Inside Politics

Inventive candidate

Mitt Romney has made it clear “that when it comes to nimble and inventive maneuvering, he’ll be the candidate to beat” for the Republican presidential nomination, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes.

“Last Monday, the Romney campaign held its first major fund-raising event, a high-powered call-a-thon that pulled in $6.5 million. It demolished not only the modern record for political donations raised in a single day, but the paradigm of what a campaign fund-raiser can be,” Mr. Jacoby said.

“Instead of inviting several hundred supporters to a $1,000-a-head dinner, Romney invited several hundred political and financial all-stars — eminentoes like Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri and [EBay Chief Executive] Meg Whitman — to spend a day working their Rolodexes and dialing for dollars. Unlike a typical boiler-room operation run out of a hole-in-the-wall, Romney’s ‘National Call Day’ was staged in a giant convention center, with old and new media on hand to record all the action.

“All in all, it was a remarkable display of smarts and organization. It suggested, as Boston blogger Dean Barnett put it, ‘that the Romney campaign, like his business career, will be marked by innovation. … As he has done throughout his career, Mitt Romney will build a better mousetrap.’ ”

Leftist literature

The modern-day literature department at American universities is an insular world where “Jane Austen was a feminist subversive whose novels express her rage against the patriarchy,” where “Stalin was valiantly struggling to turn the Soviet Union into a democracy” and where “Shakespeare wrote ‘Macbeth’ to domesticate women.”

So says Elizabeth Kantor, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature,” who addressed an audience of about 65 Friday afternoon at the monthly gathering of the Conservative Women’s Network at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

“Literary education has been politicized by the left” with race, gender and Freudian theories and the largely discredited Marxist labor theory of value, she said at the luncheon, co-hosted by the Herndon-based Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

Professors are increasingly blinded by their politically correct lenses, and, as a result, authors traditionally held in high esteem are unceremoniously relegated to the trash bin of literature as “dead white males,” says Mrs. Kantor, who boasts a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from Catholic University in Washington.

“The real shame and the real danger” for students from this “leftist monopoly” by the deconstructionists and postmodernists who dominate collegiate literature departments and lock out other views, she said, is “not what they’re getting; it’s what they’re missing” in the way of classic literature and the “insights into human nature” of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Chaucer and others.

But the answer is not a takeover of university literature departments by the right, even if that were possible, Mrs. Kantor says, but rather simply to free up literature so it can “speak for itself.”

Party time

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