LIberal?

Gary Wills reviewing David Remnick's The Bridge, discusses Barack Obama: Later, when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at The Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn’t even all that liberal.”

llustration by Joon Mo Kang;
photograph by Pete Souza
Barack Obama in 2004.

I am not a crook, er, maverick

In her brilliant Op-Ed column today, Gail Collins nails several points; one is Senator McCain's trying to rewrite his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” For now the Senator is in a political fight to win the nomination of the Arizona Republican party, being challenged on his right by a wingnut.

Collins continues:  And if McCain wants to re-imagine the 2008 presidential campaign, he is free to give it a try. Although if you are planning to deny that you ever thought of yourself as a maverick, it would be better not to have subtitled one of your memoirs “The Education of an American Maverick.”

Indeed, the book is entitled Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him.

That second cover, from Amamzon.com, to the right of young Mac's mug reads: The education of an American Maverick and the Heroes who inspired him. Touché.