New Jersey Love Affair

In the LA Times, David Green, a professor of history at Rutgers, reviews The Age Of Reagan by Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, and it's a lovefest.

Green loves how "Wilentz is utterly fair" and "analytical" and "doesn't come off as partisan." For example, Wilentz focuses on three "challenges to the nation's constitutional order" since Watergate. And what are they? Iran-Contra, the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore. Or as Greenberg puts it, "three right-wing power grabs." But that's not the whole "utterly fair" story, since, according to Greenberg, "each had a flip side of strong liberal resistance."

Here's Wilentz discussing Republicans in the Clinton years: they "established a new standard whereby the House might impeach a president for any alleged crime at all, so long as a majority of members saw fit to label it as a high crime." How's that for impartial analysis? I might have thought perjury and obstruction of justice were already high crimes. In fact, I'd be willing bet money Wilentz believed that before Clinton was elected, since Democrats have tried--and succeeded--in chasing Republicans out of office using such charges.

Or look at Greenberg quoting Wilentz on the Bush decision: "...the high court's short-circuiting of the effort to learn the election's actual winner amounted to a rejection of 'the basic American democratic principle that, messy as it might be, popular sovereignty is the bedrock of our political institutions'."

Hmm. I thought the Electoral College decided the election, regardless of the popular vote. Besides, don't we have another bedrock principle, which is that we follow the rules, and don't change how votes are counted after an election? And another thing that might be considered is after you've had a couple recounts, perhaps you shouldn't have yet another, especially when it amounts to partisans making judgment calls on a bunch of ballots.

Thank goodness Wilentz is impartial. Can you imagine what the book would be like it he weren't?