Even assuming those flying monkeys do bring Hillary the presidency this time, a fundamental strategic problem for democrats remains, William Voegeli points out. They may win one now and then, but the albatross of leftism is permanently hanging from their necks.

The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”

One subtext of the 2008 election is liberals’ effort to convey that they now “get it” – they understand the damage this elitism inflicted on their cause in a way Schlesinger never did. Packer’s critique of Schlesinger is one instance. Eric Alterman’s assertion that, “One of the great mistakes liberals made in the 1970s was to try to win in the courts what they could not win at the ballot box – thereby allowing their democratic muscles and instincts [to] atrophy and helping to inspire a right-wing backlash against which they were defenseless,” is another.

These mea culpas, however, always turn out to be sorta culpas. No sooner does Alterman identify judicial activism as one of liberalism’s great mistakes than his litany of the “catastrophes” that have befallen America during the Bush years includes “the attack on . . . choice.” The goal of this insidious attack is to re-democratize abortion policy, 35 years after the Supreme Court reduced the number of Americas who could affect it to nine. Roe v. Wade is the biggest land-grab of all the liberal efforts to secure a political victory in the courts that they couldn’t win anywhere else. Conservatives try to reverse this great mistake, and give liberals a chance to rebuild their democratic muscles, and Alterman sputters with rage.

The problem is that liberalism incorporated the agenda and the up-against-the-wall style of the various radicalisms of the 1960s in ways that now make disentangling the New Deal and New Left genomes impossible. According to James Piereson, the ideology that emerged from the 1960s was “punitive liberalism,” which “parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people.” Punitive liberals wanted America to atone for its sins rather than solve its problems. Their goal was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as one of the era’s slogan’s had it. The comfortable, made numerous by the postwar boom, deserved to be afflicted because America needed to be redeemed. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, said that we all killed Robert Kennedy: Americans have become “the most frightening people on this planet . . . because the atrocities we commit trouble so little our official self-righteousness, our invincible conviction of our moral infallibility.” This heat-of-the-moment judgment, made in the hours after RFK was shot, was one Schlesinger repeated in a subsequent magazine article and book.

The current liberal attitude about the sort of bourgeois-baiting rhetoric and policies they favored 35 years ago is: don’t worry, that’s all behind us now . . . although it was completely defensible and really quite noble. Salon’s Joan Walsh writes, “Pushed by the civil rights, antiwar and women’s movement, the Democrats [in the 1960s] became the party of inclusion, of racial equality. The Democrats became the party that questioned unchecked U.S. military adventurism and untrammeled corporate power. In my opinion these were all good ideas, but the anxiety they engendered helped lead to 20 years of Republicans in the White House, interrupted briefly by Jimmy Carter after Nixon went too far. Reagan ousted Carter by continuing to hammer away at Democrats as the party of minorities and the poor. Sure, he talked about ‘Morning in America’ and that ‘shining city on a hill,’ but he mostly played on fears that liberalism had run amok.”

Walsh can’t or won’t ask whether there was something about liberalism that engendered the anxiety that Republicans could exploit. Favoring inclusion and opposing military adventures and corporate power doesn’t sound like a recipe for defeat. Canvassing for votes from people you’ve castigated as the most frightening on the face of the planet does.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

Robert Maranto, associate professor of political science at Villanova University, reports, in the Washington Post, on the chasm separating the gauchist monoculture of the contemporary academical clerisy from the American political mainsteam.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.) …

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans. …

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

Roger Clegg, at PJM, describes how ideology enables cynical efforts by democrats to expand their voting base.

The other day I read a couple of letters to the editor of the New York Times, from people who were sincerely offended that, as had been discussed in a recent Times article, mentally deranged people are often not allowed to vote.

Here’s part of one letter: “I am very troubled by [your article], which reports political efforts to prevent people with mental disorders and elderly people with dementia from voting. Our constitutional right to vote does not require that any one of us make a rational choice. …”

Here’s part of the other: “I was appalled to learn that the mentally ill can be kept from voting, and that some are trying to make it even harder for them to participate in the democratic process….Our government’s just powers must be derived from the consent of all the governed, not merely an elite comprised of mentally sound elders.”

The former letter, by the way, is from a doctor; the latter letter also cites with approval the lowering of the voting age in Austria to 16. I should add that the American Bar Association voted favorably at its annual convention this summer on a resolution that will urge jurisdictions to make it easier for mentally incompetent people to vote. And there is a much-publicized, multifront effort to curtail the practice in many states of disenfranchising felons, and there are even activists who think that noncitizens should be allowed to vote.

It is a pretty basic question for our system of government, isn’t it: Who should be allowed to vote?

There are only four groups of people who are generally not allowed to vote in the U.S. now, and the Left wants to enfranchise more of all of them: children, criminals, noncitizens, and the mentally ill.

The Washington Times wonders about the bona fides of those democrat class warriors.

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

“If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions,” Mr. Franc said.

A key measure of each district’s wealth was the number of single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year and married couples filing jointly who earn more than $200,000 annually, he said.

But in a broader measurement, the study also showed that of the 167 House districts where the median annual income was higher than the national median of $48,201, a slight majority, 84 districts, were represented by Democrats. Median means that half of all income earners make more than that level and half make less.

Mr. Franc’s study also showed that contrary to the Democrats’ tendency to define Republicans as the party of the rich, “the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts.”

“I just found the pattern across the board to be very interesting. That pattern shows the likelihood of electing a Democrat to the House is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in that district,” Mr. Franc said in an interview with The Washington Times.

Bob Hope’s best movie line.

0:24 video

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I’ve linked this one before, but so what?

Martha Zoeller, at Human Events, on the characteristic democrat response to inconvenient truths. They lie, and accuse their opponents of unfair tactics and false statements.

Whether it is the 2000 election results, the ongoing historical revisionism about the victory of Senator Saxby Chambliss over Senator Max Cleland in 2002 or the role The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s grassroots victory over Senator John Kerry in 2004 — Democrats never think they lose a fair fight. The fix is always in and it is against them. When the 2006 midterms came around and Democrats won, of course, that was accurate. If Democrats win, it is a fair outcome, when they lose — the response is the personal destruction of anyone in their way.

Senator John Kerry had many months to dispute the claims made by The Swifties and has not taken the opportunity. On November 6, T. Boone Pickens, Chair of BP Capital Management, offered a challenge. He promised $1,000,000 to anyone who can disprove even a single charge of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads were very effective and nothing in them was ever successfully disputed. …

Hardly a day goes by that some Democrat doesn’t accuse some other Democrat of “swift boating.” This weekend, the Obama campaign charged Hillary Rodham Clinton — President Rodham to you — with mud-slinging “swift boat” politics. Ouch! That had to hurt. The leftists try to make “Swiftboating” into a verb that connotes lies and slander, but the fact is The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a shining moment where guys with integrity stood up and told the truth. That is why it worked.

Bob Novak reports at TownHall.com:

Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

Novak interprets this as a campaign stratagem which “makes Obama look vulnerable and Clinton look prudent.” But I wonder if this is not actually a threat, promising assured retaliation if the Obama camp resorts to using a scandal involving Hillary, reportedly being suppressed at the present time by the MSM.

Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, describes a personal encounter with the hydrophobic Bush-hatred infecting America’s chattering classes.

This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American Prospect editor Paul Starr’s excellent new book, “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism.” To put in context Prof. Starr’s grounding of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner–and perhaps mischievously–I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?” His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn’t allow it. “No,” he said, angrily. “You started it. You make the case that it’s not rational to hate Bush.” I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the president’s policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues, hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, “I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks.”

Read the whole thing.

Joel Stein wrote up a pre-fabricated all-purpose Ann Coulter column, including parenthetical spaces where Ann Coulter herself could supply the necessary inflammatory mot juste. He then sent it to her, and –sure enough– Ann Coulter obligingly filled in the blanks.

Liberals Are Wusses

By Ann Coulter

Can liberals really be that easily offended? Are their beliefs so fragile, their emotions so unstable, their [body part, plural] EYELASHES so [adjective] PRETTY, that my offhand remarks threaten to destroy their entire belief system?

Maybe this is because liberals don’t have a solid belief system. They don’t believe in the Bible. They don’t believe in the Constitution (you know, that piece of paper that Bill Clinton thought was for cleaning up [something messy] DEMOCRATS’ POSITION ON NATIONAL SECURITY after he [verb, past tense] JITTERBUGGED. And they don’t believe in [book] “JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL.” So instead they believe in whatever feels good, whether that is engaging in [physical therapy] PILATES in the Oval Office, putting [noun] PUPPIES up their [body part] FINGERNAILS or spending [large sum of money] $1 ZILLION on [beauty regimen] FACE-WASHING like [lack of manliness] LIBERAL [male democrat] HILLARY CLINTON did when he visited [European city] LUXEMBOURG.

They may have no idea about good and evil — how could a group that hates [morally unimpeachable act] FEEDING THE POOR, thinks it’s a crime to place the Ten Commandments in [place] BOISE, IDAHO, and defines marriage as a union between two [noun, plural] BABY SEALS? — but they sure are good at telling people what you shouldn’t say. And what they don’t want said is anything that resembles truth. So they’re disgusted when I point out that the [Indian tribe] NAVAJO practice of celebrating [something gross] DEMOCRATS’ POSITION ON ABORTION is endangering our children, or the fact that [percentage] 20% of [immigrant group] LATVIANS commit [horrendous crime] INCOME TAX within [number] SEVEN days of coming to our country illegally by [mode of transportation] GULFSTREAM JET.

When I was on [obscure cable news show] ANYTHING ON MSNBC, I mentioned to fellow guest [grumpy old white man] WALTER CRONKITE that, scientifically, men are [any number] 47 times more likely to accomplish [an incredible feat] A LIBERAL LISTENING POLITELY TO AN OPPOSING POINT OF VIEW than women, who should stay at home and focus on [obsolete chore] BUTTER CHURNING. When [New York Times columnist] FRANK RICH heard this, he bored himself writing [large number] A KAZILLION words about it, referring to me as a skinny, blond [adjective] PEPPY [animal] BEAGLE. The point here is that he called me skinny and blond.

So let the Democrats be offended by me. I consider their every objection a testament to my righteousness. After all, this is a party that’s about to choose [democratic presidential candidate] B. HUSSEIN OBAMA as their nominee — a person whose chief of staff is [made-up name] JOHN DOE, who spoke at rallies cosponsored by the [radical liberal group] WEATHERMEN protesting the [beloved institution] FOX NEWS CHANNEL, in which members [violent action] THROAT-SLIT the [beloved symbol] AMERICAN FLAG and supported guilty [cop killer who’s first name is Mumia] MUMIA ABU JAMAL. So while my Godless, liberal detractors are in hell with the [non-Christian group] MASONS, [ethnic group] ALEUTS, [occupation, plural] DOCTORS and [deceased Democrat] MIKE GRAVEL, I’ll be in heaven dying my hair and not eating. Because the one person I haven’t offended is God. And [a conservative or book publisher] RUSH LIMBAUGH.

Kevin Drum mockingly proposes that readers pick the five “All-time Wingnuttiest” ( i.e. the worst from a leftist perspective) blog posts from his own list of fourteen nominees.

Inevitably, he includes some not-especially-interesting (Gotcha!) Iraq War posts:

Glenn Reynolds

and Steven Den Beste
(Cut and paste the link to read the post: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/03/Itsthewaiting.shtml),

some a bit too eccentric:

Pam Geller proving that she can’t sing –though she does dance well–,

Ann Althouse obsessing over Jessica Valenti’s breasts),

and a few not really here or there, but curiously enough he actually does nominate some real winners, some important conservative blog posts of unusual merit and long term interest:

Bill Whittle (after Katrina): “Tribes”
-Despite its embarrassing public display of warrior self-identification, Whittle’s Tribes is a truly classic post which says something fundamental, real, and important.

Lee Siegel: “The Origins of Blogofascism”
-This one is a landmark post in the history of the blogosphere, identifying a serious problem and pathology.

Ben Domenech: “Pachyderms in the Mist”
-Don’t listen to him at your peril, democrats.

Kim du Toit: “The Pussification of the Western Male”
-Sure it’s a rant, but it’s a fine rant.

Michelle Malkin: “The Defeatocrats Cheer”
-Michelle Malkin is very cute, and she can cheerlead.

But, in his effort to pick the all-time greats, Kevin Drum did manage to overlook the single most important blog post of all-time:

Charles Johnson: Bush Guard Documents: Forged

And, undeservedly I thought, he overlooked my own:
Gone to Live on a Farm

Geoffrey Wheatcroft expresses a European’s natural astonishment at the willingness of the American Republic to take seriously candidacies to high public office based entirely upon dynastic pretensions.

Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there’s nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?

She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can’t win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits? …

..in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton’s résumé even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It’s true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina… or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines — and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. …

What a contrast (to Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher) Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn’t seem to have impinged on Americans.

Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband’s health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.

The Zogby Poll finds George W. Bush is a trifle unpopular with a mere approval rating of 29%, but Congress is doing so much worse at 11% that one almost expects to see angry peasants with torches and pitchforks attacking the Capitol.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably has a higher public approval rating in the United States than the Reid/Pelosi Congress.