Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, June, 2003 by Charles Peters

APPEARING ON TIM RUSSERT'S "Meet the Press" some months ago, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) did not display a command of the information a president should know. Was this just a bad day for the senator? We hope so, but a story recently told to me by a reliable source is less than reassuring.

One evening while he was campaigning for the Senate in North Carolina, Edwards was faced with a choice of several events he might attend. An advance man suggested, "Maybe we ought to go to the reception for Leah Rabin" Edwards responded, "Who's she?" "Yitzhak Rabin's widow," replied the aide. "Who was he?" asked Edwards.

AS MY WIFE AND I WERE WATCHing a congressional hearing on CSPAN a few nights ago, she remarked, "Why is it that the women sitting behind the senators are almost always good looking?" I explained that members of Congress are noted for their devotion to affirmative action for physically attractive females.

SPEAKING OF AFFIRMATIVE action, I was delighted to see that last month The New York Times devoted a front-page story to school integration by income. This is a cause championed by the Monthly in several articles over the years by The Century Foundation's Richard Kahlenberg. Economic class, not race, should be the standard for affirmative action. Why give a rich black kid a leg up over a poor white one? Economic affirmative action would aid the blacks who need help the most, those who are held back by poverty. Of course, there is a kind of economic affirmative action now widely used in American higher education-only it works the wrong way, in favor of the privileged and well-connected. Back in 1989, the Monthly revealed the big advantage given to legacies by Harvard and other schools. Since then, the situation appears to have become worse. Where the legacies were 20 percent of Middlebury's entering class in 1990, according to The New York Times' Jacques Steinberg, by 2002 they made up 45 percent.

HAVE WOMEN BECOME TOO LIBerated? We would, of course, be the last to say so. But we must note that at Ohio University, "Moms' Weekend" seems to be departing from the customary standards of maternal behavior. Alcohol sales exceed those at Halloween and Homecoming, according to the Athens (Ohio) Post. Paul Shugar, a columnist for the school paper, writes:

"The weekend is really nothing more than a recipe for disaster. Take a group of males 18-25 years old in their sexual prime, add women 35-50 years old and in their sexual prime, stir in some alcohol and then let them bake together in a tightly confined Athens bar, next thing students know, they wake up wondering not where they are but where their mom is."

WHEN THIS MAGAZINE'S JOSHUA Green and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter broke the story about Bill Bennett's expensive gambling habit (see page 8), William Kristol of the Weekly Standard came to Bennett's defense: "It would be different if he had written anti-gambling screeds ..."

I can't help pointing out that I don't recall Bill Clinton writing screeds against fooling around. Yet Kristol never hesitated to slam him.

If, by the way, you doubt the seriousness of the habit Bennett was encouraging by his behavior, NBC Nightly News reports that in recent years, gambling among senior citizens has grown from 20 percent to 50 percent. Of them, 6 percent will become "problem" or "pathological" gamblers. NBC interviewed two, a man and a woman, who had completely squandered their savings.

THERE ARE 575 EMPLOYEES OF the District of Columbia who are paid $100,000 or more per year. In Baltimore, a city of similar size, only 34 of the city's employees make that much, reports The Washington Times. Even Chicago, a city nearly six times larger than Washington, has 156 fewer employees making $100,000 or more. Yet no one in his right mind would contend that the District of Columbia is more competently governed than Baltimore or Chicago.

ONE PROBLEM CAUSED BY OVERpaying local employees is that the money for their salaries has to come from somewhere, and it often comes from cutting back needed programs. Montgomery County, Md., reports The Washington Post, is "locked into costly labor agreements negotiated during boom times" and now "faces a $300 million-plus budget gap" One result is that there are 1,000 children in the county, according to another Post story by Brigid Schulte, whose parents can't afford to send them to private school and "there's not enough room for them in Head Start"

SPEAKING OF HEAD START, I applaud the Bush administration's efforts to inject some educational standards into the program. Head Start's enormous potential has too often been sabotaged by a bureaucratic culture that has treated it less as an educationally enriching experience and more as custodial daycare for the children and a jobs program for the teachers. But, just as with the rest of his education program, Bush continues to leave too many children behind because his standards are not accompanied by the money to implement them in underfunded schools.

BEN BRADLEE ONCE SAID THAT if you put all the Watergate data into a computer you could figure out who Deep Throat is. A journalism professor at the University of Illinois named Bill Gaines had his students do just that, and the computer answered that Deep Throat is Fred Fielding. Veteran readers know that he's been our number one suspect for more than 20 years. He was a notorious leaker. And as deputy White House counsel throughout the scandal, he knew more than any of the other suspects. He is also a thoroughly engaging man, whom prosecutors and reporters would be strongly inclined to protect if they possibly could. I once attended a small party at Bradlee's at which all the guests fit the profile of big shots from the Post and from the world of politics. Kay Graham and Bob Woodward were among them. Only two didn't fit the profiling: I was one, Fielding the other. And I'm not Deep Throat.