The Hunters: Speak Crudely and Carry a Sharp Spear. (via college now live)
Today’s New York Times features a story by Richard W. Stevenson that reads like a sequel to Lord of the Flies, if Piggy had been the shadow chief of the hunter tribe. As Stevenson writes in With Bush Safely Re-elected, Rove Turns Intensity to Policy:
Jack Kemp was causing problems for President Bush’s drive to overhaul Social Security, and it naturally fell to Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s strategist, enforcer and closet policy expert, to take him on.
Mr. Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee and a founder of a conservative advocacy group, was publicly attacking an idea floated by the White House to cut benefits in the retirement system and was rallying support for an alternative approach that, on paper, would be pain free. Mr. Kemp’s statements exposed a split among Republicans and complicated the administration’s efforts to prepare the public for possible benefit cuts.
After a ceremony several months ago in the White House East Room that Mr. Kemp attended, Mr. Rove sought him out, associates of the two men said. But their exchange was less a scolding by Mr. Rove, they said, than an assertive, detailed argument against Mr. Kemp’s favored approach. Mr. Rove, they said, went through a point-by-point critique of the plan and left Mr. Kemp with the message that he considered it unworkable.
This has to be the first time in human history a football star has been tackled by a model U.N. nerd.