Much of the liberal pile-on targeting Raplh Nader in the last few days has struck me as both unnecessary and self-indulgent. One recurring (and irritating) meme of anti-Nader polemics involves slamming Nader as an egotist, a narcissist, a monomaniac, etc. I say irritating because to call a presidential candidate egotistical verges on tautology. Don't doubt it takes tremendous ego for Clinton, McCain, and Obama to go out there and sell themselves day after day.

But Nader's announcement moved me to go back and read a James Wolcott post from a few days ago:

Not having my copy of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals near at hand (hard to believe, isn't it?), I have to rely on my memory of what he stipulated as the elements for a successful activist campaign, which included: that an action be specific and directed in purpose, not a grab-bag of causes; that it be brief in duration rather than open-ended (so that volunteers don't get bored and discouraged); and that the tactic be fun --something that promotes infectious enthusiasm and attracts even more recruits.

By my count, Nader gets a 0 out of 3 on the Alinsky scale.

Ken Silverstein interviewed a Republican consultant, John Brabender, to tease out lines of attack that might be used against Obama in the general election, if he's the nominee. Brabender's comments drove home for me that a Dem victory in 08 is far from guaranteed:

If you want to reduce political campaigns to marketing, Obama is a great new product with great packaging and people are anxious to try it, but they don’t yet know whether it’s a product they want to use over and over again. People know McCain. He is Coca-Cola. You might not always want a Coke, but you always know what it’s going to taste like and that it’s good when you’re thirsty. These are turbulent times and the safe pick might be the best pick. ...

6. What about the age factor? Does that hurt McCain?

Some people say McCain’s age will be a negative, but it might be one of his biggest assets. When they are side by side, Obama is going to look very young, maybe too young to be president. He’ll look like a kind young man and McCain will look like an elder statesman: That visual works to McCain’s advantage. The less sure Americans feel about their security, the more people will feel better about McCain. Obama has many appealing features, and in many ways, he’s what’s right about America. He shows that anyone can rise up if they’re smart enough and talented enough, but the question is whether he has the experience to lead the country in turbulent times. That’s a huge question mark. McCain is a PC and Obama is Mac. People like the look of Macs but there are a lot more PCs out there. McCain is an extremely safe choice for America and people may decide they can’t afford to do anything but make the safe choice.

So what we have here, to use an overused phrase, are the politics of fear. What's scary is that they might work.

Here's a rather sentimental, wonderful celebration of democracy by the 19th century poet John Greenleaf Whitter.

 The Poor Voter on Election Day

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;
And sleekest broadcloth counts no more
Than homespun frock of gray.

To-day let pomp and vain pretence
My stubborn right abide;
I set a plain man’s common sense
Against the pedant’s pride.
To-day shall simple manhood try
The strength of gold and land
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand!

While there’s a grief to seek redress,
Or balance to adjust,
Where weighs our living manhood less
Than Mammon’s vilest dust, --
While there’s a right to need my vote
A wrong to sweep away,
Up! clouted knee and ragged coat!
A man’s a man to-day!

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: [...] John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all came back to the original theme that has gone throughout this Democratic race. And that is one of change. You know, John Edwards fighting for his life at this point, says he can change because he's the toughest. Barack Obama, he's the newest. Hillary Clinton says, listen, I'm the one with the experience. So, we're back to the original arguments.

First, Bill Kristol cites Michelle Malkin when he meant Michael Medved. Now we get this embarrassing (and still uncorrected, as of this writing) error from the latest David Brooks column:

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Ward Churchill? The Native-American Marxist "chickens-coming-home-to-roost" dude? I'm pretty sure he means Ward Connerly. Lesson for the fact-checkers here: you gotta check the name beyond the initials.

p.s. an alternative explanation: Could this be some kind of subversive act of neocon solidarity from Brooks?

Good news for Matt Taibbi fans: he's apparently got a new gig as the 08 political reporter for Bill Maher's show. Here's a clip from (I think) his first episode. It features a discussion of the surge in which Taibbi comments to Tony Snow that "I wouldn't trust you people to tell me the f*cking time" and Snow's angry retort that Taibbi is "perfectly cynical" and that soldiers in Iraq "have been part of something special.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky reports how to get there in seven steps. A couple of tidbits:

The government's number one target? Peace and justice organizations. From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" --- from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses. ...

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll.

I was happy to see that Gould-Wartofsky linked an old piece of mine about the ballooning number of surveillance cameras on Brown's campus. I still remember being shocked when a campus police official told me that "there are people that are constantly testing the fences" and another gave this explanation for the big new investment in cameras: "We're operating in a post-9/11 environment." Yes, on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed interviewed Ohio State President Gordon Gee about college athletics. Here's the headline: Buckeyes' Leader Believes College Presidents Should Help Contain Sports Spending. But that didn't really square with this stunning bit of rationalization:

Q. What can the top-spending university do about the arms race?

A. Our budget at Ohio State is $4-billion, and our athletic budget is $110-million. When one thinks about it as part of the overall budget of the institution, it's fairly insignificant. And it is a self-supporting unit, the same as many other units within the university. We have to make certain that athletic programs are fully integrated into the ... life of the university, that talented football players and talented cellists are given opportunities to excel, but that it is all part of the academic, social-cultural environment of the institution. And what is happening as part of this escalation is that athletic programs are increasingly becoming separated and segregated, both in structure and function, and even values, from the rest of the institution. And it's bringing that back into focus, which I think is important.

For the record, Ohio State does have 36 varsity teams, according to the Chronicle. But $110 million of public money being funneled to sports at a "research" institution? How is this acceptable?

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a favorite civil liberties group of many conservatives--which I agree has done some good work in the past--has released a year in review for 2007. This item is listed under "successes":

• Ending Brown University’s semester-long suspension of an evangelical student group, which was imposed on dubious grounds and without any explanation from Brown

The proliferation of media has lessened the importance of the Times; so have the newspaper's mistakes (which include too great a kinship with the Democratic National Committee). To be sure, there are some unmissable individuals in the paper, such as John F. Burns in Iraq. But, seemingly every day, journalists and others are discovering that they don't have to consume the whole deal.

Ari Melber reports:

Facebook's 58 million active members have posted more than 2.7 billion photos, with more than 2.2 billion digital labels of people in the pictures. But what many users may not realize is that the company owns every photo. In fact, everything that people post is automatically licensed to Facebook for its perpetual and transferable use, distribution or public display. The terms of use reserve the right to grant and sublicense all "user content" posted on the site to other businesses. Facebook, a privately held company, rejected a buyout offer from Yahoo! last year and recently sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft, which values the company at up to $15 billion. (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace, the other leading social network site, for $580 million in 2005.)

Nothing good, I think, can come out of that setup.

Seeing activists march around the main green or quad or what have you, touting posters and chanting mostly at each other, I used to think, what's the point? There's an informational purpose, to be sure, but, still, it always seemed like a better idea to me to break through the bubble and get off campus. But I was wrong. It seems concerted cross-campus efforts to protest our erstwhile AG may be putting the financial squeeze on Gonzo. The Washington Post reports:

Buried by legal bills and hard up for cash, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hit the college speaking circuit last month hoping to rake in big bucks. Instead, he's been raked over the coals, heckled or flat out turned down by students whose institutions he charges exorbitant fees to tap his amnesiac mind. ...

Even before the CIA tapes scandal, Gonzales had become the subject of angry editorials and protests on campuses near and far. At the University of Florida last month, he was viciously heckled to the point that two students wearing black hoods and orange jumpsuits blaring the words "civil liberties"- impersonating prisoners at Abu Ghraib - walked on stage and stood next to the former attorney general as he spoke. (Until they were arrested.)

It was a tough way to make $40,000. And it stands to get tougher. Gonzales is scheduled to speak on Feb. 19 at Washington University in St. Louis, where more demonstrations are expected, according to the student body president.

The talent agency Gonzales signed up with to get him speaking gigs at colleges and universities doesn't seem to be having a ton of luck. The agency, Greater Talent Network, based in New York, sent out a blast email to schools pitching Gonzales as a top-notch get - without mentioning, of course, that he's raising money for his legal defense fund. ...

Pomona College in southern California is one school that has decided Gonzales isn't worth the $35,000 cost or the headache. Politics Professor Heather Williams lit the firestorm with an Op-ed in the school paper titled "Alberto Gonzales Is a Disgrace, Not a Speaker."

"Why invite a man who repeatedly broke the law, shredded the ethical codes of the institutions he served, and then lied about it?" Williams asked. In a telephone chat, the professor told us, "It occurred to me that in 15 years Gonzales might well be up on war crimes charges."

It's a new magazine, founded in 2002, with a mission to reclaim conservatism from the neocons. The magazine has been at the forefront of an intellectual left-right antiwar coalition, running such diverse writers as Glenn Greenwald and Pat Buchanan. Besides, in what other magazine can you read Philip Weiss and John Derbyshire?

Here's an interesting one from an AP report on the wacky conservatives at Princeton:

It's an argument that Nava and others have frequently made about the campus [Princeton], which is considered more politically conservative than some other Ivy League schools but to the left of most of the country.

What's the basis, one wonders, for that assertion?

There are a lot of reasons to object to this Boston Globe endorsement of John McCain (e.g. running two endorsements—one per party, as the Globe did—lamely affirms a mushy “nonideological,” character-based vision of politics), but this passage really irks (emphasis added):

The antidote to such a toxic political approach is John McCain. The iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense.

The piece goes on to cite the senator’s “willingness to acknowledge unpleasant realities,” the fact that he has “never been an uncritical booster of President Bush's policies,” his record as a reformer, his ability to “transcend partisanship and promote an honest discussion of the problems facing the United States.” What unites these disparate qualities? Not one has a damn thing to do with being an “iconoclast”:

1. One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions.
2. One who destroys sacred religious images.

As reported in (where else?) the New York Sun:

A group working to promote pro-Israel sentiment at American colleges is hiring students to act as campus emissaries of the Jewish state.

Jewish student leaders from Columbia University, New York University, and Queens College will receive up to $1,000 a year from the advocacy group StandWithUs to bring speakers and films to campus that portray Israel in a positive light. […]

The North American campus director of StandWithUs, Daniel Klein, identified Columbia, MIT, and the University of Michigan as hot spots of anti-Israel sentiment. "The story of democracy in Israel, of a vibrant diverse country, is not being told on campuses," Mr. Klein said.

No disagreement with Klein on that last point—that's not the story being told. Here's the list of campuses that will have "Emerson Fellows" And here's a telling detail (emphasis added):

[Emerson Fellows] will:

• Possess clear leadership abilities
• Demonstrate interest in Israel’s history, society, and geography
• Be organized and clearly motivated to educate their peers about Israel
• Be a strong team player

Is it proper for an outside group to pay stipends to students to get them to invite certain speakers to campus? This seems qualitatively different from subsidizing speakers' fees or the like.

This piece, by JoAnn Wypijewski, is the freshest and most thought-provoking campaign essay I've read in a while; it's not getting nearly enough attention:

Granted, it was more fun--the last time adultery and presidential ambitions coincided so publicly--to imagine Governor Clinton bound to a bedstead with silken ties, maddened by the big-haired blonde with her animal prints and scented light bulbs, a woman who claimed he was never so happy as when he could bury his face in her muff, than it is to contemplate Mayor Giuliani panting over his soon-to-be-new-missus, the "princess," according to Vanity Fair, who's always longed to be "a queen." To toss around the subject of adultery and politics now is to raise that specter of Saturday Night Bill and of the other big-haired girl, the frisky Monica, with her kneepads and cigar tricks and oral-anal games in the Oval Office.

Someone finally decided to document the melodrama and banality and weirdness of a student newsroom. Woohoo!

THE PAPER is a revealing portrait of the young journalists whose disillusionment and determination are shaping the news of tomorrow.

Be sure to click "Watch Preview."

There are a lot of answers, but one big reason is that he can be an incredibly derisive prick:

David Brooks today was but the latest to unveil this new wisdom, following along with Peter Beinart's fact-free declaration last week that the diastrous war he cheered on is now politically irrelevant (a column that, as intended, predictably caused people like National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru to issue the ultimate TNR/NR Compliment-Cliche: "Peter Beinart has a smart column")

That parenthetical is just dripping with derision, no? It's similar flights of prickishness--though admittedly in different flavors--that make people like Alexander Cockburn or Matt Taibbi fun to read. There's an argument to be made that there's a real shortage of smart, abrasive commentators in the mainstream media.