Inside Politics

Diploma-cy

Many commencement speakers at America’s top campuses were “Democratic Party officials, leftist activists, and members of the media,” according to a survey released yesterday by Young America’s Foundation.

The tally includes former President Bill Clinton (Princeton University), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (College of William & Mary), Illinois Sen. Barack Obama(Northwestern University), retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (Virginia Tech), Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (University of Arizona), Al Gore’s daughter, Karenna Gore-Schiff (Columbia University), and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa (University of California at Los Angeles).

From the press: CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Yale University),MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (Fordham University) and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman (Clark University). The roster also included self-described Marxist Gustavo Esteva (University of Vermont) and global-warming guru Ralph Cicerone (North Carolina State University).

The study also found that Vanderbilt University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michiganand University of Minnesotaoffered “separate” recognition ceremonies for black students. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Duke University, Georgetown University, Princeton, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Iowa State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California at Davis and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered separate ceremonies for homosexual and transgender students.

A few centrists and conservatives sneaked in, such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Boston College), former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean (Rutgers University) and Secretary of LaborElaine L. Chao (Marquette University).

Oh, and that was a mere 50 disgruntled graduates who managed to rally during Miss Rice’s address in Boston yesterday. The “protest,” pathetic by 1960s standards, barely was noticed in a crowd of 25,000, many of whom gave her a standing ovation.

Chuck amok

Sen. Charles E. Schumer has a little more than six months to figure out what’s wrong with American politics. The New York Democrat has signed a book deal with Rodale, the Pennsylvania-based publisher that also backed Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth,” a global warming-destroys-the-Earth tale.

Mr. Schumer announced Sunday he planned to showcase the failings of both Democrats and Republicans to buffer the nation from technology run amok. He will call on both parties to abandon old ideas — “Democrats from a New Deal belief in government and Republicans from the Reaganite distrust in it,” according to the New York Times yesterday.

“What Bill Clinton did was modify Reagan Republicanism and put a Democratic face on it. That’s not going to work. You need a whole new paradigm,” said Mr. Schumer, who has a January deadline at Rodale — previously known for environmental and health publications alone.

Raining on Al

Meanwhile, Robert Balling, professor of climatology at Arizona State University, and Joseph D’Aleo, former chairman of the American Meteorology Society’s committee on weather forecasting, have screened Mr. Gore’s film. They find it foggy.

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