By Steve Rhodes
Sept. 15 – 16.
Publication: The New York Review of Books
Cover: Citizen Gore? I’m reading this online.
“There is almost no autobiographical reflection in The Assault on Reason, but early on he tells a story about his first Senate race, in 1984,” Michael Tomasky writes. “He had done no polling when he first ran for the House, but as a statewide candidate, he succumbed. He describes a ‘turning point’ in the race when his opponent, Victor Ashe, was gaining on him:
“After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls.”
I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.”
Of course, if the pollsters were really that good each and every time out . . . well, we know they aren’t. And couldn’t the other side’s pollster see the same thing and take steps to prevent it?
*
“The sad irony of the 2000 debacle is not only that we’ve been stuck with George W. Bush, frightful as that is, but also that Gore, even with his limitations, could have been a great president,” Tomasky writes. “He distinguished himself as an engaged – though not overbearing – vice president, whose participation in ‘eight years of six-days-a-week CIA briefings’ would clearly have counted for a great deal in light of events. I’ve always thought it possible that a Gore administration might have prevented the September 11 attacks. But even failing that, his response to September 11 would have been along the lines many Americans now wish we’d pursued – forceful but measured and concerned to promote a new, democratic internationalism that would not have squandered the world’s good will. We would at least have started doing something about climate change, health care, and a host of other issues.”
*
Publication: Tribune
Cover: “The Enemy’s Voice: Viet Cong’s diary of life during the war.”
Other Reviews & News of Note: Garrison Keillor has a new Lake Wobegon book. Reviewer Art Winslow took so much time explaining what Lake Wobegon was that I turned the page before I got to the new book. I’ll read about it somewhere else.
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Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “A Stitch in Time: Gioia Diliberto steps back into the early 20th century world of fashion’s Coco Chanel.”
No thanks.
Other Reviews & News of Note: A review of Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court fails to mention the book’s startling revelation that Justice David Souter was so distraught over the court’s partisanship in Bush v. Gore that he almost resigned.
*
Publication: New York Times
Cover: A review of The Indian Clerk.
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Twenty years ago, when Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the end of the cold war and college cost far less than it does today, a book arrived like a shot across the bow of academia: The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, a larger-than-life political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” it spent more than a year on the best-seller list, and today there are more than 1.2 million copies in print. Saul Bellow, who had urged his brilliant and highly idiosyncratic friend to write the book in the first place, wrote the introduction. (Bellow later cast Bloom as the main character in Ravelstein),” writes Rachel Donadio.
“Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the “relativism” that had replaced it had “extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”; that rock music “ruins the imagination of young people”; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war,” he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change “possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.”
Of course, anyone who thinks rock music ruins the imagination of young people is an idiot. Including Allan Bloom.
So much for his open mind and fancy education.
CHARTS:
1. Bill Clinton
2. Mother Theresa
3. Navy Seal
George W. Bush is 4th; Tony Dungy is 5th; Pattie Boyd is 6th; Alan Jackson’s wife is 9th; Anna Nicole Smith is 10th; the un-great God is 12th; Dog Chapman is 13th; Jerome Bettis is 14th.
Posted on September 17, 2007