Greetings from San Marcos, Nicaragua!

I learn from a quick glance at the headlines that Saxby Chambliss was reelected to the Senate, handily defeating his Democratic challenger Jim Martin by a 57-43 margin. An even more cursory glance at the vote totals tells me two things. First, this was a relatively high turnout run-off, with around half as many voting as did on November 4th. Second, African-Americans were more likely to stay home this time. The vote drop-off in Fulton and Dekalb Counties (both majority African-American) was much more pronounced on the Martin than on the Chambliss side.

None of this surprises me, but it does suggest that Obama’s November 4th victory was perhaps more singular than some might want to believe.

Philip Kennicott, the architecture critic for the WaPo, is very critical of the just-opened Capitol Visitor Center. He explains that there is no such thing as an underground building, and the Center is "a perfect exemplar of bureaucratically conceived and executed architecture." He thinks it’s awful. His last paragraph:

Paragraph two of an article on the Pentagon transition, "Gates’s Top Deputies May Leave":

"Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Gates’s right-hand man in running the Pentagon day to day, is widely expected to leave his post, said the [defense and transition] officials, one of whom noted that England’s speechwriter is reportedly taking another job."

Scott Johnson at Powerline brings our attention to a very thoughtful post by William Katz of Urgent Agenda about the role that popular culture and Hollywood played in the 2008 election. As Katz notes, this discussion is a perennial in American politics and, until now, it has almost always concluded with conservatives kicking back, looking self-satisfied, and pronouncing that celebrity endorsements and Hollywood political activism don’t really amount to much in terms of electoral outcomes. Some low-hanging and gullible fruits may easily be snatched by the clever machinations of entertainment industry wannabe pols, but the American people en masse are not so soft-headed as to traipse after any old celebrity of a pied piper just because she’s got a TV gig. After this election, however, there’s not as much self-satisfaction on the right as there has been up till now. Why? The names of two gals might have something to do with it: Oprah and Tina Fey.

Of course . . . Oprah is not just any celebrity. She’s a virtual religion for a good number of American women. And Saturday Night Live, if not Tina Fey, has taken on mythical and historic proportions in the popular imagination. Every other week gives us another airing of an anniversary episode or a "Best Of" compilation--as though it were some sort of pious and somber history and civics lesson about our important entertainment past. Indeed, it’s probably safe to bet that a good number of our fellow citizens recall their recent American history through the lens of SNL more readily than they do from any personal reflections. Don’t remember Gerald Ford? I bet you DO remember seeing Chevy Chase’s impersonation of him always falling down and bumbling through life. And so it is likely to be for Sarah Palin--unless she can quickly overcome it.

Anyone hoping to make a serious argument against the idea that Oprah and Fey had a powerful (and, I’d add, ominous) impact on public opinion in this election needs to go back and reflect some more on Katz’s observations. Katz argues further that the influence of popular culture on our politics is not likely to be an epiphenomenon. It seems to represent something of a dramatic shift even as it has been a long time in coming--a slowly growing iceberg that has just now hit our ship. I’m not sure what accounts for this (the rising importance of youth culture, social networking via the internet, the death of newspapers, entertaining ourselves to death, etc.?) and I’m not sure that this is really as sudden a shift as it seems to feel. But one has to admit that was a vast difference in the impact of, say, Ben Affleck and Bruce Springsteen’s endorsements of John Kerry and the impact of the full-court-press of Oprah and Fey. Forget the same league. This is not even the same sport, as kids say.

In the future, conservatives who wish to overcome this phenomenon (however new or old it may be) will have to do two things: First and foremost among them will be to quit whining about the bias of popular culture. They’re all liberals and they don’t like you? Waaah. No kidding!? Get over it. Second, they need to move beyond it. Doing this may involve adopting some of the methods and tools of this culture . . . but it needn’t mean resorting to impersonating them or, especially, not courting its favor. Conservatives should remember why it was that a certain actor/president and hero of theirs was able to overcome the massive bias against him. Even though he was one of Hollywood’s own, Reagan did not expect or need their love to be successful in politics. He turned the dynamic on its head by speaking over the heads of those in entertainment who could never be expected to endorse him and going instead directly to the American people who always had. He did not wait for the media to come to him and carry his water; he carried it himself and he did it so well that he made them come and see (and broadcast) what all the fuss was about.

He also did not get sucked into a media vortex by dancing to their tunes or appearing obsequious with his hat in his hands begging for popular adulation. He was manly in the face of their criticism without bothering to be contemptuous of them. Was he then engaged in a kind of political stage act? Maybe you could say so. I prefer to see it as character. But part of that "act" (if you want to call it that) or character was never to say or do anything that might be taken as contempt for the American people who, after all, he sought to lead. Why would anyone seek to be President of a people for whom he has contempt? People are right not to trust such a politician and Reagan was right never to exhibit such feelings--even if he sometimes (like most of us) had them. He did not criticize the people for their appreciation of a popular culture that did not appreciate him. But neither did he bow to it. He, like Lincoln before him, found a way to appeal to the better angels of their nature. And by speaking directly to what was best in them he was able to speak directly about what is best about America and, one hopes, he inspired us to live up to it. In this he sought to be imitated, not merely to imitate as a mere actor does.

Joseph Epstein on our elites:

after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as "the good student"--that is, the student who sails through school and is easily admitted into the top colleges and professional schools. The good student is the kid who works hard in high school, piles up lots of activities, and scores high on his SATs, and for his efforts gets into one of the 20 or so schools in the country that ring the gong of success. While there he gets a preponderance of A’s. This allows him to move on to the next good, or even slightly better, graduate, business, or professional school, where he will get more A’s still, and move onward and ever upward. His perfect résumé in hand, he runs only one risk--that of catching cold from the draft created by all the doors opening for him wherever he goes, as he piles up scads of money, honors, and finally ends up being offered a job at a high level of government. . . .

I did my teaching at Northwestern University, where most of the students had what I came to regard as "the habits of achievement." They did the reading, most of them could write a respectable paper, many of them talked decently in response to my questions. They made it difficult for me to give them less than a B for the course. But the only students who genuinely interested me went beyond being good students to become passionate ones. Their minds, I could tell, were engaged upon more than merely getting another high grade. The number of such students was remarkably small; if I had to pin it down, I should say they comprised well under 3 percent, and not all of them received A’s from me.

Meanwhile our good student, resembling no one so much as that Italian character in Catch-22 who claimed to have flourished under the fascists, then flourished under the Communists, and was confident he would also flourish under the Americans, treks on his merry way. From Yale to Harvard Law School, or Harvard to Yale Law School, or to one of the highly regarded (and content empty) business schools, he goes, as the Victorians had it, from strength to strength.

While Lawler has the cushy job in southern California, I’ll be working for the Man in Nicaragua this coming Tuesday through Friday.

Couldn’t help but notice a big difference between our president’s Thanksgiving message and our president-elect’s Thanksgiving message. There is no mistaking to Whom President Bush expresses gratitude for "all that we have been given, the freedoms we enjoy, and the loved ones who enrich our lives." They come "not from the hand of man but from Almighty God." Unclear what to make of Obama’s recurring de-emphasis upon God and Providence. I recall Obama’s Victory speech, where he bowdlerizes Martin Luther King’s "arc of the moral universe" quote, turning a clear reference to God’s moral ordering of the universe into a praise of human beings bending that arc themselves!

To be sure, a belief in a personal God who takes interest in His creation should not lead folks to sit on their hands and trust the Creator to do everything for them: this disrespects God’s will that those made in His image put head, heart, and hand to the work to which He calls them. Nevertheless, Obama’s reticence to ask humbly for God’s blessing upon the United States, coupled with his call for unity by Americans to "make a new beginning for our nation," suggests that he believes that what makes America great is that individuals can do whatever they put their minds to, and not so much that what they put their minds to should be informed by the fixed and eternal truths discerned in the created order. The fact that our president-elect chose to make no reference to God whatsoever, while placing himself squarely in the middle of a Thanksgiving Address (to wit, "why I’m committed to forging a new beginning from the moment I take office"), is strikingly at odds with an address that traditionally highlights our national humility before our Maker.

In a quickie op-ed, I argue that President-elect Obama really wants incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss to win next Tuesday’s run-off in Georgia.

My conclusion:

I’ve almost convinced myself that President-elect Obama shouldn’t campaign on behalf of Jim Martin, if he knows what’s good for himself and his administration. Indeed, if he could, he should film a commercial for Saxby Chambliss, the last barrier between him and an agenda driven by the demands of congressional Democrats.

And, tempted as I might be to vote for Jim Martin to bring out the worst in the Democratic Party, I’m going to support my new president and put country above party by marking my ballot for Saxby Chambliss.