This issue: March 25, 2013 (Vol. 18, No. 27)

'The GOP of Old'

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

"The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered,” Kentucky senator Rand Paul said Thursday to the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we?” he added coyly.

The names he had in mind were of course those of John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Those spokesmen for “the GOP of old” had the bad form to call out Rand Paul after he took to the Senate floor to speculate glibly about American presidents and American military and intelligence officers calling in unprovoked domestic drone strikes against innocent Americans. McCain and Graham, advocates of what Paul calls an “aggressive” foreign policy—i.e., the foreign policy of the Republican party for the last 70 years—also challenged Paul’s general foreign policy prescription.

What does Dr. Paul prescribe? In an interview last week, Paul appealed to the wisdom of Vice President Joe Biden. In the 2012 vice ...

New World Pope

An Argentinian Jesuit in the Vatican.

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

There was much talk during the recent conclave in Rome, as there usually is at such times, about the Catholic church as a medieval institution. Occasionally that took the mild form of newspaper Sunday supplement pieces brightly describing the voting process in the Sistine Chapel. More often it combined a sneer at the past with an attack on the present. 

In the face of a wild, almost hysterical national rejoicing—Argentinians flooding the churches to weep in joy, parading through the streets to cheer in a way not seen since Poland went mad in the wake of John Paul II’s election 35 years ago—Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner could not avoid issuing a statement of congratulations when her old enemy Jorge Bergoglio, cardinal of Buenos Aires, was elected Pope Francis by the Roman conclave on March 13. But her earlier denunciation of the man as the residue of “medieval times and the Inquisition” reflects ...

Among the Evangélicos

For Republicans reaching out to immigrant groups, a glimmer of hope: Protestant Hispanics are genuine swing voters.

BY MICHAEL WARREN

Marietta, Ga.
The 2004 presidential election was the Republican party’s high-water mark with Hispanic voters. George W. Bush received between 40 and 44 percent of the Hispanic vote that year. Bush lost Hispanic Catholics to John Kerry, but he overwhelmingly won Hispanic evangelicals, 69 percent to Kerry’s 29 percent.

In 2008, the numbers changed dramatically. Barack Obama secured the votes of 74 percent of Hispanics, while John McCain won a paltry 22 percent, despite having been the GOP’s spokesman for comprehensive immigration reform. Sixty percent of Hispanic evangelicals supported Obama, and just 36 percent McCain. Four years later, Obama’s support among Hispanics dipped slightly, to 71 percent, but Mitt Romney received only 27 percent. An October 2012 Pew poll found that while 73 percent of Hispanic Catholics supported Obama, just 50 percent of Hispanic evangelicals did so, with 39 percent supporting Romney. Republicans have no reason to be happy about that ...

Forbidden City

The left-wing stranglehold on academia.

BY MARK BAUERLEIN

Neil Gross is a sociologist at the University of British Columbia who previously held posts at the University of Southern California and Harvard, has a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, and received undergraduate training at Berkeley. He edits Sociological Theory and has written a book on the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty. 

He has all the markers of an academic on the left, and Gross confesses in his introduction to this study of faculty politics that he has “very liberal social attitudes” and that his views on the economy and law are center-left. Nevertheless, he registers clearly the overwhelming ideological slant of higher education. Reviewing survey and voter registration data, he concludes that “the professoriate either contains the highest proportion of liberals of any occupation in the United States for the period 1996-2010 or is right behind another famously liberal occupational group, authors and journalists.” 

Mister Early Riser

David Skinner, (anything but) routine parent

BY DAVID SKINNER

My wife Cynthia occasionally interviews our kids, jotting down their answers in little journals. She asks questions like, What was your favorite part of our trip? What was your favorite meal?

This started before our children were even saying much. When our firstborn, Maddy, was not even one, Cynthia wrote down her favorite food, milk, and recorded her favorite song, which was “You Got the Belly, I Got the Rub,” a goofball number I had invented on the fly during bath time. Apparently, my daughter didn’t mind that it made less sense with every line: “You got the belly, I got the rub. You got the bathwater, I got the tub. You got the appetite, I got the grub.”

I had forgotten about the song, and can only quote the lyrics because Cynthia wrote them down and read them aloud a few nights ago in a terrifically cute recital as we celebrated Maddy’s tenth birthday. After some more saccharine lines, including “You got the mama bear, I ...

The Carcass of Caracas

The Scrapbook took note last week of plans in Venezuela to embalm the late strongman Hugo Chávez and put his corpse on permanent public display. This would have placed a comparatively tinhorn character in some fast historical company—Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung—and made his resting place a must-see on the Macabre Tourism trail (The Carcass of Caracas, Peasant Under Glass, and so on).

But, alas! The Scrapbook must report that it probably won’t happen. It seems that, according to his (interim) successor President Nicolás Maduro, “Russian and German scientists have arrived to embalm Chávez, and they tell us it’s very difficult because the process should have started earlier. .  .  . Maybe we can’t do it.” Which means that Chávez may soon be buried in the usual way, as he seems to have wished, in his provincial hometown of Sabaneta. And which also means that the scenes of celebrity mourning we had anticipated—Harry Belafonte ...