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Cue the Dr. Evil jokes — a major Clinton donor secretly offered to give the Young Democrats of America one million dollars if YDA’s two remaining superdelegates endorsed Hillary.
An unnamed “high-ranking official” in YDA tells the Huffington Post that billionaire Clinton supporter Haim Saban made the offer in a phone call to Young Dems president David Hardt in advance of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries.
YDA leadership is said to have “agonized” over the proposal, which would have increased their operating budget for the year by a third. Support for Barack Obama was “overwhelming” within YDA, however, and the organization ultimately turned the money down.
The YDA has three superdelegates. Crystal Strait recently announced her support for Obama, while Francisco Domenech endorsed Clinton in January. Hardt, the group’s only uncommitted super, stated on Friday that he will make no endorsement “until every young voter has made their voice heard.”
Update: According to Wikipedia, Saban is the 102nd richest person in America … and the co-author of the Inspector Gadget theme song.
Two years ago today John McCain gave the commencement address that prompted me to write the following essay.
In the course of John McCain’s speech at the New School’s commencement this week, he offered this appraisal of the development of his own character:
When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.
McCain is here addressing a group of newly-minted college graduates. His message? “When I was like you, I was stupid.”
One expects politicians to pander to their audiences, but this is something different. In this speech, McCain is pandering to an audience other than the one in front of him. His oratory is designed to flatter the self-image of his peers at the expense of the people to whom he is speaking. His speech is an ugly, self-satisfied insult, and Jean Rohe, a New School student who shared the stage with him at the commencement, rightly called him on it. Speaking before McCain, but having seen an advance copy of his speech, Rohe said
Senator McCain will … tell us about his strong-headed self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others, and in so doing he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions. I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong.
Rohe explained her decision to confront McCain in an essay published at the Huffington Post the following day, and it didn’t take long for the McCain camp to respond. In a comment he left at the website Mark Salter, a senior McCain aide who had co-written the speech, rebuked Rohe, contrasting McCain’s “regard for his audience” with Rohe’s “comical self-importance” and patronizing her and her classmates:
Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber.
As it turns out, though, Rowe is not the pampered child of Salter’s fantasies:
You assume that I have no experience making a living. I have been a full-time college student and have worked a job to pay my own rent and my own expenses for the past two years. You assume that I live in an “echo chamber” of liberal head-patting, when, in fact, I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood notorious for its cultural diversity and sometimes, conflict.
John McCain was twenty-two years old when he graduated from the Naval Academy and, as his senatorial website puts it, “began his career as a Naval aviator.” Jean Rohe was twenty-two when she rose at the New School to respond to McCain’s insult to her and her fellow students. She is no less an adult today than McCain was in 1958, and it is a shame that neither McCain nor Mark Salter can see that.
An off-campus end-of-semester party turned into a melee in Middletown, Connecticut Thursday night, as Wesleyan students clashed with police.
One report contends that used pepper spray, tasers, and dogs on the students, five of whom were arrested on incitement to riot and other charges.
Before dawn, as many as sixty students converged on the police department to file complaints about officers’ tactics.
The Wesleyan student newspaper, the Argus, published a special edition on the disturbance on Friday. Wesleyan blog Wesleying has been covering the situation as it develops.
Update: Here’s an analysis of the events of Thursday night that struck me as well worth reading.
The mother of an economics student at Britain’s Lancaster University recently emailed one of his professors to complain that his courseload was too light. Because he was not being academically challenged, she said, her son “is now quite addicted to alcohol, smokes and has spent a great deal of time over the last nine months asleep.”
When the chair of the LU economics department sought to reassure her by detailing her son’s course schedule for the semester, the son filed a complaint with the university for violating the privacy of his academic records.
The professor has been reprimanded by the university, and told that any further improper disclosures of student data will be referred to the university’s personnel department for possible action.
The trustees of California’s Cal State university system voted to raise student fees by 10% on Wednesday, and a committee of the state’s UC board of regents voted to raise that system’s tuition by 7.6%. Student trustees in both systems voted against the hike, and 16 protesters were arrested at the regents’ meeting.
California’s public colleges and universities don’t officially charge tuition, but the “fees” they do charge are comparable to other public universities’ tuition rates.
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