Last time, I said a piece by a neo-con was sharp, I was practically read into the outer limits along with Podhoretz and co. My only connection, offhand, is that one of my best friends, father studied with Leo Strauss, and has met Michael Novak. Nathan's with Mick Jagger were about that close. (Although my step-Dad, is a distant relative of Adm. Stansfield Turner, does that make me a stepchild of the CIA? Albeit of the CIA head that threw out all the Ted Schackley and other covert ops guys that pulled off Iran-Contra)-Back to Novak-(Anybody have his, " A Theology for Radical Politics, " put it beside his theology of "democratic capitalism" volume).
And as long as I dipped my toe into the neo-con swamps. I'd be curious as to the opinion of the lawyers on the list, as to the symposium in First Things, the Catholic neo-con monthly edited by Richard John Neuhaus, ex of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, an author of a book on the "public square" (any comparisons with the Habermas or Offe "public sphere"?)(are theologians hip to Habermas? And did I really see a book on Derrida and God, the other day?) on the legitimacy of the American regime?
"The End Of Democracy"
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9701/theend.html
(I know a horribly run on sentence, I've been reading and replying to e-mail for 6 hours, I need an editor, or a Guiness. What time does Politically Incorrect come on? What's on CSPAN?)
Michael Pugliese )()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
McCain's Policy Team: The Few, The Informal Senator Relies on Instinct Most By Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 25, 2000; Page A01 John Raidt may be the closest thing the 2000 presidential race has to an oxymoron: He is the McCain campaign policy director. The McCain candidacy, after all, is about character, not issues. McCain formed most of his positions long ago, and he trusts his instincts more than his advisers. So what's McCain's policy director to do? "When you find out, let me know," says Raidt, who prefers the title "policy coordinator." "John McCain is his own policy director." Okay, so there's no policy director. How about a brain trust? Sorry. "There isn't one," Chris Koch, McCain's first Senate chief of staff, says with a laugh. But surely McCain has some sort of formal decision-making process. Nope, says Mark Salter, his current chief of staff. "There is none." That, in a nutshell, is how the McCain brain works--and, most likely, how a McCain White House would work. To critics, it's chaotic and impulsive. To friends, it's ad-hoc and instinctive. It lacks the heft and order of George W. Bush's policy operation, but, most of the time, it gets the job done. McCain relies on a loose and informal network of longtime advisers, a few policy wonks whose work matches McCain's worldview, and several trusted friends who warn McCain if his instincts fail him. McCain friends say a diagram of the Arizona senator's decision-making process would resemble an ink blot. Salter explains the McCain brain by describing his experience watching football on TV with the senator. "He flips from game to game, never getting the sense of how one game is going because he's watching 14," Salter says. "His interests are scattered and he indulges them simultaneously. He's got almost a childish appetite for new things. For a guy who grew up in the military culture, he's not regimented." Salter isn't being disloyal; McCain says the same thing himself. "There is no brain trust--it's the no-brain trust," he jokes, then adds, seriously: "Most of the stuff I don't need a lot of help on." To be sure, McCain has a circle of close advisers, mostly trusted friends who can counsel him on both politics and policy. There's Vin Weber, the former congressman, Warren B. Rudman, the former senator, Kenneth Duberstein, the former Reagan official, Marshall Wittmann, of the Heritage Foundation, and Chuck Hagel, the senator from Nebraska. Expand the circle a bit and you'll find Salter, along with political advisers John Weaver, Bill McInturff, Greg Stevens and Mike Murphy. This (minus Murphy, who joined the campaign late) is the group that met regularly with McCain, often early Saturday mornings, as he started his presidential bid. But even these folks didn't really "advise" him. "We listened to him," says Rudman. "We just discussed how you go about doing it." The meetings weren't so much policy talks, he adds, as "freewheeling discussions." It's hard to imagine a greater contrast with the deliberate world of Texas Gov. Bush, who has twice the policy staff and many more outside advisers, organized neatly into policy committees that meet regularly. Every time Bush returns to Austin, he spends a couple of hours getting updates from well-known policy gurus such as Condoleezza Rice, Lawrence Lindsey and Steve Goldsmith. Much of this is necessary: Though Bush isn't the puppet of his advisers, as the stereotypes have it, he did need to form policies on a range of federal issues he hadn't contemplated before. The McCain operation is low-budget and ad-hoc by comparison. Kevin Hassett, McCain's adviser on taxes and economics, describes his operation as "me and my laptop and three English majors and some economist friends keeping at bay an aircraft carrier of Ph.D. economists that has been attacking us." McCain, unlike Bush, doesn't require his advisers to be exclusive--or even to support him. Weber has seen both types of operations. The Bush 2000 brain trust looks to him much like the one Robert J. Dole asked Weber and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to assemble for the '96 campaign. "We ended up with 100 people, very formally structured," Weber says. "It was a great effort, but it sort of sunk by its own bureaucratic weight." McCain didn't have the luxury of a big brain trust. Most of the usual suspects had already been taken by Bush, Weber says, and McCain didn't have the money to launch a big policy effort. Beyond that, Weber says, the informality matched McCain's style. Sometimes, the outnumbered McCain operation has come up short. Before McCain put out his health care plan, a staffer prematurely released incorrect health care cost numbers, which had to be retracted. On taxes, Bush aides say he got the better of the senator when he accused McCain, during a debate, of calling for taxing employees' fringe benefits. McCain was on the defensive for a couple of days. But McCain's informal method of gathering information and advice has also proven to be a source of creativity and flexibility. McCain is a one-man polling operation and his own focus group leader, each day soliciting the opinions of dozens of people who don't even know they're advising him. "He hunts and pecks a lot," Murphy says. Adds Raidt: "McCain is a 24-hour-a-day sponge." The Sponge soaks up anecdotal advice and ideas from all walks of life. He talks regularly with publisher and analyst William Kristol, journalists Charles Krauthammer and R.W. Apple, high-tech executive Andy Grove, money man Herbert Allison, telecom executive Sol Trujillo, conservative writer William J. Bennett, foreign policy luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Brent Scowcroft, and even characters such as actor Warren Beatty (he suggested McCain's campaign accept no money at all). After the anecdotal advisers comes a second level of McCain brains: the policy wonks. There is economist Kevin A. Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, Randy Scheunemann, a former foreign policy adviser to Dole and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona's education superintendent, Heritage Foundation Social Security expert David John, and Ann McLaughlin, the former Reagan administration labor secretary. A third group, a collection of trusted friends and longtime aides, provides a reality check for McCain, affirming his hunches or nudging him elsewhere. In this group are Chuck Larson, from McCain's Naval Academy class, Salter and Koch, staffers Deb and Wes Gullet, and Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.). Even some Bush supporters, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and some Democrats, such as Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.), serve in this role. McCain advisers seem to share one trait: Their ideas fit within McCain's philosophy, rather than vice versa. Wittmann, for example, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition, offered his services because he, like McCain, is an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, and he, like McCain, sees the potential to run a campaign similar to Roosevelt's. "In order to have a successful candidacy, it is necessary to have a reform candidacy," Wittmann argues. "TR was an inherently conservative individual who thought it was necessary to restore legitimacy to American institutions. He was trying to remake the Republican Party." He gave McCain a collection of Roosevelt's writings, which McCain read and cited to Wittmann in future conversations. Wittmann also distributed to McCain's other advisers copies of Weekly Standard writer David Brooks's writings on "national greatness conservatism," which helped to form a McCain speech on the "New Patriotic Challenge." While Wittmann, Duberstein, Weber, Rudman and other like-minded thinkers help McCain paint the big picture, they also have found him policy experts to draft specific proposals. On taxes, for example, Weber got McCain in touch with Hassett, a former Columbia University professor and Federal Reserve economist. Hassett's book "The Magic Mountain" argued that the budget surplus should be used to fund a transition toward partially privatized Social Security. To Weber, that sounded a lot like what McCain had been talking about. The idea came from the peripatetic McCain himself, who hadn't heard much clamor for a big tax cut. McCain also believed, from his wandering, that a plan to secure Social Security would appeal to the young as well as the old. "He's had a strong idea of what he wanted to do from the start," says Hassett. Hassett assembled an informal team of young economists, including Jeremy Siegel of the University of Pennsylvania, Greg Mankiw of Harvard, Charles Calomiris of Columbia and Doug Holtz-Eakin of Syracuse to do battle against the older, more established Bush economists, who came up with a traditional Republican tax cut. After the wonks do their work, it's up to McCain's longtime friends and advisers to nudge him--delicately. Chief among these is Salter, who wrote McCain's memoir and is now a constant traveling companion on the campaign trail. McCain hired Salter 11 years ago as a foreign policy adviser, even though "I wasn't particularly qualified for the job." McCain simply liked his style. Throughout his time with the senator, Salter has learned to obey--and, occasionally, gently guide--McCain's hunches. "My role with John McCain is to encourage his best instincts," Salter says. "It's a pretty small responsibility." Perhaps, but that's life in the McCain brain trust.
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