New Republic Inc.

Just days after purchasing the shares from money men Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt, Canadian media giant Can West has completely bought out the New Republic. The Observer first reported in Dec. 2006 (2nd item) that CanWest was taking a majority stake in the company. That was confirmed on Feb 23. Instead of just majority interest, CanWest now owns 100% of the company.

Marty Peretz, who no longer owns part of the magazine, for the first time since 1974, will remain as Editor in Chief.

-Michael Calderone

Full release after the jump  read more »

A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel's interests and the U.S.'s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.

Well now in The New Republic, John Judis has joined me in legitimizing this question. Here is the money quote:

On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism-- the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.

This is intellectually valiant work, Judis should be applauded; and TNR praised for running the piece. As for the demand made on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, it is one that anyone who has worked for the New Republic (I did it once, and carried Marty Peretz's anti-U.N. water for him) has experienced.

Wow, I'm just stunned by this. It's another achievement of the AJC report, which Judis's piece addresses (and of Walt-Mearsheimer, who broke the whole thing open). Don't you see what is happening? The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed. The degree to which neocons and neolibs and American Jewish journalists generally have been recruited in passive/unconscious identification with Israel is, as I've said here before, a legitimate issue. The suppression in the American Jewish community of any alternative discourse to Zionism—well, thanks to the AJC, the bridges are being dynamited...

Bill Clinton will be in Westchester this weekend.

In electing Tom DiNapoli, the legislature treated Governor Spitzer the same way they treated Governor Pataki.

DiNapoli's 53rd birthday is on Saturday.

The New York Times, Post and Daily News editorial boards all denounce the legislature.

A rookie Assemblyman who tried complaining about DiNapoli's election was booed.

The state GOP is in bad shape.

At least $100 per vote was spent in Tuesday's special election in Nassau.

Mike Bloomberg said the public advocate and some critics on the City Council "have no experience in doing anything".

Some city officials are eyeing their next race.

Spitzer re-appointed Judith Kaye to another two years on the bench.

Errol Louis says more needs to be done to clean up the bench.

Hillary Clinton has taken a sharp turn to the left on Iraq, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board [subscription]

The New Republic is still debating whether Israel should preemptively attack Iran.

And a neighbor of John Edwards is a big Rudy Giuliani fan.

-- Azi Paybarah

One thing that Walt and Mearsheimer do in their rebuttal is to list the large number of policymakers, including Jews like Feith, Perle, Wurmser and Wolfowitz (I would add Abrams), who are "deeply committed" to Israel and helped get us into the war in Iraq. "We emphasize again that we see nothing wrong with this [commitment], as all Americans are entitled to such attachments and are free to express them in political life," they add.

Identifying the neoconservatives as Jewish is one of those unspoken/spoken things in public life today. Two years ago, Wolfowitz was asked a question about the neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and quipped, "Don't you mean Jewish?" He was being ironical; his point was that the identification was itself antisemitic.

This is not very straightforward. Before W&M came along, two Jewish conservative scholars wrote books that described the neocons as Jewish. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by the late Murray Friedman. And The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, by Benjamin Ginsberg.

Ginsberg's book came out in 1993 and is an important work for anyone trying to understand Jewish power, the Jewish presence in the American establishment. Indeed, though Ginsberg's politics are opposite to mine, I admire him for doing what an intellectual should do, and working to describe new social patterns. Ginsberg's historical theme is simple: Jews have risen again and again because our skills have proven essential to states trying to become modern. We made Spain what it was in the 15th century. We allowed the German and English states to rise in the late 19th century. "Jewish academics, intellectuals, and artists were the leading figures in German theater, literature, music, art, architecture, science and philosophy.... " Etc. The words "Jewish financier" appear countless times in Ginsberg's book, for an obvious reason: the Jewish genius for finance has lifted and empowered the modern state. (Yivo, which burlesqued the issue of Jews & Money by inviting the vapid Niall Ferguson to talk about it, should invite Ginsberg to make up for the lapse).  read more »

The fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer's bombshell paper on the Israel lobby includes a loss of credibility to Commentary and the New Republic, two eminent journals (to which I subscribe, thereby emulating my parents, whose house was filled with stacks of Commentary) that have chosen to respond to W/M by denying that there is any such thing as an Israel lobby.

In the January Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld returns to his theme, Jewish powerlessness, when he argues that the U.S. government has always supported Israel for its own (goyische) reasons, not through any Jewish prodding. By this analysis, AIPAC should fold up its tent tomorrow, it's wasting a lot of hardworking people's money. And the ailing British chemist Chaim Weizmann should never have rushed to the White House to extract a commitment from Harry Truman to a Jewish state in 1948, again, a waste of time, Truman was planning to defy his own State Department and oppose a binational state.

Israeli scholar Benny Morris was the point man for the New Republic in its attack on Walt/Mearsheimer last year. Outraged that the authors had cited his (honorable) investigation of the expulsions of '48, Morris was shrill, his piece filled with meaningless discussions of his favorite subject, troop strengths in battles long ago. (What is it with these writers who fetishize combat?)

But in his 2001 book Righteous Victims, Morris several times refers to the Zionist and Israel lobby. He says, quite accurately, that Zionist pressure tactics were used on the Truman Administration to bring about American support for partition in '47 (in defiance of the State Department and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, the equivalent of the Iraq Study Group of that time). And Morris honestly describes the Israel lobby as a potent force in U.S. politics when he cites the secretary of state's threat to cut off "all public and private aid to Israel" to punish Israeli belligerence in the Suez crisis of '56:

President Eisenhower had just been elected to a second term; he could allow himself to ignore Jewish lobbying.

It just goes to show: Everyone knows there's an Israel lobby. The journalistic challenge is, what are its dimensions? The New Republic and Commentary have chosen to react angrily to the non-Jewish authors' statements rather than doing what they should do, telling us how the lobby works. By responding so defensively, these journals have damaged themselves, and the discourse; American readers deserve better.

P.S. Morris's point re Suez reveals the poverty of Dennis Ross's analysis of the lobby in the debate at Cooper Union last September. Ross basically said, Sure, AIPAC has the Congress in a half-nelson, but no one controls the presidency. Morris (and Abba Eban) contradict this claim.

An interesting piece of trivia about the field of Democrats jockeying for the nomination in 2008:

The three leading contenders all have ties to Wal-Mart, a decidedly controversial company among Democratic primary voters.

Writing in The New Republic [subscription], Conor Clarke makes the connections, starting with Hillary Clinton.

Between 1986 and 1992, she served on the Arkansas-based company's board of directors, a position that let her rake in about $12,500 per year. During the 1992 campaign, she still owned about $80,000 in company stock.

Skip

Last January, the senator scolded Wal-Mart for not doing enough about healthcare--but withered when asked if she ever suggested a change when she served on the board. "Well, you know, I, that was a long time ago, I have to remember." Not a good answer.

Clarke notes that John Edwards "used to own company stock--stock he conveniently managed to sell in 2004."

The piece also draws a connection between Barack Obama and Wal-Mart, though that particular dossier is, by the author's admission, pretty thin.

In an impressive demonstration of historical repetition, the senator's wife, Michelle, earns about $45,000 per year (plus stock options) serving on the board of a major Chicago food company whose biggest customer is--one guess--Wal-Mart. If that connection seems pretty distant (and, really, the connection is pretty distant) just think about all the tenuously relevant personal details that can railroad a perfectly respectable presidential campaign. Campaign critics can make a four-course meal out of pretty thin gruel.

-- Azi Paybarah

I'm actually shocked that Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor, used Tolstoy's opening line from Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as the lead of his review of a book about business dynasties in my latest New Republic. It's shocking that Ferguson would display such laziness in a leading magazine, shocking that he seems to regard the use of the thought as original—it provides his tagline, too, of course—and shocking that the New Republic let him get away with it.

I suppose I ought to have known. I'm still sore at Ferguson over the lazy lecture he gave at Yivo a few weeks back, on a hot topic, Jews & Money, which turned out to be all cliches and chestnuts and threadbare Scottish homespun.

Many, many intellectuals are now being called on to perform a backflip on Iraq. Alas, few have attempted it, and few of those have pulled it off with any grace. I mean the mea culpa for supporting the Iraq war. After all, how seriously should any writer be taken who hasn't come to terms publicly with his own bad judgment on one of the great questions of our time? Not very.

Leon Wieseltier does a pretty good job of it in the last New Republic, in a forum on what to do in Iraq.

"Since I was a supporter of the war, I have its consequences also on my own conscience. I do not believe that American troops should die for some heartless Kissingerian notion of American credibility in the world, or the like. (Anyway, it is the war itself that is doing the most damage to American credibility. After terrorism, the most immediate problem for American foreign policy in the age of Bush is anti-Americanism.)"

There's some other stuff to nod your head to here, like the frank admissions that more troops wouldn't have made any difference, that the war has increased terrorism and emboldened terrorists, that it's been a great setback to the dreams of universalists in the Middle East. (A new key on Wieseltier's piano, universalism; though of course he particularistically dismisses the Palestinians.) But I admire Wieseltier's moral tone on this one. He's taking some personal responsibility, and doing so in an open and sincere manner.

The incident in which police fired 50 shots and killed a groom on his wedding day was "contagious shooting."

The mayor has better relations with minorities than during the police shooting of Amadou Diallo seven years ago.

The cops involved in the shooting had at least five years of experience on the job.

Two Council members have called on the police commissioner to resign.

Christine Quinn's citywide speaking tour is generating buzz about a possible mayoral run.

An advocacy group wants congestion pricing in the city.

The state Assembly will make public a detailed list of pork projects it funds.

Political parties can now spend money during primaries in New York.

The head of the Executive Director of the state's Lobbying Commission may be ousted.

Eliot Spitzer will get to fill at least two upcoming vacancies on the state's highest court.

2008 wouldn't be the first time Rudy Giuliani tested the presidential waters.

Al Gore told Time magazine that despite traveling by jet to promote his global warming lecture, he does live eco-friendly.

Newsweek looked at Mitt Romney's opposition to same-sex marriage in his last days as governor of Massachusetts, and wonders if he can ride that issue into the White House.

Time magazine simply asks whether a Mormon can be president.

Jonathan Chait, writing in The New Republic, argued that "psychotic mass murderer" Saddam Hussein should be restored to power [subscription]in Iraq.

"Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured, and lived in constant fear. Bringing the dictator back would sound cruel if it weren't for the fact that all those things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale."

And Andrew Cuomo told Page Six that he asked Louis Freeh, a Clinton foe, to be on his transition team because of his legal expertise, not because of politics.

-- Azi Paybarah

I've been thinking about something Marty Peretz said at Yivo Institute last week.

Following Niall Ferguson's talk about Jews & Money, a lady in the second row asked whether the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed itself to a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, arose from a need by the Brits to gain the support of "influential Jews in the United States," who might help determine the outcome of World War I. Ferguson didn't know the answer, but that didn't keep him from offering insights into Lord Rothschild (to whom Foreign Sec'y Balfour's declaration was addressed) and the Germans and Muslims and other issues. (And I'm not going to try and answer the question here; I don't know, though it's intriguing...)

At one point, Ferguson noted that The New Republic was established by Walter Lippmann during that era, in 1914—if I heard him right, in part out of Zionist concerns—and from the audience Peretz, the grand vizier of the New Republic and chairman of Yivo's overseers, piped up that Louis Brandeis had also helped start the magazine.

My sense is that Peretz misspoke. The usual nutshell on The New Republic is that Lippmann and Herbert Croly helped start it along with the young Felix Frankfurter. I wonder if Peretz meant that future Jewish Supreme Court Justice, not Brandeis?

I'm interested because I happened to have with me at the event a splendid book I just got, The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, family letters, edited by David W. Levy of the University of Oklahoma. Brandeis was the father of American Zionism, and he's fascinating. He was assimilating until he was close to 60, and then, apparently stunned by the Dreyfus case and influenced by an associate of Herzl's with whom he became close, Brandeis grew fearful about the place of the American Jew, pushing the cause behind the scenes even when he got on to the Supreme Court in 1916 (following an antisemitic uprising against his appointment). He was never able to convert Lippmann completely, though the Levy book reveals that Brandeis lobbied for Zionism with the financier Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father, who bought the Washington Post in 1933; and that Meyer kicked in large sums for the cause, $25,000 on one occasion. And yes, Brandeis met with Croly and Lippmann around the time the New Republic began. Maybe what Peretz is referring to.

The letters also show that after the Balfour Declaration, Brandeis was among those who lobbied his friend the President, Woodrow Wilson, to echo the British commitment. As Wilson did in 1918, thereby defying his own State Department. Brandeis subsequently visited Palestine with Frankfurter and a man called Rudolph Sonneborn, the son-in-law of the great American banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb. And Sonneborn in 1947 supplied arms to the fledgling state of Israel thru a fictitious entity, the Sonneborn Institute.

All this is from David Levy's fine book.

I go on this historic bender to make a point. Powerful American Jews have played a crucial role in the Zionist cause, often behind the scenes. Marty Peretz knows something about this history. The world of Louis Brandeis and Eugene Meyer and the White House—Peretz, who is a friend of Al Gore's, knows its later incarnations in his fingertips. And how regrettable it is that from the moment that Walt and Mearsheimer addressed the idea of Jewish influence, Peretz's response has been altogether defensive and vituperative, seeking to blacken these scholars as antisemites. There is a great Jewish scholarly tradition that seeks answers to important questions, not obfuscation. What an education it would be to hear Peretz's thoughts on Washington and Israel. Though yes, we got a peep out of him the other night.

The latest New Republic has an emotional attack on Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier says that W-M are antisemites who don't understand how policy is formulated and Tony Judt is trading in antisemitic legends. He gets very angry. All this stems from the Walt Mearsheimer paper and Judt's defense of their ideas at Cooper Union.

A few points:

—The piece underscores the fact that the media failed to cover a hugely significant event (the Cooper Union Debate). Wieseltier says that he understands that the moderator Anne-Marie Slaughter refused to engage the question of whether the original LRB paper was antisemitic. I was there. She specifically asked that question at the start. It was openly debated. How unfortunate that a serious publication cannot even get this basic point right, because the author is dealing with hearsay.

—Wieseltier tries to dismiss these ideas by saying that they are tk. He is saying, They're echoing the Protocols of Zion, so there are going to be pogroms. This is a form of name calling, and it keeps people from going near the questions. But the questions are just too important, and in the end journalists and writers should deal with facts. When Judt said that the New York Times required him to identify himself as a Jew before he could write a support of the paper, and when Rashid Khalidi said that he rarely gets to speak about Palestinian issues in a mainstream forum, they were both speaking about the taboo that continues to exist on this subject because of, because of—let's be straight about this, Jewish power in the discourse, and the fear of offending Jews. I've dealt with this from editors too long to try and dissimulate about it. When Judt spoke in the Observer last week about Jewish influence and power, he was speaking openly and honestly.

—The stunning thing about the debate, in retrospect, is that when it was done, no Jews were murdered in the streets of the East Village. At least not on the north side of Cooper Union. I should stop joking. The stunning thing was that 900 people entered a hall with diverse opinions, some of them called out abuse and mockery during the debate, but not many. The seven men and woman on stage exchanged ideas without being muzzled or bitch-slapped

A number of friends passed on the article in yesterday's Times where Joe Lieberman said that Ned Lamont was not committed to Israel, during a trip by the Senator to New York to raise money in Jewish circles. The challenger of course denied it.

This is good news: the issue is getting into the Times, and on front pages elsewhere.

The credit all goes to Walt and Mearsheimer. A few weeks back, the New Republic sniggered at the authors of the LRB paper on the Israel lobby, making it out to be a flash in the pan. Oh they got their little moment in the leftwing sun, how quickly they evaporated, was Marty Peretz's tone. Well he's wrong. This was a real bombshell that is reverberating. As I first reported last Sunday, and then as Gabriel Sanders reported in this week's Forward, FSG has given the authors a book contract (at last); and meanwhile the front page of the influential New York Sun has run an attack on Tony Judt, who had lately argued on behalf of Walt and Mearsheimer's views. These ideas are not going away.

I sense that we're approaching a real political moment; and good for Lieberman for putting the issue on the agenda. Let's have it out. Before long, who knows, maybe Chris Matthews will describe the settlements in the West Bank as what they are, religious apartheid, and Senator Hagel, or Senator Lamont, will ask, What effect these violations of the Geneva Conventions that we support are having on Arab hearts and minds... Am I dreamin'?

Look, what follows is really not appropriate. But it's hard to clear the mind and hit the Friday LIRR without finally saying something.

There is one person in America telling the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times to be more boring, and his name is Clay Risen. Mr. Risen—who penned an op-ed this week which insanely took the LA Times to task over the crazy LA Times magazine profile of Joe Francis—is a killjoy moralist douchebag.  read more »

Okay, he could be worse. He could be Nicolas Lemann, who pleaded poor and then cut the budget of CJR Daily without ever attempting to put advertising on that site, thereby losing two staffers, and who recently penned a horrid and barely readable piece in the New Yorker saying that online presences needed more reporters and reporting. See? Man, it doesn't get much wronger than that.

I bashed The New Republic's Martin Peretz for hinting ominously that Harvard Pres. Larry Summers's departure would result in the loss of $100 million gifts to the school. Oops. Turns out he was right.

The New Republic this week has a snidely-vicious attack on John Murtha as the destroyer of the Democratic party's hopes for November. The article reflects TNR's belief that the war in Iraq is a good thing, and underscores the deep divisions within the Democratic party over Iraq. It also demonstrates a key difference between Vietnam and Iraq. During Vietnam, opposition to the war was most fervent among those who might have to go there: Students. Back then writers at the TNR or their friends were actually in danger of serving in the war; they were against it.

This time around, there's no possibility that meritocrats or their children will have to serve in the war, and opposition to the war is again strongest among those who actually have to go there: The military. Consider these facts:

—Murtha, the leader of the Get out of Iraq movement, is a Vietnam vet who has derived moral force from his visits to veterans' hospitals;

—The other most prominent antiwar voice belongs to a military family member: Cindy Sheehan;

—The lead lawyer arguing for the Supreme Court reversal of the Bush Administration's war tribunals procedure was a Navy Lieutenant Commander, Charles Swift; —Last month the Naval War College defied congressional opposition in inviting Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, leading academic critics of the Iraq war (and Mearsheimer is a former Air Force officer) to speak at the school, where they got a receptive audience;

—This spring the Bush Administration shifted its militant Iran policy to a softer, working-with-Europe policy after a virtual palace coup of retired generals came out to question the policy; —"Before the war began, the [former] Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki said that it would take 500,000 troops to stabilize the country, and [Paul] Wolfowitz told him, 'I think that's wildly off the mark.' I never heard a chief of staff reproved in that way by a civilian. But he didn't pull that figure out of the air. I am sure that Shinseki had a six-foot-high stack of Army estimates. We still haven't seen those studies."—Daniel Ellsberg (in New York Magazine).

—The strongest critic of Dick Cheney has been Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, an opponent of the Iraq war who has described the vice president as a "paranoid" after 9/11.

—Vietnam vet John Kerry recently recanted his support for the war and has drawn support from an upstart movement within the Democratic party that again derives its power from the disillusionment of veterans.

What I'm saying is that the moral force of the antiwar movement today comes from the military. And maybe intellectual force too: They are hungriest for new ideas about how to deal with the clash of cultures, they are most skeptical of the neocons, or most willing to speak out against their deluded program, c.f. Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. They are open to discussion of the Israel lobby, something the mainstream media has difficulty engaging. Their liability is that the military are not politically organized. A good thing, that. But daily the number of veterans of good wars goes down, while the number of veterans of bad ones goes up. Their voices will only get louder.

On Charlie Rose, that is. The outgoing Harvard President was on for an hour, rebroadcast just now. It was interesting to see him up close at last. Some observations:

Summers seems a business executive by temperament. He's too tan and doesn't miss meals. He's bold. The strongest impression of the hour was how often he rode right over Charlie Rose when he tried to make a point, or cut in. Summers's voice would rise and Rose would have to shut up. An executive's way. It's kind of amazing that Harvard wanted him, but I guess this has a lot to do with money.

Summers lacks tone. His accent is unfinished, reminds me of middle-class friends from Baltimore who never became that worldly. He has that "dt" problem—pronouncing "t's" with an extra consonant in there. The lack of tone extends to his ideas. He has an executive's impressive grasp of large ideas, forward-thinking ideas—to his great credit, he has no problem with the vision thing—but lacks subtlety. There was no sensitivity or elegance to his expression.

Summers is unhealed. He had worked on some smooth turns about how it was his fault too for being too aggressive, and he didn't handle things well, but when it came down to it, he couldn't really talk about what an abrasive personality he is. Rose seemed to me to actually dislike Summers, which is rare on his part, and kept pushing Summers to take responsibility for his lack of finesse. "You were Treasury Secretary, you should have understood the fishbowl," he said. Or he pushed Summers about his highhandedness and, using the third-person to refer to Summers, said, "You wonder... for all his brilliance.. he may not be the world's most—whatever the offense was." He meant "arrogance," a word Rose also managed to drop in. Summers didn't cop to it.

The only individual in the Harvard community he spoke of in the 50 minutes I watched was a 19-year-old student who had had the temerity to challenge Summers's data head-on in a class. Summers admired the kid, but I thought it was narcissistic. The kid plainly reminded Summers of himself.

I also think Summers misrepresented the forum for his controversial comments about women and science in January 2005. He repeatedly called it "a seminar." Later: "a private academic seminar."

But per the Washington Post, it was "a speech... at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research." According to the Boston Globe, which broke the story, the conference, on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce, was "a private, invitation-only event, with about 50 attendees. Summers spoke during a working lunch." Not exactly a seminar.

P.S. In the New Republic this week, Martin Peretz, sore over Summers's departure (which he ascribes in part of course to "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus"), desires to punish the university for Summers's departure and so plays the money card. "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey." Note to journalists: always be vague when throwing around the $100 million figure, throw in an "at least" or two. You don't want anyone to try to pin you down.

In which your humble Transom editor interrogates—via IM—media editor and Off the Record columnist Tom Scocca regarding the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times. Off the Record It is time to revive an old feature. The Transom Oh is it? Off the Record The frisky new Foer-tified Nuevo Republica is running a takedown of... THIZZURZZDAY STIZZYLEZZ The Transom Oh hell no. Off the Record Oh yes. The Transom WHERE'S MY NEWSPAPER? Off the Record TNR is still behind the curve, since as I reach for Thursday Styles, I am once again distracted by House & Home. The Transom Are you implying that H&H is the new ThurSty? Off the Record I am SAYING it. The Transom WHERE IS MY NEWSPAPER? Off the Record It's not the new ThurSty, it's the new STYLES OF THE TIMES. The Transom I found my newspaper. It was in the trash.  read more »

That's how The New Republic's Ryan Lizza describes Hillary's operation, in a comprehensive look at Hillaryland that has the rare virtue of not understating the role of an operative who will, as always, remain nameless.

He can't quite decide if the operation is a tight band of (mostly) sisters or if internal strife is about to break out, but bets that ideology, not ego, will be the major internal fault line.

Also: Ann Lewis is the Democratic Karen Hughes?

The recent New Republic has a piece challenging the notion (subscription required) that Hillary's Upstate success means she can succeed on a national level.

First, it argues that she didn't really do all that well in 2000 Upstate, where Lazio narrowly beat her. Second, it argues that Upstate is more liberal than most of America, and that Hillary's success has been more retail than any national candidate could duplicate.

These points seem only partially right. National elections aren't fought by sweeping whole states; they're won and lost on the margins, and Hillary's narrow defeat upstate was -- in that sense -- quite a victory. And since then, she's defused some of the suspicion and dislike.

The same point applies to the argument that Upstate is more liberal than America. Sure it's more liberal than Alabama; but the central question of "electibility" is whether Hillary can pull a few more votes in Ohio than John Kerry.  read more »

On the other hand, the New Republic's attempted debunking is prescient, in a way. John Spencer seems set to hand Hillary Schumeresque margins all across the state, and if he does, the modest lessons that can be drawn from the Rochester suburbs will rapidly be transformed into "Kerry's-a-great-closer"-style mythology.

The Observer started getting interested in this odd couple last summer, and in the most recent New Republic, I focus in on Hillary's courtship of the New York Post.  read more »

Post editorial page editor Bob McManus, who argues that Hillary, not The Post, has changed, concedes that the paper has taken some heat for its coverage of Clinton. And not from the usual liberal-watchdog sources. "There's people out there who think she's, if not the devil incarnate, certainly the spawn of the devil," he says. "We do something that surprises them, and we're going to hear about it."

As a guest on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Russ Feingold sniped at Hillary's presidential prospects, saying that 'Republican lite' won't cut it for 2008. (ABC's website and the NY Post both have more info on his appearance; the New Republic also ran an insightful profile on him earlier this month.)

Are these the seeds of a new "Stop Her Now" movement...on the left?  read more »

If not, how to explain the budding Senate candidacy of Steve "Bike Chain" Greenfield, a little-known sax player from New Paltz who is challenging Hillary for the Democratic Senate nod? Mr. Greenfield's campaign Web site has pics of his arrest during the RNC; a more colorful site, perhaps, features his band Andy G. and the Roller Kings: he's on the far right, wearing sideburns and a hip rock n' roll sneer.

I'm a little late on this link, but don't miss this New Republic piece on Russ Feingold as the thorn in Hillary's (left) side.  read more »

The analysis pieces are starting to meander in, and a couple you may have missed are Fred Siegel's harsh treatment of Freddy in The New Republic and Greg Sargent's partial lament of the result in The American Prospect.

Siegel sees a certain amount of justice in the defeat of a man whom, he thinks, cost the city's Democratic Party a shot at reform under a New-Democratized Mark Green.  read more »

"And so for the second time in four years, New York has elected a mediocre mayor," Siegel writes. "And for the second time in four years, Fernando Ferrer is to blame."

Sargent, meanwhile, thinks that Bloomberg's victory was in part over Giuliani and Koch, and laments what he sees as the failure of the city's elites to call Mike on his spending and to give Freddy a chance.

It’s easy to forget that in the early 1960’s, when the Beatles and their Brit-pop clones were in  read more »

The New Republic has a new group blog, The Plank, that seems modeled on National Review's The Corner, only lefter, and is off to a funny, confrontational start. Here's their invitation to procrastination.  read more »

The Al Gore boomlet, which has been gathering force in recent months, has crested in Ryan Lizza's New Republic piece this week, in which he argues that Gore is the only Democrat who can stop Hillary.

He makes a fairly complicated argument:

"Hillary's strategists are driven by a fear that electability is her greatest weakness in the primaries. In Democratic circles the conventional wisdom is that Hillary can't lose the nomination but can't win the general election. 'It is her Achilles heel if activists in Iowa and New Hampshire wake up and decide she can't win it,' says a party operative. But every move Hillary makes to stamp out the electability meme--tough talk on Iraq, moderate noise on abortion--opens her up further to a challenge from the left in the primaries. "

Gore is the darling of the blogosphere, but unlike other Kos favorites, a case can be made that he has a better general election chance than Hillary. (He did get more votes once, after all.) And he is, as Lizza notes, an anti-war hawk who can go after Hillary from the right and the left.

It's all plausible to a point, but some elements of the argument seem stretched. Can Gore really claim to be a Washington outsider? He was Veep...

Anyway, TNR revels in tweaking the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure the convention wisdom Lizza is tweaking is yet worth dismissing. A lot of Democrats still, quietly, consider Clinton unelectable. Whether that's a widespread perception probably won't be tested until the winter before the 2008 election, a notoriously unpredictable time. If an anti-Hillary mood emerges, Gore isn't the only one who can capitalize.  read more »

Actually, if a Gore ex Machina, with everything breaking his way, is the only alternative, what Lizza's really arguing is that Hillary's nomination is inevitable.

The other night, I watched an episode of Over There, a new television drama about the war in Iraq.  read more »

The New Republic takes obvious, patronizing relish in demolishing Freddy this week, in a piece that is available online only to subscribers.

The view from Washington, apparently, is that Freddy is an almost 19th-century creature of an exotic, nearly extinct breed: the local Democratic Party machine hack. There's something to that view, though we're unsure how a magazine whose central political identity is a fond glance back to the great old Clinton years can be quite so snide about politicians playing politics.

Anyway, here are some choice excerpts:

"All his adult life, Ferrer has been playing by the same set of rules -- that the way to succeed in politics is to behave like an unapologetic hack. Now that he's on the verge of his greatest success, voters and the press have decided unapologetic hackery isn't good enough. Suddenly they want 'consistency.' And 'principle.' And 'character.' Well, I say it's not fair. You don't cut Social Security benefits for people who are about to retire. You don't change frequent-flier incentives for people who've already earned their free trip to Hawaii. And you don't go revising the criteria for political leadership when a longtime pol like Ferrer is about to grab the brass ring....  read more »

"To suddenly deny Ferrer his due would be a crime against ambitious ward heelers everywhere, a crime against mixed metaphors, a crime against a lovable sitcom type. Then again, who am I to over-indict?"

One tale of triumphant inheritance gave way to another Tuesday afternoon, as The Lion King yielded t  read more »

So, God help us, Howard Dean made these fashionable, and so why shouldn't Gifford Miller, Fernando Ferrer, Eliot Spitzer and many others have their own. Maybe not quite the Bloomberg Way...but it's a taste of how this mayor's race and all the other local ones will pick up all the tools and fads that burst out in the Democratic presidential primary.

So far, the candidate blogs are scrubbed clean of personality. Gifford's is, cleverly, written by wife Pamela and brother Marshall, but that's where the fun ends. "Over the last few days, Gifford led the City Council in taking a number of important steps..."

Freddy's and Eliot's are written by the candidates, and mostly travelogues and chronicles of every Genesee Assemblywoman they've encountered. Eliot's offers two highlights: free access to his recent New Republic piece which offers a glimpse of a more populist politician than he used to be; and an extremely lively discussion section with uncensored comments.

"Eliot Spitzer is, I am afraid, a fraud," read one recent item, and today's entertaining Associated Press story notes both Spitzer '08 presidential speculation and the porn somebody posted to the site the day Spitzer declared he was running for governor.  read more »

We're impressed that the people at 895 Broadway are being so laid back about this.

As for Freddy, he hasn't been doing much blogging, but in general he's all about being an everyman and his photos certainly back that up. A favorite.

New York Underground , by Julia Solis. Routledge, 251 pages, $35.  read more »

"In case I fail to resolve all aspects of the Meaning of Life in this essay," began Mark Greif, 29,  read more »

The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon Press, 824 pages, $160.  read more »

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 may have focused feverish attention on the alleged axis of evil betw  read more »

The question that everyone was asking leading up to the release of Shattered Glass , the Billy Ray j  read more »

The question that everyone was asking leading up to the release of Shattered Glass , the Billy Ray j  read more »

Billy Ray's Shattered Glass , from his own screenplay, based on Buzz Bissinger's September 1998 Vani  read more »

If it's a civics lesson you need, you can forget about the idiotic Runaway Jury , and you won't lear  read more »

The actor Hayden Christensen, speaking by phone from the Australian set of the final Star Wars prequ  read more »

The Fabulist: A Novel , by Stephen Glass. Simon & Schuster, 342 pages, $24.  read more »

During the hollow hours after the death in Iraq of Michael Kelly, a Boston reporter got through to m  read more »

Here we go again: The New Republic 's railing on the Democratic Party.  read more »

People have taken to calling it "The Second Holocaust Debate"-the polemical fracas that has followed  read more »

I remember the first time I saw James Cramer on TV.  read more »

Here's one story you've been hearing a lot lately: 9/11 represents the clash of two incompatible glo  read more »

Knock on wood: If the news cycle and the relative stateside calm continue as is, The