Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Here's an oddity worth remembering. On Saturday evening, February 1, two days before the Iowa caucus, when the actual VOTING phase of this forever campaign was at last set to begin, CNN went on the air in a program it had scheduled in conjunction with the Des Moines Register,  a program that had been promoted as a live unveiling of the final poll results before the actual caucusing. But they provided no results. The network announced that the pollsters had discovered a glitch in their own procedures that rendered them unwilling to stand by the results. After that announcement, the remainder of the hour-long program was anticlimactic filler. What kind glitch led to such an embarrassing stand down for these two institutions?  You can find the particulars yourself with a little googling, and I will leave you to it. I will only say, as I do in the headline above, that poll results these days are sensitive things, best handled with gravest of care.... One of the reasons...

So, Mayor Buttigieg, candidate for President, has discovered (1) that his campaign had surged into the top rank and that (2) he will be taking a lot flack from others who until then had happily ignored him and his disclosures. Those others discovered that he spent three years as an employee of the infamous business consultancy McKinsey.  McKinsey is a partnership founded in the 1920s by James O. McKinsey, who had the idea of applying cutting-edge accounting ideas to businesses. Why is it infamous? Chiefly I think because its alums keep showing up in scandals, and eventually in federal penitentiaries. Jeffrey Skilling, for example, was a partner at McKinsey in the 1980s. Ken Lay then hired him to work at Enron, where he became associated with that energy derivatives' company's meteoric rise and fall.  Rajat Gupta, even more dramatically, was the managing director of McKinsey from 1994 to 2003, and was later convicted of insider trading.  After hemming and hawing ...

A recent article in SLATE criticized Pete Buttigieg in a beguilingly diagonal manner -- through a close reading of the Graham Greene novel, THE QUIET AMERICAN. Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. A more important fact about him, for all those of my readers not residents of South Bend, is that he is running to be President of the United States, part of the vast array of Democratic candidates doing that. The position of Mayor of South Bend does not give one much of a track record on issues of foreign and defense policy -- not obviously more so than does the position of reality TV show host offering projects to various "celebrity apprentices." So Buttigieg has sought to burnish his credentials by telling all who would listen that he wrote a thesis as a Harvard undergraduate about Graham Greene's novel (published back in 1955) . Not a great credential on the fact of it, although it does set him apart from the illiterate Orange Dynast. That isn't a high ...