Tilting at Windmills - analysis of various social trends and events - Column

Washington Monthly, April, 2000 by Charles Peters

A New York Times profile by Nicholas Kristoff explains another reason I hated to see McCain lose. He was a proven leader. Kristoff says of the men who served under McCain in the Navy: "Loyalty to the Skipper was widespread. As one tracks down and talks to the men he once commanded, it is striking how often their voices light up as they describe something magical about the Skipper ... he would hurtle into the maintenance shops and start kidding the officers, peppering them with rapid-fire questions and jokes, urging them, scolding them and leaving them fired up ... Inertia had set in. But then McCain came in and changed them overnight."

So I regret his loss. Not that I don't share the conventional wisdom that he spent too much of the campaign's final days in overheated, overly-personal attacks, instead of focusing on the inspiring elements of his message. But I also feel that his mistakes were compounded by the media. Instead of seeing McCain whole, and consistently reporting his virtues and his faults, the media helped inflate his victory in New Hampshire by their too-enchanted reporting. Then, having become disenchanted, the media expressed that disenchantment disproportionately during the last week, and contributed to his defeat on Super Tuesday.

MEDICAL ERRORS AND THE deaths they cause have been in the news recently. Behind the problem is the medical profession's longstanding lack of enthusiasm for self-criticism. The situation among lawyers is no different. For example, during 1998-9, the Wisconsin Board of Attorneys Professional Responsibility received 1256 complaints of which 1068 were dismissed without investigation. Only 34 of the complaints led to public reprimand or license suspension or revocation.

A CANADIAN IS THE DEPUTY COMMANDER of the U.S. Army's Third Corps based at Fort Hood, Texas. This, having come about because of NATO, makes sense to me. In fact another form of the idea is one of the Monthly's old causes. Since we haven't brought it up for a while, it may be time to tell our newer readers ab-out it. The State Department has embassies and consulates all over the world. So do countries like Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with whom we have a language and many other things in common. Why have duplicate embassies and consulates in the places where we have common interests with at least one of those nations? Why not let one of them represent us in some places while we represent them elsewhere. Of course we can't do this everywhere. Sometimes our interests diverge. But where they don't, we could save a pretty penny.

"VOTERS IN THIS YEAR'S Republican presidential primaries rank education dead last in importance," writes Dave Boyer of The Washington Times, citing exit polls and other surveys of GOP voters. The same may be true of the political reporters for our great papers. Although I thought George W Bush's best moment in the California debate was when he talked about his accountability education program, and the worst moment for McCain and Keyes came when they disagreed on the basis that any federal role in education is automatically bad. In their stories the next day neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times tried to explain Bush's position or the significance of his opponents' disagreement.