Shots in the Dark

The other day, Beltway conventional-wisdomist Mort Kondracke wrote this about the Lieberman—Lamont race:

This is no exaggeration: The soul of the Democratic Party — and possibly the future of civility in American politics — is on the line in the Aug. 8 Senate primary in Connecticut.

Nope. No exaggeration there.

Does anyone seriously think the Lieberman-Lamont campaign will have one iota of impact upon the civility of any single race in the future?

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for these pundits who talk about all the horrors that have been visited Lieberman actually to name some of them. The worst I’ve heard is that someone called Lieberman a “warmonger.” That’s less an incivility than an exaggeration.

Kondracke’s column inspired Joshua Micab Marshall to write this, which (you’ll be shocked to know) strikes me as exactly right:

I think the Lieberman skeptics are really on to something when they point out that in the Kondrackes and others there is this sense that for a well-liked-in-the-beltway senior pol like Lieberman to face a primary challenge is somehow a genuine threat to the foundations of the system. You’d think he was a life peer, if not an hereditary noble, suddenly yanked out of the House of Lords and forced to run for his seat like they do in the Commons.

Marshall’s right: From the viewpoint of the Beltway Boys, the worst horror inflicted upon Lieberman is the mere fact that someone has dared to challenge him in the primary.

I’d add to this the small point that Kondracke isn’t even a Democrat, and it’s kind of annoying to have a Fox commentator lecturing the Dems on what constitutes the soul of their party. The best way for the Dems to lose the soul of their party is to listen to a Fox commentator telling them how to save the soul of their party.

And two, does Kondracke not remember how Lieberman won his Senate seat? With attack ads portraying his opponent as fat, sleepy and out-of-touch. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything in the current campaign that’s nastier than the tactics that Lieberman used to win power for himself….

Sometimes it seems to me that we have a government at odds with the people of this country, a government intent on imposing values on the American public that are at odds with the best traditions of American freedom.

For example….

The New York Times reports that NASA has quietly altered its mission statement to delete any mention of Earth.

From 2002 until this year, NASA ’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted.

Why does this matter? Because it’s an attempt to ensure that NASA can’t consider the problem of global warming.

Without [the language pertaining to Earth], scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

President Bush has often said that we are fighting a war on terror to spread freedom abroad…and yet, his freedom has a distinctly Orwellian cast.

In related news, Christine Axsmith was a CIA contractor who wrote a blog available only to people with security clearance on issues of interest to that community, such as the caliber of food at various canteens. On July 13, after writing a blog post, Axsmith had her blog pulled down, lost her security clearance, and was fired.

The subject of the last post? “Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.”

It’s not just a war for freedom overseas, is it? It’s a war for freedom at home. A war over what kind of nation we really are—what we stand for, what we believe in, how we live our lives.

So far, I’m not sure who’s winning.

And not infrequently, your posts are more informed than my blogs. Such as this one from someone named “Eagle” relating to the firing of Harvard deputy dean Pat O’Brien.

With an inside perspective, I can say that this event is much more significant than your blog has noted, Richard. O’Brien was in charge of everyone who interacts with students in the College’s administration (though only as a House Master did she interact with them herself). All the lines on the org-chart she drew (and re-drew, and tinkered with) ran through her before branching.

Gross made a decision here and there, and chaired the Administrative Board, but mostly he only ran the curricular review and tried to herd the faculty. O’Brien was running the college. This means House Masters, sub-deans of students, and every associate dean, curricular or otherwise.

And she knew nothing about colleges. She could be passionate on certain topics, but they never had to do with the lives and learning of 19-year-olds. She was hired by a headhunter who is worth some close investigating; a corporate category-head to whom many of the College’s non-curricular problems as an educational entity can be traced directly.

More importantly, O’Brien’s management style was incommunicative, ruthless, and subserved no stated educational aims. To call it ‘intimidating’ is to miss the point that she actually did simply and with no advance feedback fire the people who might in a merely unhealthy organization feel intimidated. And the atmosphere was: “The beatings will continue until morale improves!”

If you didn’t read the job listing for a “Director of Internal Communications” for the College in the spring, you’re missing out on a good sample of how survey numbers were going to be boosted under her vision (I saw it in the Globe). She believed that branding tools were what schools needed more of.

As to the larger picture: The anonymous poster above is living in a fool’s paradise if s/he thinks that the elimination of Harry Lewis’s position was a well-thought-through administrative adjustment. It was a way of justifying his ousting, nothing more, and for three years no one has done his job. Gross never could have intended to do it; and no one except the old guard in the building seems to understand what’s missing.

O’Brien was, I hope, fired because she was lousy at her job. I understand she’s a good House Master, though, so one would hope she would stay on there. And some of her campus-wide initatives might be nice grace-notes to supplement a proper rethink and re-articulation of the student experience on campus.

The larger question is whether Gross has developed good enough relationships in the faculty to allow him to survive more than a year as Dean, given how poorly things have been going in the leading of the College proper. I’d say it’s three to two in favor, since Bok would probably expect the new president to need some continuity in the Dean role. (But note that O’Brien’s ouster couldn’t wait even a year for a new president! Significant indeed; there are many stories under here).

Not long ago, it was announced that Harvard College Deputy Dean Pat O’Brien—”deputy dawg,” as skeptics dubbed her—was taking a leave of absence for personal reasons. Whoops! Turns out she was fired.

The Crimson reports today that O’Brien, former dean of the business school at Simmons College, was ousted by a combination of Harvard College dean Dick Gross and FAS dean Jeremy Knowles. Adding insult to injury, the position of deputy dean may itself be eliminated; the job appears to be either something that Bill Kirby foisted upon Dick Gross, or Larry Summers foisted on Bill Kirby, or both.

Either way, O’Brien, considered a Summers apparatchik, didn’t make many friends at Harvard. She does, however, get a send-off from Summers himself: “I very much hope that all that she put into motion to break with past practices and place greater emphasis on student welfare will continue and be enhanced,” Summers said.

Is that my imagination, or did Summers just take a dig at former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis, whom he ousted in March 2003? Or am I wrong, and that’s a self-serving way to characterize his regime as one of positive change and everything else as more of the same?

O’Brien joins a long list of deans, professors, and administrators—along with one cantankerous president—who’ve lost their jobs during or just after the Summers regime. Here’s a suggestion for the Crimson: How about a piece on how much money Harvard has spent in severance packages related to Larry Summers’ management skills? (What, for example, do you think Bill Kirby got that’s keeping him so quiet these days?) Not to mention Summers’ own seven-figure golden parachute…..

Then total in Summers’ payoffs—money for Af-Am to keep Skip Gates happy, money for female professors, etc.—and what do you have? Something like one of those $100-million gifts people are supposedly not giving to Harvard?

Ever get the feeling that today’s yuppie parents worry too much? I do.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, a hoity-toity collection of D.C. suburbs, parents recently started freaking out about a man in a white van who was stalking their young children. Phones began ringing off hooks; Internet bulletin boards were buzzing.

“Please be advised that a man in a white panel van approached one of our 13-year-old girls this morning as she walked to practice,” someone wrote in one of the unsigned e-mails. “The man tried unsuccessfully to engage the girl in conversation. She wisely ignored the man.”

“The driver of the van in both cases was a white male, about 50 years old. He had light brown hair with a receding hairline. He was disheveled looking, wearing a white t-shirt. The van was old and looked like a van that a painter would drive.”

Classic tropes of the child molester. He looks like a member of a lower economic class, but someone whom we invite into our home as part of the service class. He looks like a loser—badly dressed, slightly overweight, bad hair. He drives a crummy but generic car. Of course he does; we’ve seen all this in movies and on television.

Except it’s not true. The Washington Post reports that the whole scare came after “a man in a white van stopped a 13-year-old girl in the parking lot of a Potomac swimming pool.

“‘Miss, I think you left your lights on,’ the man reportedly said, according to police, who tracked down the teenager yesterday. The man then drove away.”

And so an act of thoughtfulness is transformed into a modern-day witch hunt. Which says something, I think, about the underlying sense that people living in upscale commuter suburbs have of being disconnected to their town, of a lack of community that creates a social and psychological vacuum…into which a sinister man in a white van can drive, taking aim at the children, underscoring the artificiality of our modern lives.

A new poll shows Ned Lamont up by four points, 51-47…

While the poll suggests that Lieberman would do well running as an independent if he lost the primary to Lamont, imagine the pressure that would come down on him from the national party to bow out gracefully.

Sometimes, Joe, it’s time to call it a day…..

So the thing is, I may have cancer.

I don’t mind writing that, because it’s not a serious cancer, just a little skin thing, a small scaly patch smaller than a dime on my right forearm. It suddenly appeared on my arm about a year ago, and changed color slightly at different sunny times (and not in a good way). A friend who’s a dermatologist frowned when she saw it, and I wound up making an appointment with another dermatologist she recommended, Dr. David Colbert, 5:15 last Tuesday.

Plus, I also had a little bump on my arm that my friend identified as an angioma, a benign tumor consisting of small blood vessels. (It looks like a little red dot.) I am too young (or so I like to believe) to have little red dots on my skin, except for the chicken pox which afflicted me at age eight, so I wanted to get that looked at as well. This is what happens when people of English descent take up scuba-diving.

I arrived at Colbert’s downtown 5th Avenue office at 5:00, as suggested, to fill out the pages of paperwork that precede any modern visit to the doctor, one third of which is insurance info, one third of which is background health stuff, and one third of which is solicitations for cosmetic surgery—Botox, chemical peel, etc. It took me about two minutes to fill that out, and then I waited…..

…in what was surely one of the swanker doctor’s waiting rooms I’ve ever experienced. A converted loft space with huge windows, blond hardwood floors, leather chairs, and two laptop computers on a glass desk so that you can check e-mail while you wait. The browser history had the last four days of visited sites preserved—someone was making reservations at a luxury resort in the Dominican Republic. Then I got creeped out by how people didn’t realize or care that anyone could see what websites they’d been on and erased the history.

I sat in a chair to the left of the model with absolutely perfect skin, to the right of the slightly older model whose skin was also basically perfect. No angiomas that I could see. I had stumbled into the modelicious den of a hipster doctor.

Ho-hum. About an hour later—the models long gone by now—my name was called. A young, clean-cut doctor named John Adams introduced himself and said that Dr. Colbert was running late—his train was delayed—and so we should get started. I thought it a little odd to make an appointment with one doctor and see another, but let it go. I’m a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy.

The doctor sat me down on a reclining chair in an office whose front wall consisted of frosted glass—although the top part was clear, and I could easily see into the windows of the building across 19th Street. I wondered if the people across the street, when they got bored, checked out the models visiting the dermatologist.

Dr. Adams was a nice guy. We both had lived in Adams Morgan, which when I was there was considered bohemian by D.C. standards and was definitely dangerous. He used to go to Perry’s, the sushi bar-cum-disco on 18th Street that kept me up on weekend nights when I lived at 1841 Columbia Road for $800 a month. We chatted about Washington for a minute. (There’s really a Whole Foods in Adams Morgan? Things have changed.) He asked what I was there for, and I showed him my arm. He frowned too.

Before I really knew what was happening, he had injected me with two needles and reclined the chair. A biopsy for the scaly patch, apparently, followed by stitches. Then I smelled something odd and asked Dr. Adams, “Is that me burning?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he said. “Just a little laser.” To remove the angioma. It was sort of an unpleasant smell.

Would have been nice if he’d mentioned that, I thought to myself, but again said nothing. Best not to disturb a doctor with a laser.

I wondered if I would ever see David Colbert, the doctor with whom I’d made my original appointment.

My arm sufficiently zapped, Dr. Adams turned off the laser, put a couple of bandaids on me, and had me make another appointment—with him, not with Dr. Colbert. A $12 co-payment and I was on my way.

Biopsy results come in next week; I’ll keep you posted.

Dr. David Colbert:
Theoretically, my dermatologist.

I’m always struck, speaking with and interviewing folks at Harvard, by how much they have Princeton on their minds. The New Jersey university has several things that Harvard just can’t seem to develop: outstanding undergraduate education based on personal interaction between students and professors; a sense of community and school spirit; alumni who give money in impressive percentages. (Harvard’s alumni give a lot of money, but the percentage of alumni who give is relatively low.)

Now Princeton also has another advantage over Harvard: a progressive president who wants to build on Princeton’s strengths while addressing its shortcomings (the small university’s elitism and clubbiness, primarily). Shirley Tilghman presents such an interesting counterpart to Larry Summers; she clearly thinks about many of the same issues Summers did while he was president, yet moves her university forward in a much more consensus-driven way.

The Wall Street Journal just conducted this very interesting interview with
Tilghman.

Some parts relevant to Harvard:

WSJ: You were outspoken in your criticism of Mr. Summers’s comments about women in the sciences. Why did you speak out?

Ms. Tilghman: There are 25 years of good social science that demonstrate the many cultural practices that act collectively to discourage women from entering and continuing careers in science and engineering. The research is overwhelming, and it is there for anybody to see. On the other hand, the data that would suggest there are innate differences in the abilities of men and women to succeed in the natural sciences are nonexistent.

WSJ: I keep hearing your name as a possible candidate to be president of Harvard. Are you interested?

Ms. Tilghman: I have the best job in higher education, and I have no intention of leaving it. I have also always understood that there was kind of an unwritten rule in the Ivy League that you don’t poach each other’s presidents.

Tilghman also speaks on fundraising, alumni preferences, increasing the size of Princeton’s student body, financial aid, and more.

(And, incidentally, would that unwritten rule apply to Amy Gutmann?)

Our Frat Boy President

Whether he’s addressing his British counterpart with the cheery phrase, “Yo, Blair,” or giving an impromptu squeeze to Angela Merkel, our president just can’t seem to grow up. Hard to believe that we have to live with this man for another two and a half years. (Don’t you have the feeling that it’s going to get worse before it gets better?)Which makes me think that the perceived maturity of the person who replaces Bush is going to be a huge factor in the 2008 race…. The world has shown itself to be a pretty tough and complicated place, not the sandbox the Bushies thought they could play in. I never thought I’d say this—he was such a dreary candidate!—but Al Gore is looking better and better….

For almost 15 years I’ve been a fan of a little-known band called Dada, as they struggle to survive the insanity of the record business. (People may remember their one big hit, Dizz Knee Land.) You’ve never heard of him, but guitarist Michael Gurley is one of rock’s finest. And don’t get me started on the rhythm section. Trust me, you’d rather just listen to them.

Somehow, despite the usual record label hell—two record labels folded underneath them—Dada have managed to stay together, and hung in there long enough to take advantage of all the non-music biz ways of getting their songs out there—a web site, an e-mail list, a myspace page.

They’ve posted a new song on MySpace, “A Friend of Pat Robertson“—congratulations for avoiding the double possessive, Dada!—which is terrific. If you have the time, take a listen…