Last Sunday, March 14, C-SPAN's Q&A host Brian Lamb interviewed Michelle Easton, President of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.
http://www.q-and-a.org/...
Lamb does a good job with these interviews: he listens carefully, asks questions to keep things moving, and usually lets his subjects reveal far more of themselves than they probably intended.
The Easton interview was a typical example. I had never heard of her or her policy institute before Sunday night, but I watched because Clare Boothe Luce was a fascinating person I've enjoyed reading about for many years. I wasn't disappointed: there was a clip from an interview Luce did in the 1950s that showed her at her elegant, witty best and some excerpts from her best known play/movie "The Women".
But the most intriguing aspect of the interview was what it revealed about Michelle Easton herself, her policy institute, and the women whom she considers to be Luce's present day counterparts. What a decline!
I think of Clare Boothe Luce http://www.lkwdpl.org/... the same way I think of William F. Buckley. They were people with whom I strongly disagreed most of the time, but they were intelligent and polished and enormously entertaining. I never met either of them, but I would have relished the opportunity.
Can I say the same thing about Michelle Easton and her fellows at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute? Maybe on a personal level because Easton sounds like a pleasant enough sort, but judge for yourself the level of her intellectual discourse:
". . . I'm thinking of President Obama at that health care center-summit-that they just had. And he sat up there, and everything on his face and his body language said to me, he's thinking. "I am really smarter than most of you people here, And I really know what's best for you and the American people. And even though 75 percent of Americans don't want this health care proposal, I really know what's best."
Now if the only people you talk to are people who are already convinced that the President is being condescending and arrogant when he listens to people a comment like that might make sense. But here's Easton's criticism of Katie Couric
"Couric's half-lidded eyes and unbearable condescension toward a woman whose achievements, personal and professional, are so superior to her own, were excruciating to watch."
I'm sure everyone knows the identity of this so superior woman! Now that we know Easton's standards for accomplished women, it should come as no surprise that her Policy Center, which claims to support "strong, conservative women leaders," functions as a speaker's bureau for Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Bay Buchanan, and the like.
So Michelle Easton sees Coulter et. al. as the twenty-first century counterparts of Clare Boothe Luce. Its true Luce had a gift for sarcasm and invective, but there was substance behind it. She didn't pretend that a catalogue of one-liners and zingers was a substitute for knowledge.
Now that we know what the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute means by strong conservative women leadership, here's further illumination from Easton on why her institute is so important:
"There's definitely a bias against conservative women. We find this with the girls we work with at school. Jenny Lehman from Rutgers University, a wonderful intern we had. She went in for her senior thesis and said "I want to write about great conservative women." And her professor at Rutgers,-probably the most feminist college in the US-said "There are no conservative women leaders."
So now everyone's prepared for a horror story about how this poor conservative girl was denied the chance to write about conservative women by some liberal professor. But Easton went on:
"Well, we helped her. She fought, she wrote her thesis. She got an honors grade."
Hmm, obviously that professor wasn't as close minded as Easton thought. This is particularly ironic in that Easton had earlier singled out for praise two colleges, Hillsdale and Grove City, which are among the few institutions that are not "totally biased, totally dominated by liberal, socialist thinking." Do I dare presume that a graduate student in those colleges who desired to write a thesis on some subject deemed "left wing" would also get the same opportunity?
There's a lot more in the interview, and I encourage you to follow my link to read the whole thing. My first reaction was amusement that any policy institute, think tank, or whatever it chooses to call itself would think Coulter and company were important intellectuals and role models. On second thought it saddens me that the name of an undoubtedly intelligent woman has been so co-opted.