Crimson Tide The kids at Harvard won’t fight bin Laden.
By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
September 25, 2001 2:45 p.m.
R founder William F. Buckley Jr. once said that he "should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University." These famous words now have a corollary: We should sooner send into battle the first 2,000 young men in the Boston telephone directory than 2,000 at Harvard University.
Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, released a poll yesterday showing that a majority of the school's undergraduates — 69 percent — support taking military action against the terrorists responsible for the September 11 massacres. This isn't quite where the general public is on the matter — 85 percent of Americans support military action, according to a recent CBS/New York Times survey — but it still looks like a strong response.
Except that it's not. Only 28 percent of the undergrads said they would support military strikes if they resulted in the loss of innocent human life. The wider public, which knows war is a dirty business and terrorists must be fought with vigor, remain overwhelmingly sensible: 75 percent say the loss of innocent life is an acceptable by-product of the war on terrorism.
The Harvard youngsters also don't want to risk their precious little necks — and this is especially true among the self-identified Democrats. Only 32 percent of campus Democrats said they would be willing to serve in the armed forces if called up, versus 42 percent of the independents and 56 percent of the Republicans. Those GOP numbers are fairly depressing in their own right — might a gender gap explain them? — but the Democratic response is astonishingly low.
Perhaps this is the moral influence of Bill Clinton, a famous Democrat who dodged military service when he was a similar age. Or perhaps the campus is full of people who simply hate President Bush. As Marcie B. Bianco, head of the Harvard College Democrats, told the Crimson: "Bush is acting like he's Captain America, going on television and telling Americans there has to be a strong military response."
If there really were a Captain America, he probably wouldn't be a member of the Harvard College Democrats. Come to think of it, maybe John F. Kennedy of PT-109 wouldn't be a member, either.
Bono Fides
"I do not support a National ID Card program and if Congress were to consider this proposal, I would vote against it," says Rep. Mary Bono (R., Calif.) in a press statement.
Bono intends to clarify a comment made to a reporter for her local newspaper that some people interpreted as support for a national ID system — and which received an enormous amount of attention when the Drudge Report website linked to the story. "I was responding to a question regarding what types of proposals may be brought before Congress to deal with this major terrorist threat," explains Bono.
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