiotic texts academics love to deconstruct, made to signify everything from the aging of boomer dreams to the future of feminism, even as her every gesture and inflection is sifted, measured and weighed, and her actual résumé and record are increasingly shoved to the side.

Our magazines and newspapers are so dumbed down that they never discuss issues, only stereotype or attack or puff up candidates -- and all for the most idiotic things -- like their marriages, which in truth we know nothing about -- or their weight or their clothes or their hair. They don't discuss brains, intelligence, psychological maturity, but only who's up or down in the polls, cuter in photos, who misted up, cried or didn't cry, said"my friends" like Reagan or mimicked Bill Clinton's style or JFK's or whomever's.

If Eleanor Roosevelt were alive and running, they'd talk about her big teeth and her hoity toity accent. If JFK were alive and running, they'd reveal his affair with Marilyn and slander his wife for it.

Martin Luther King led the movement; Lyndon B. Johnson supported that movement, played the politics, guided the legislation, and signed it into law. Both were indispensable to the civil rights successes of the 1960s. To acknowledge both denigrates neither man. Describing such an acknowledgement as a denigration of Dr. King is, at best, bad history. At worst, it is a manipulative and inflammatory racial appeal concerning a crucial era in American history--an era that needs very, very careful consideration indeed. Either way, the current heated rhetoric demonstrates that the utopia of post-racial politics has hardly arrived.