I guess I'm gossiping today. Then I take heart and remember what Mike Kinsley once said, that to be a good journalist you have to be part-gossip. And my wife says gossip is the yellow-brick-road of curiosity about, ultimately, the human condition. There, now I feel righteous…
Politico says that oft-cited legal scholar Cass Sunstein and human rights siren Samantha Power, who wed in Ireland last summer, may become a Washington power couple under Obama. Politico says that Power is being considered for National Security Adviser and Sunstein for the Supreme Court.
Obama got where he got thanks to the written word, and if the Sunstein/Power accession comes to pass, two august journals will have played a role. Here is law professor Sunstein in Dissent a few years ago, giving the Bush Administration a pass on its civil rights record during the so-called war on terror:
Taken as a whole, the record of the Bush administration isn't at all
bad by historical standards. There has certainly been no serious attack
on political liberty or constitutional democracy.
This is not my territory; still, I sort of doubt that statement. And wonder how much of it was written with Republican senators in mind! Though Sunstein ends on a politically-correct theme:
While constantly invoking both "liberty" and "security," the Bush
administration has failed to see that these ideals call not merely for
protection against bullets and bombs but also against hunger, disease,
illiteracy, and desperate poverty.
As for Power, I find it hard to criticize someone whose passion and values I so admire (and who's so pretty). Notwithstanding her career debt to Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, she surely gets Palestine. Yet I have to raise an eyebrow over this New York Review of Books piece last August: "The Democrats & National Security." See for yourself. It doesn't really say anything. Very official. Courtly bows to Biden and Armitage. Nothing the least bit risky about the Middle East. "Pro-Israel" when it has to be. This is not why I pay for a subscription; I want to know what writers really think.
The real story, of course, is that the piece was published a few months after Power had (accurately) described Hillary Clinton as a "monster," causing Obama to let her go. You have to scrape the shit right off your shoes, as Mick Jagger said, and even great publications must play doormat now and then.
P.S. It goes without saying that former Harvard dean Stephen Walt, who thanked both Power and (another Politico pick) Lawrence Summers for their help on a recent book, is of course not on Politico's list, notwithstanding his own goldplated bona fides. His own journal entry ("The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy") in the prestige-appointment sweepstakes was somewhat more efficacious. And noble.
