Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog

Here’s a quick roundup on Obama News-for-Jews:

Advisor McPeak on NY and Miami

Sounds like Jeffrey Hart isn’t the only Obama friend who’s getting him in trouble (as we talked about a few days ago).

Mazel tov to Katie Levinson! She just got a gig with Richard Edelman’s outfit. (Edelman’s a real mensch.) While it was sad to have the old Giuliani team break up, it’s nice to see talented and committed people like Katie land on her feet. Good luck, kiddo.
(h/t Potomac Flacks)

As all eyes turn toward Pennsylvania, for the upcoming Democratic primary, the GOP is enjoying watching the internecine party battle between Clinton and Obama supporters. From Pennsylvania Avenue:

The Republican National Committee gleefully pointed our attention Tuesday to what they see as hopeful a sentence in a recent Rasmussen Reports poll on the Democratic race.

To quote Rassmussen: “If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, just 55% of Clinton voters say they are even somewhat likely to vote for him against John McCain. That’s down two points from 57%.

If Clinton is the nominee, just 55% of Obama voters say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for her against McCain. That’s down nine points from 64%.”

For months, the Democratic lovefest enjoyed watching the circular firing squad of the Republican primary contenders (having had a spot in the trenches with the Giuliani camp, I can tell you it was pretty bloody), but now the GOP is all love and rainbows and McCain ponies. And so it should be. (we’ll save our bitterness for the inevitable convention platform fight and deciding who gets to speak in prime time… as if people still watch anything in prime time anymore).

Speaking of warzones and frontlines, poor Hillary has her Bosnia oops to atone for while Obama is still trying to figure out how to get out from under the Rev. Wright’s shadow (hint: distract people by pointing out that your supporter Jeffrey Hart is funny with the Jews - if history is any lesson, the only thing that will distract the MSM from a good racial witchhunt is a good anti-semitic one).

For those of you who didn’t see it in the comments buried below, we feel we owe it to Thomas Callahan to showcase his explanatory note in full:

Tom Callahan ‘84 here with a clarification:

My old man (who died in 2006 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s) used to refer to his former professor by name with an aphorism something like, “You know what Rosenstock-Huessy used to say…” and then would say something about fate and being aware that you don’t know how your life will unfold. My six living brothers and sisters can all attest to Dad’s references to R-H, but none of us can remember the exact words that had stuck in my father’s mind. I never knew how Rosentock-Huessy’s name was spelled, and I always thought his first name was Rosenstock and his surname was Huessy. I even googled various misspellings of his name one time but to no avail. Then I came across Hart’s article. Now I had the guy’s name (I thought - didn’t know that Hart misspelled it too), and I was able to find a philosophy web site and a few samples of his writing (still didn’t pick up on the misspelling). For the alumni profile, I used the citizen-education quote rather than my poorly remembered paraphrase of my Dad’s paraphrases of what R-E used to say. So–Hart definitely did not lift his quote from me; it is thanks to Hart’s article that I could track down more information about my father’s favorite philosophy professor. No plagiarism intended by me - just wanted to quote Prof. R-H accurately while capturing the spirit of my father’s aphorisms. I don’t think my late father or the late professor would mind. Indeed, the late professor would probably be more concerned if I misquoted him with a memory shrouded paraphrase. Finally, any mistakes are entirely mine, not Ms. Birzen’s. I provided that passage to her.

Regarding Phi Delt, Gig Faux was VP when I was President of the house. He was if anything even more instrumental than I in bringing Phi Delt back into the good graces of the College at the time.

Best regards,

Tom Callahan ‘84

So there you have it; mystery solved. Kudos to Callahan for responding so forthrightly. As we’d heard, he’s an honorable, patriotic man. As you can see, this also clears Birzin and Jeffrey Hart (as far as the quote goes, yes, but his attitudes on Jews vis a vis his support for Obama is still troubling - especially given Obama’s speech today about the Rev. Wright and Barack’s own crazy white Grandma. I guess that makes Hart the nutty Judeo-fetishist uncle in New Hampshire)

Interesting that Eliot Spitzer could afford the talents of Ashley Alexander Dupre (aka “Kristen“), but he obviously had no money left for a decent speechwriter when it came time for his resignation. Loyal readers know that we’ve dwelled here in the last couple weeks on “plagiarism” and “misappropriation” of quotes. The lesson is, when there’s a dispute, then attribute. But maybe Eliot Spitzer should have been reading the blog.

In his resignation speech the other day, he said “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” At first I thought that was from Spiderman, but actually it’s from Bill Gates’ mother. As Bill put it in his commencement speech to Harvard on June 7, 2007:

My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

Of course, the similar quote appears elsewhere - from George Bush to John F. Kennedy, Jr. In fact, there’s a fascninating history of the phrase posted by Mark Lieberman at Penn.

Spitzer continues in the speech: “our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” A terrific line. And one that sounded great when British writer Oliver Goldsmith said it in the 18th Century.

As a longtime supporter of Rudy Giuliani, I could have told New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to follow Giuliani’s lead: If your marriage is getting stale, don’t go to a prostitute! Just get a new wife (even if there’s some overlap). Really, at the end of the day, you can still run for President. (People seem to forget, but that strategy worked for McCain, too. His first wife “worked tirelessly for POWs,” only to have him finally return home and dump her for Cindy.)

If Barack Obama’s rise in popularity is due to his “Audacity of Hope,” then Hillary’s downfall could be proportionately attributed to her “Arrogance of Inevitability.” If this inverse relationship seems obvious in the Democratic primaries, it was perhaps less obvious, though no less true, on the Republican side of the ballot box. As the GOP faithful set our clocks forward to the Spring hangover of John McCain, we’ve begun to ponder just how it happened that a man whose campaign was all but dead last summer, and who is so reviled by so many quarters of the party, could so easily be waltzing to a September coronation in Minneapolis. In short, I would argue, McCain has Rudolph Giuliani’s own arrogance of inevitability to thank for his ascendancy.

The real mystery of Campaign 2008 remains why Giuliani’s campaign imploded to the point of irrelevancy. Why didn’t he challenge in Iowa? Why did he retreat from New Hampshire? And why did he count on Florida so much when the campaign was effectively over by then?

As a sometime advisor to the Giuliani campaign, I had a bit of an insider’s view of how the campaign lost the double-digit lead we enjoyed last summer. As you may recall, that was the time of the soft primaries of fundraising, organization, low-cost trial balloons and online campaigning. It was also the summer of Obama Girl. The gyrating, singing vixen was the first real sign to America that we had an election going on. It was the beginning of the YouTube-ification of the campaign, and every candidate knew it. Except one.

While Obama Girl battled a lurid Hot-4-Hillary user-generated campaign ad to gin up excitement for the Democratic primary, an equally provocative ad shook up the Republican blogs and YouTube channels. A series of anonymous ads, featuring a middle-aged valet driving a minivan and spouting out sometimes funny, sometimes incoherent diatribes, didn’t get the national attention that the more well-endowed Democratic eye candy got. The ads, known only by their YouTube channel name “Abrad2345“, portrayed the driver as a self-proclaimed Giuliani supporter, but so over-the-top, that it comes across as a satirical jab at Giuliani himself. To make matters more pointed, the ads all ended with a tagline for the Giuliani campaign and a link to the official campaign website.

Not surprisingly, the ads were dismissed by the Giuliani campaign as harmless pranks that had no relevancy to the real business of raising money and preparing for primary season. But as ABC News and The New York Times starting looking into who was behind the ads, they linked them to a consulting company that had been responsible for the infamous Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign. Naturally, that firm denied any involvement with the stealth ads. The whole point of a stealth campaign is to have plausible deniability. It’s worth noting, though, that at a time last July when the McCain campaign was literally reduced to buying coach tickets for the Senator, one of their few existing consulting contracts was with these very same consultants.

And let’s think for a moment about what would have been going through the minds of the few staff left on the McCain campaign: They needed to slowly chip away at fellow traveler Rudy Giuliani’s base of support, and to do it in the lowest-budget way possible: on the internet, and without a paper-trail back to McCain who had to maintain the moral highground that would be consistent with his “Straight Talk Express” reputation. Sure enough, the McCain campaign denied any involvement with the Abrad2345 ads. It’s relevant to note that of all the candidates supposedly attacked by the unhinged Giuliani supporter in the ads, only the “attack” on McCain becomes an ironically clear-cut comparison between McCain the heroic POW and Giuliani, the draft dodger, in its tagline: “Rudy: No war hero.” In vying for the same set of national security Republicans, this was Giuliani’s one vulnerability versus McCain. Whether the ads were officially sanctioned by the skeletal McCain campaign, or the work of rogue elements in his organization, they were effective nonetheless.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who authored the videos. Some have plausibly argued that they were the work of left-wing agitators just stirring up the Republican pot. The relevant point is that the Giuliani campaign completely dismissed them. At the same time, while every other primary candidate was developing an aggressive online component to their campaign, the Giuliani team floundered. We did not have an official MySpace page until September, by which point Obama, Clinton and Romney had racked up tens of thousands of online “friends.” The Giuliani team didn’t feel the need to: Rudy was the presumptive front runner and was racking up a war chest built on big donors. The internet was for Ron Paul and his crazy minions. Right?

Wrong. As Giuliani found out two months ago, and Hillary is finding out now, it is your broad base of internet supporters who will sustain a campaign deep into the primaries. With individual contributions capped at $2,300 a person, it’s all those MySpace friends and YouTubers out there whose small donations have buoyed Obama, to say nothing of McCain, Huckabee, and yes, Ron Paul (even in the face of actual primary defeats).

By the time the Giuliani campaign hired a new team of media consultants in the early fall, its solution was to start posting clips from a young campaign volunteer on YouTube and MySpace. The guy in question, a likable enough junior staffer named Dan Meyers, was what you might have expected for a young Republican: Clean cut, shirt and tie, and all the charisma of burnt melba toast. With no humor, production value or edge of any kind, these YouTube clips were doomed. In short, when the satirical anti-Giuliani videos are averaging ten times as many hits as the official videos, that does not bode well for your online strategy.

By September, McCain had retooled his campaign team, started posting effective campaign videos that reminded voters of his war record and his support of the Iraq War surge. A similar strategy worked for Huckabee, who ultimately shot to the lead in the Iowa caucases after a hilariously effective YouTube clip of himself with Chuck Norris. The difference is that Huckabee siphoned votes off of Romney, while McCain succeeded at the expense of Giuliani. And now we see McCain has learned another lesson: Unlike the stuffy Dan Meyer videos, McCain has his pretty, perky daughter Meghan and her two gal pals Shannon and Heather YouTubing their campain. Who wouldn’t want to watch them?

Did a handful of satirical YouTube videos sink the Giuliani campaign? No. Giuliani and a handful of his own advisors sunk the campaign with their myopic vision of their own inevitability. And that’s a lesson that Hillary is learning now.

The Dartmouth Review responds. Turns out that “reformed” conservative, fomer Nixon speechwriter and now Obama supporter Jeffrey Hart (an “Obamacon”) was a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and wrote a long piece about it in the DR (or ‘TDR’ as apparently they like to call it). Don’t know why no one noticed it sooner.

It’s an odd piece, and I’m not entirely sure I get his point, but in addition to reminiscing about “Christian existentialist” Rosenstock-Huessy (who was born Jewish, converted to Christianity and fled the Nazis to Dartmouth) and his book The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, Hart has this to say about Jews:

I had come to Dartmouth from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which, though a public school, required an entrance exam. It was 85 percent Jewish and it seemed to me most of the students had their eyes on Harvard and usually its medical school. The intellectual culture was intense and exhilarating. The faculty to day [sic] would be university professors, but most were Jewish too, and excluded from the desirable. During the 1930s Harry Levin had trouble getting tenure at Harvard, so did Lionel Trilling at Columbia, because they were Jews…..

But where have all the Jews gone, now that Stuyvesant is mostly Asian? What about Harvard? What about medical school? Are the Jews settling for William and Mary? Rollins? Say it ain’t so.

Jeffrey, it ain’t so.

In any case, it’s now clear that Hart DID take classes from E R-H, though he apparently dropped out of Dartmouth and finished his degree at Columbia (because there were more Jewish professors there?).  I’ll leave it to others to decipher Hart.

As for Callahan, it’s still intriguing to think that the future King Abdullah II of Jordan spent his salad days kicking back with the Phi Delts singing “Louie, Louie” and smashing beer cans on his head. It’s no wonder he’s one of America’s biggest allies in the Middle East. And given that he’s surrounded by Iraq, Syria and Israel, I suspect there’s more than a few times that King Abdullah wishes he was back at Dartmouth. On the other hand, Abdullah’s mother was a secretarial assistant on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, so maybe he was just channeling Peter O’Toole.

Hats off to the Dartmouth Review for digging a little deeper. In today’s blog, A.S. Erickson writes:

I was reading through the preface of Prof. Hart’s Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe (published in 2001) when I came across this on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. This seems to corroborate the speculation that Rosenstock’s maxim about the Citizen was often repeated in class.

[Rosenstock] had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.

He would say, “History must be told.” He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

Good digging. But I’m afraid that since this was written in 2001 (after Hart wrote the 1996 piece), it stills begs a few questions:

• Does Hart spell E R-H’s name right in the book? We’re still - at best - left with a Dartmouth English professor who neither cites his sources, nor even spells the name of his subject correctly. If an Ivy League English prof. can’t check the spelling of one of his esteemed colleague’s names correctly, it begs the question about the value of a Dartmouth education.
• Was Hart actually a student of E R-H? (we know he taught at Dartmouth, but the DR says he and E R-H probably didn’t overlap). In and of itself, this doesn’t corroborate that the Citizen quote was widespread, only that Hart used it more than once. The trick is to find someone else who remembers the quote.
• If he wasn’t a student, what’s his original source for the ‘96 quote? The DR can just ask him.
• The DR now puts the blame squarely on Callahan and/or Birzin, suggesting that they copped from Hart. Fair enough, but then I ask again, why would the Callahan quote be such a personal one “from his father?” If a man lies so cavalierly about his own father, what else is he lying about? His own resume? His own trackrecord at Dartmouth? Do we really want this guy representing us at the State Department working in anti-terrorism? We’ve been asking around the National Security community, and indeed, Callahan has a stellar record protecting America (and yes, even contributing to Bush/Cheney in 2004). If Hollywood was to depict a handsome, daring, athletic, patriotic, articulate diplomat, they couldn’t do better than Callahan. To read the Birzin piece in particular, the guy is one part Tom Cruise and one part Matt Damon (minus, of course, the Sarah Silverman thing).
• ….But, what happened at the Phi Delt house? The Birzin profile spends considerable time talking about Callahan’s experience cleaning up his frat, Phi Delta Alpha (not to be confused with Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta Phi, the inspiration for the film Animal House):
  

  Just before he took the reins as president, Phi Delt was put on social probation by the administration for a series of behavioral incidents and infractions by its members. Callahan was faced with the difficult task of finding a way “to reconcile the house’s objectives with the legitimate concerns of the Administration.”

  What’s interesting is that the general dates of that time period coincide with Jordan’s then-Prince (now King) Abdullah hanging out at the frat:

  Royalty visited Phi Delt in the 1980s. Prince Abdullah of Jordan hung out at Phi Delt in 1983, while visiting close friend George ‘Gig’ Faux ’84.

  
  Best as we can tell, Callahan took over as Phi Delt president from Gig Faux the next year and had to clean up “the mess.” I have no reason to doubt Callahan’s loyalty to his country, but should a high-ranking State Department expert on counterterrorism be old frat buddies with the King of Jordan? As one of our strongest allies in the reason, maybe that’s a good thing. But it begs the further question of if the young Prince had anything to do with the “behavioral incidents” at the Phi Delt house and what exactly did Callahan do to “clean it up”?

• Has anyone tracked down Birzin, Callahan or Hart to get to the bottom of this?

(h/t to Eli and Marwan for digging up many of these links)

So that’s the Democratic Party’s solution to the weak dollar, record high diesel prices, lost jobs, returning veterans, to elect as President a motivational speaker. I don’t care how many Harvard degrees Barack has. Try bullshitting a hero who just lost both his legs, who’s seen his buddies obliterated, who can’t sleep because of nightmares. Try telling him “yes we can” and see how far you get. Once again the Democrats have it wrong. Even if you accept their premise that people are suffering, they should know that people on the bottom have a tendency to “playa hate”. The last thing a patriot mired in debt and self-hate wants to hear is the sunny optimism of the young, tall and good looking. That’s why McCain is a perfect fit for today and tomorrow’s zeitgeist and that’s why he’ll be our next President.