Inside Politics

No movie critic

President Bush, who this paper noted last week has suddenly become Oprah-in-Chief, spent nearly an hour yesterday fielding questions from an unscreened audience of almost 10,000 at Kansas State University.

Most of the queries were mundane — What about the Sudan? Will I have Social Security? How do you lead? — but the Most Powerful Man in the World got one question on which he definitely had no talking points.

“I was just wanting to get your opinion on ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ if you’ve seen it yet,” said one young male student, referring to the Hollywood film about two homosexual cowboys.

The crowd laughed — a bit nervously, it seemed — before the student said loudly: “You would love it. You should check it out,”

Mr. Bush got his bearings quickly: “I haven’t seen it,” he said.

“I’d be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven’t seen the movie,” he said to laughter. “I’ve heard about it.”

The president, looking a bit uncomfortable in the following silence, waited a second or two, then said, according to the White House transcript: “I hope you go — you know — (laughter) — I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm, is what I’m about to say. I haven’t seen it. (Laughter and applause.)”

Liberal nightmare

“A great achievement of modern liberalism — and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas — is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Anti-war sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been),” Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal.

“Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders — vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances,” said Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.”

“But this Republican ‘weakness’ has now begun to emerge as a great — if still largely potential — Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power.

“The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance.”

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