Taki Theodoracopulos with 'Greek Pudding' Arianna Huffington (PMc)

"I don't think he did anything that extraordinary, to point out what Blacks themselves point out," Taki Theodoracopulos told The Observer over the phone this afternoon.

He was talking about National Review journalist John Derbyshire's controversial article, “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” written for Mr. Theodoracopulos' namesake webzine, Taki's Mag.

Within 72 hours after its publication, the Review announced that it was "parting ways" with Mr. Derbyshire, saying that the author was using the conservative publication's name to "to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise." National Review's Editor-In-Chief Rich Lowry said the piece "lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible."

Mr. Theodoracopulos, who called himself a "great fan" of Taki's Mag (which is actually edited by his daughter, while dad plays the role of curator, pulling in big names from his thick Rolodex), had his own opinion of why Mr. Derbyshire was let go.

"You know, I was one of the last people asked to write Bill Buckley's obituary," the  American Conservative magazine co-founder (his partners were Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell) told The Observer. "He never would have done a thing like that...meaning you don't fire somebody to toe the politically correct line for the neo-cons in Washington."

"It's nice to be light sometimes," the 40-year veteran of The Spectator's High Life column said of Taki's Mag's sometimes flippant take of the issues. "Especially in America."

"They (the Review) were in such a hurry to toe the PC line that I don't even think they read the piece. It just goes to show what a bunch of rats they've become to do a thing like that," Mr. Theodoracopulos continued. "But it makes me happy, because now Mr. Derbyshire is free to go to The Chronicle, The American Conservative, or to us (Taki's Mag). We'll split him up, the three of us, I hope."

We asked if Taki's Mag pays its writers.

"We pay! Unlike the 'Greek Pudding' [Editor's note: We assume he's referring to Arianna Huffington]...and Tina Brown knows...we pay."

Writing on 'The Corner' blog, Mr. Lowry claims:

So, according to Mr. Lowry, it was Mr. Buckley's jaunty little email, not the "flood" of hate mail Mr. Buckley says was sent to The National Review after he endorsed Senator Barack Obama, that did him in.

It hardly seems to matter. Maybe we'll get to read all the messages—jaunty, hateful, or otherwise—when Mr. Buckley puts out a sequel to his father's 2007 book, Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription.

Book World editor Marie Arana (who, incidentally, took a buyout from the paper recently and will be leaving her job) could not be reached this afternoon, and her man in charge of nonfiction coverage, Alan Cooperman, declined to comment.

According to Mr. Feith, who has been at Georgetown since leaving the Pentagon in 2005, the reason his book was not reviewed had to do with the fact that Post reporters Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung had written about it in the paper's news pages back in March.

"About a month before my book came out, Ricks and Karen DeYoung did an article on it based on a leaked typescript on the front page of The Post. Ricks called me the night before it came out and said he was going to do this piece against the publisher's embargo," Mr. Feith said. "I said, 'Did you read the book?' and he said, 'No, we just flipped through it for newsworthy items.' And then Karen DeYoung told a friend of mine that they had six hours with it from the time they got the typescript."

Mr. Feith noted that War and Decision was not a short book. Indeed, it clocks in at 688 pages.

"They did not read the book," Mr. Feith said. "I pointed this out when I was told by The Post that they were not gonna ask anybody to read it and review it because it had already been written about. I said, 'It was written about by people who hadn't read it.' And he said, 'Well, what did they miss?'"

A week later, Mr. Feith said, he called Ms. Arana and asked her if the situation had changed.

"When I spoke to her she just reaffirmed the decision not to review it," he said.

So, did Mr. Feith think The Post was ignoring his book because it was sympathetic to the administration, as Mr. Lowry had suggested in his post on the National Review blog?

"All I know is they have extensively reviewed books that are critical of the administration," he said. "My book is a critical examination from the point of view of someone who is fundamentally sympathetic with what the president was faced with and how he decided. It's the only book of any significance that's come out about Iraq from anyone who was within the government that takes that position. They reviewed all the others and they didn't review mine."

According to Mr. Feith, the never-to-be Post review was not the only article about War and Decision that had been squashed because of the article Mr. Ricks and Ms. DeYoung wrote in March.

"[New York Times reporter] James Risen did a news piece on it," Mr. Feith said. "He interviewed me, he did this piece on the book, and his editors rejected it. He said it was not political. He said that because Ricks and DeYoung did their piece, his editors wouldn’t run his."

In particular, he singled out the “lawyer-spouse” of the Democratic presidential nominee, gravely warning that Hillary Clinton “believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.”

“Friends,” Buchanan continued, “this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat—is change…but it’s not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

Roughly speaking, this is the caricature of Hillary Rodham Clinton—the angry radical feminist bent on destroying every last vestige of traditional American culture—that has prevailed among conservatives for the last decade-and-a-half. It’s why she registered the highest unfavorable ratings of any First Lady in history and why so much ink has been devoted to the question of whether she’s too polarizing to win the presidency.

But something funny has happened as this year’s Democratic race has unfolded: Some of the same right-wing voices who once vilified her as the second coming of Hanoi Jane now seem to see Hillary Clinton as some new Frank Rizzo.

Take Buchanan, who has taken to promoting her on an almost nightly basis on MSNBC as the salvation for working class, culturally conservative “Reagan Democrats,” an electable antidote to Barack Obama, whom Buchanan now skewers as the same kind of nutty leftist he once branded Hillary.

On a recent broadcast, Buchanan emphatically sang Clinton’s praises for the appeal she has shown in states with heavy populations of working-class white ethnic voters—precisely the people at whom his 1992 convention speech was aimed. Then he spouted the Clinton campaign’s spin that, even though their candidate trails in popular votes and delegates and fares markedly worse against John McCain in numerous swing states, Hillary is nonetheless the superior fall candidate because only she can carry the white ethnic vote in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“If he loses Pennsylvania by anything like the margin he lost Ohio,” Buchanan said of Obama, “Democratic superdelegates and Democrats everywhere are going to say, ‘Look, Reagan Democrats looked at him…They are recoiling and moving away. This guy can lose it all for us when we’ve got it won.’”

He added: “The Democrats have to win the general election, and his vote—African-American, young, liberal professors—they're going to vote Democrat anyhow.”

Others on the right are making the same case.

A decade ago, The National Review’s Rich Lowry branded Hillary “a practitioner of the odious political style of the enlightened Baby Boomer.” But now, with Obama poised to win the Democratic nomination, Lowry is rushing to Clinton’s defense, praising her “a serious person, afflicted, as she put it once, with ‘a responsibility gene.’”

Lowry then lionized Hillary for pressing on even though the cultural elite in her party—the same people that, according to the conservatives’ preferred narrative until recently, she supposedly represented—had abandoned her, leaving her with a coalition of “unglamorous voters who aren’t young or rich or independent, but working-class Democrats without the time or inclination to stand so long at Obama rallies that they faint in the middle of her speeches.”

Or take Howie Carr, a vitriolic conservative radio host and Boston Herald columnist who spent much of the last 15 years portraying Hillary as the mortal enemy of Joe Six-Packs everywhere. “An ashtray-tossing shrew,” he dubbed her back when she was First Lady.

Now? In his most recent column, he portrayed her as something of a champion of the common-sense, law-abiding working man, arguing that her supporters are “those who work with their hands” while Obama’s are “those who don’t work, period.”

“Clinton voters,” he also wrote, “know who caused 9/11 - Arab terrorists. Obama voters know who caused 9/11—Halliburton.”

At least Carr recognizes the irony of all of this.

“Once,” he wrote, “it was the Clintons who were the insurgents, the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, partial birth abortion-backing Ivy League limousine libs. Now, compared to Barack Obama’s radical-chic comrades, Bill ’n’ Hill look like refugees from the local Tuesday-night candlepin-bowling league.”

That is probably as good an explanation as any for the right’s sudden sympathy for Hillary Clinton. Sure, her style has changed through the years and she’s made a concerted effort in the Senate to moderate her image.

But what has changed is that, for the first time ever, a young African-American has emerged as the likely Democratic presidential nominee. And, while the breadth and depth of Obama’s coalition should be sufficient to defy caricature, the popular image of his bandwagon has it overstuffed with idealistic and awe-struck college students and black voters. To reactionaries like Buchanan, it’s as if George McGovern and Malcolm X have joined forces.

And just like that, the old feminist doesn’t look so bad to them.

And now: What's the difference between Madison Square Garden and the inside of Lewis Lapham's skull?

Mr. Lapham, the editor of Harper's , put his stamp on the coverage of the Republican National Convention last week with a self-written cover story on "the Republican Propaganda Mill." The G.O.P. gathering in New York, Mr. Lapham reported, illustrated the far-reaching effects of the right wing's message machinery.

"The speeches in Madison Square Garden," he wrote, "affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal … and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer."

Speaking of hollow …. "I thought, 'Wait, we haven't had the convention yet,'" said Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine.

"It's not a closely observed reality," Mr. Lapham said on the phone, in defense of his pre-convention convention coverage. That was an understatement. Like now-departed New York Times man Rick Bragg plying the coastal waters of Florida from afar, Mr. Lapham apparently trusted he could conjure the convention without the trouble of witnessing it.

After Mr. Sullum flagged the irregularity on Reason 's Web site, Mr. Lapham issued an oddly worded online apology-saying he'd failed as editor by not better policing the verb tenses of "the author," i.e., himself. The mix of first-person plural and third person enabled Mr. Lapham to present his deeds as a "mistake" in the editorial process ("mix[ing] up his tenses in manuscript"), rather than authorial fabrication.

"It's a dumb mistake that I made as editor," he said.

Mr. Sullum was not satisfied by the explanation. "It's telling that he feels that he doesn't need to listen to speeches in order to criticize them, because his underlying thesis is that George Bush is the ideological heir to Barry Goldwater," Mr. Sullum said.

Given the Iraq war, the Medicare drug plan and the administration's emphasis on education, Mr. Sullum said, it's "not a foregone conclusion" that the platform speeches will call for diminished government power, as Mr. Lapham predicted.

"A lot of conservatives are disappointed with Bush," Mr. Sullum said. "People like Lapham don't acknowledge that at all."

Still, even for a professional opinion writer, Mr. Lapham has been notably immune to outside stimuli, his monthly commentaries for Harper's seeming to issue from a wax-encased one-man echo chamber. "I can't understand a word he writes," said argument-journalist-at-large Michael Kinsley, currently running The Los Angeles Times editorial page.

Mr. Lapham's convention coverage, though, raises questions for the other opinion writers out there, who are striving to cover the Republican National Convention by more accepted methods: How are they going to do better? And why should anyone care?

If the Democratic National Convention in Boston was a Sahara for the commentary business, offering no news but John Kerry's putatively make-or-break acceptance speech, then this Republican National Convention is the moon. There's not even anything to breathe.

"The story line does not seem about to be changing in any way," said The New York Times ' Frank Rich. "[Mr. Bush's] whole modus operandi is, I won't change the story line."

The prospect of Chicago-in-'68 chaos, Mr. Rich said, had given the press something to think about in the run-up to the convention. "Everyone from a news point of view was licking their lips," he said.

Sunday's mass march went off peacefully, however. There may have been undesirable elements at large-Off the Record spotted Canadians and anarchists, back to back, waving their respective flags-but they were too well behaved to foster scandal.

"It reminded me in a way of the Y2K buildup," Mr. Rich said.

And if an Al Qaeda attack remained as likely or unlikely as ever, it also remained immune to discussion: veiled by ignorance and tastefulness, and screened behind a wall of cops.

That left nothing on the horizon but a bunch of speeches-by people who've already given plenty of speeches before.

"We know Bush as a speaker now," Mr. Rich said. "We don't expect him to suddenly turn into Martin Luther King."

So what's left for the pundit class to do at the convention? "We're doing a terrific job of downing free cocktails," said Mr. Rich, "and schmoozing with our friends and disdaining everything that comes in our path."

And they're struggling to identify any of their colleagues, especially on the liberal side, who might qualify as must-reads this week. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review , took a more optimistic view of the meaningfulness of the conventions. "Well, you always learn something about the parties and the candidates," Mr. Lowry said, as he greeted well-wishers just inside the door of his magazine's Monday party at the Turtle Bay Grill and Lounge.

Such as? "Can we grab the mantle from Kerry of a substantive, change-oriented candidate?" Mr. Lowry asked.

After Bush's speech, who would Mr. Lowry be waking up Friday morning eager to read? "In terms of liberal critics … ," Mr. Lowry pondered the subject and shook a few more hands. Bloggers, he concluded.

"I'll look the next day at Josh Marshall or-Andrew Sullivan is more on the right, but certainly not a traditional conservative," Mr. Lowry said.

"Me?" said Mr. Marshall, author of Talkingpointsmemo.com, when told of Mr. Lowry's endorsement.

Mr. Marshall was not entirely sure what he would be looking for at the convention. A month ago, he said, the question might have been "whether these guys are starting to panic." Now that Mr. Bush's position appears to have somewhat stabilized, Mr. Marshall said, "the stakes aren't quite the same."

In lieu of tracking big shifts in symbolic momentum on the New York stage, the press has been keeping its eye on daily poll updates from the expected battleground states. And what columnists are interpreting the convention for readers out there?

"Tomorrow we'll have Cal Thomas and E. J. Dionne," said Eric Mink, opinion editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch .

Mr. Mink was not inclined to claim that his paper's carefully paired tandems of syndicated commentators-one liberal, one conservative, six days a week-would be swinging the undecided voters of Missouri through sheer force of argument. There is, he said, "a separation between what we run and what influences the people who are reading it."

"All of us in the media tend to be sort of enthralled with politics," Mr. Mink said. "We're not writing and publishing and broadcasting for each other."

The convention-punditry situation evidently looked even less bleak from the West Coast. On the phone from Seattle, Mr. Kinsley conceded that there may be a "weariness of commentary in general," but affirmed his faith in written analysis.

"I think it's still scintillating, but I gather fewer and fewer people agree with me," Mr. Kinsley said.

And-save for recusing himself from discussing his own opinion-page stable-Mr. Kinsley had no hesitation in naming which writers he'd be counting on this week. "Maureen Dowd," Mr. Kinsley said. "This is a perfect subject for her …. All the New York Times columnists."

"You may be giving up too soon," he said. "There's plenty of stories there."

David Brooks Knowledge Watch:

Being an expert on the entire red-and-blue quilt of the American experience, as The New York Times ' David Brooks aims to do, is a big responsibility. So Off the Record hopes to help keep track of whatever loose threads-the price of a Red Lobster dinner, the geographical distribution of bookstores-may elude Mr. Brooks.

On Sunday, in The Times Magazine , Mr. Brooks presented his cover-length vision of a future political philosophy of "strong-government conservatism." The piece opened with his memories of the cavalcade of diversity at the 2000 Republican National Convention. "I remember joking that with all the whites in the audience and all the minority performers onstage, the whole thing looked like a Utah Jazz basketball game," Mr. Brooks wrote.

Airrrr-balllll! Republicans stacking their lineup with people of color is one thing. The Utah Jazz doing it is another. The 1999-2000 Jazz, in keeping with the team's pale-faced tradition, featured three white starters-point guard John Stockton, shooting guard Jeff Hornacek and center Greg Ostertag.

Correction:

Airrrr-balllll! Last week, Off the Record blew a pair of lay-ups, misspelling the name of police spokesperson Paul Browne and mangling the byline of writer Mark Jacobs. The two do not spell their names like those of N.F.L. legend Paul Brown and fashion designer Marc Jacobs, respectively. Off the Record regrets the errors.

Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review magazine, was having dinner at the Union Square restaurant Coffee Shop near his office and apartment. It was early November, and Mr. Lowry, 35, was in the middle of promoting Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years . Billed as a "shattering indictment" of Bill Clinton, the book's cover is an unflattering photograph of the 42nd President looking anxious, hunted and guilty.

"People have joked that it looks like he's about to skulk into the woods and flash someone," Mr. Lowry said.

Although in Legacy he calls Mr. Clinton "the Navel Gazer in Chief," Mr. Lowry admitted that his subject has stamina.

"It's never over," he said. "It's like the Jason movies where he's got an ax in the head, but he's always coming back at you. Clinton's never going to give up flacking for his legacy; he does it every day. Last week it was, he'd warned Bush about bin Laden. And if you listen to every Democratic debate, all the criticism of Bush is made in the context of 'Clinton did things better' …. I also think, in the area of foreign policy, you can't understand what the country's dealing with now without understanding how we got here, which was the 1990's. And then there's Hillary, who's going to run on his record-not this time, but certainly in '08. So they're not going away."

Was it a depressing book to write?

"You know, slogging through the scandal stuff wasn't particularly fun-not what you'd want to do on a Sunday afternoon," Mr. Lowry said. But the only thing that really got his blood boiling was how Mr. Clinton allowed terrorists to flourish.

America is benefiting from its current "self-confidence" abroad, he said.

"There's people we need to go out and kill," he continued. "We no longer can bomb empty buildings and empty tents. They're really evil guys out there who you have to go out and get, and Bush temperamentally is comfortable with doing that in a way Clinton never was and never will be."

Legacy made it to No. 25 on the Times best-seller list. He dedicated it to his father, a retired English professor, his mother, a retired social worker, and his older brother, who is handicapped and "who laughs more than anyone I know."

Growing up in Arlington, Va., Mr. Lowry was "rambunctious" and "always dirty and sweaty," more contrarian than troublemaker: When everyone was going on about Star Wars , he didn't join the herd.

"One thing that played into my development as a conservative was a skeptical attitude to authority and received wisdom," Mr. Lowry said. He hung out with other medium-cool kids outside the 7-Eleven asking people to buy them beer.

His first political memories were in 1984, when he became a Reagan supporter after discovering William F. Buckley's show, Firing Line . He'd read the National Review in the back of the classroom. At the University of Virginia, his grades were "poor to terrible," but he hooked up with the conservative newspaper, The Virginia Advocate , and wrote articles that pissed people off. A guy in the student council tracked down Mr. Lowry's mother by phone and said, "Do you realize you've raised a fascist?"

"The advantage of being a conservative journalist on campus-because political correctness can be so suffocating and so humorless-you get to be kind of the rebels that are kind of fun and raise hell and have some laughs in the process," he said.

The Virginia Advocate's funding got cut off and the university president, a First Amendment scholar, didn't pipe up soon enough. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial.

After graduating, Mr. Lowry became a research assistant for columnist Charles Krauthammer. He entered a National Review young writers' contest and tied for second. He began badgering the magazine to hire him. Soon enough, he was the national political correspondent, and in 1997 Mr. Buckley appointed him editor. He was 29.

"I founded the magazine when I was 29, so I felt it was a good tradition," Mr. Buckley said. "He's very talented."

"He's just an all-American guy. The thing that Rich brings to the magazine-which is kind of rare in its history-is normality," said National Review contributor Richard Brookhiser.

Dec. 4 was an extra-full day for Mr. Lowry: He finished a tongue-in-cheek cover story endorsing Howard Dean, then headed to Washington, finishing a column about John Kerry on the train. Then he went to the White House to interview President Bush.

"It was very cool," Mr. Lowry said. "Any time you're around him in close proximity, you just realize those people like Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews who suggest somehow he's not in control, or being pushed around by his aides or manipulated, are just totally out to lunch, completely ill-informed."

Mr. Lowry's girlfriend, Jennifer Wotochek, works in philanthropy. They met at the Republican National Convention in 2000. A vegetarian, Ms. Wotochek often takes him to the Veg-City diner on 14th Street, where Mr. Lowry orders a fake-meat sandwich with tofu called a "sloppy no."

"I've been evolving that way," he said.

-George Gurley

Jr., who founded the magazine, ran as a Conservative in 1965, and Rich Lowry,

who edits it today, is considering a run this year. But John O'Sullivan, who

served in between them, never pined for City Hall. The fact that he is a

subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II may have been a factor in his lack of

interest. But foreign citizenship should be no bar to a political career in the

gorgeous mosaic.

Since Rich Lowry is still deciding whether or not to run, I

have not done anything so vulgar as question him. We (I'm a senior editor at

the magazine) are a small journal of opinion of conservative views; we can slap

down John McCain, David Geffen or Richard Rorty without a qualm, but we have

certain standards which we honor. I can, however, legitimately ask what the

prospects for conservative politics are in New York City generally.

Begin with the Republican Party. Mayor Giuliani is a

Republican by accident. He began his adult life as a Democrat, and in his first

year in office, he campaigned for Mario Cuomo for Governor. He is not a

politician, but a centurion; 2,000 years ago, his ancestors drilled recruits,

slaughtered Goths and crucified thieves. What does he know from deals and

double-talk? As his time ran out, anxious Republicans hoped he would groom a

successor. But the most potent veteran of the Giuliani administration is Bill

Bratton, who hates him, and who is allied with Democrat Mark Green. This is not

the profile of a party builder.

But in fairness, what could the Republican Party offer

Rudolph Giuliani in this city, apart from a ballot line? Con men sometimes find

it convenient to assume the identities of dead people, but they don't want to

be dead themselves. Fiorello LaGuardia, another nominal Republican Mayor, liked

to say there is no Republican or Democratic way to collect the garbage; what he

meant was, there is no Republican way to do anything successful here, so those

who wear the label must blur partisan identification or be trampled.

In the early 60's, the Conservative Party argued that this

diagnosis was self-fulfilling; opportunism, they said, works only for

occasional opportunists. Conservative politicians could successfully appeal to New

Yorkers by offering principled solutions to New York's problems. Mr. Buckley

made the ideal debut run for such a strategy in 1965. Facing John Lindsay,

Republican and Liberal, and Abraham Beame, Democrat, he got only 13.4 percent

of the vote, but an easy third of the attention. The payoff year should have

been 1969: Mayor Lindsay, reduced to the Liberal line, had been a gorgeous

failure. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination was Herman Badillo,

then a figure of the left. White ethnics had not yet completed their flight to

Long Island or New Jersey, but they had slipped loose from their Democratic

moorings. John Marchi, a state senator from Staten Island who had both the

Conservative and the G.O.P. lines, might have scooped them up in a three-man

race. The wrench in the works was Norman Mailer, who siphoned enough white

liberal votes from Mr. Badillo to give the Democratic nod to Mario Procaccino,

a relatively conservative Democrat. Running against two ethnics to his right,

the last WASP won again.

So 1969 was the last game for that game plan. The Irish and

the Italians hemorrhaged away; Jews stuck around a little longer and had their

fling with Ed Koch, who was as far to the right as they would ever go anyway.

The Conservative Party joined the G.O.P. in the cellar of nullity.

When Mr. Giuliani made his freakish run, his backup line was

provided not by the Conservative Party, but by the Liberals. There was

excellent reason for them to do so. Mr. Giuliani is as pro-abortion as Bill

Clinton and more strongly for gay rights and gun control. But classifying Mr.

Giuliani by adding up issues, left and right, does not measure intensity, for

the one issue he cared most about-even more than dung Madonnas-was crime. Which

is better, from a conservative point of view: to back a right-leaning wimp who

does nothing, or an enemy who does one important thing well? George Pataki or

Rudy Giuliani?

Where does that leave New York conservatives now? They can

fight the war of ideas apart from politics, as the Manhattan Institute does

with considerable success. An aspect of this strategy is smuggling good ideas

to impressionable Democrats. Mark Green says he has learned things about

policing he never knew before. Since he began life as a protégé of Ralph Nader,

he had much to learn, but give him credit for trying. On the Republican side,

Michael Bloomberg wants to show what a lot of money and a few ideas will get

you. (Answer: less money than you started out with.) Herman Badillo has moved

from being Norman Mailer's unhappy dance partner to being the champion of

standards at City University. He still wants to be Mayor. He has put in his

time; has time passed him by?

Then there is my boss at

National Review. The fact that Rich Lowry was born and raised in Virginia

should be no problem, after 2000. Next to our junior Senator, he is as Old New

York as Mrs. Astor. He has lived and worked in the city; he knows how to get to

Yankee Stadium; he is actually a Yankees fan. The Daily News recently claimed that Mrs. Clinton's husband could win

a Mayoral election. A campaign by Bubba would be reason enough to hope that

Rich would run. Imagine him saying: "All we want from you, Mr. President, is a

promise that if labor negotiations bog down, you won't bomb the Sudanese

consulate."

Conservatives do well to struggle for New York, however

hopeless their efforts. This-not Washington, nor even Los Angeles-is still the

talk and image capital of the nation. If you fake it here, you can make it

anywhere. New York should also hope that conservatives make the effort.

Liberalism and confidence once reigned here hand in hand, but that was a long

time ago. We are in many ways a static city in a shrinking state. Outsiders,

from small towns and other countries, have often done well by us. Strange ideas

could help, too.