Two campaigns, two problems

John McCain is shaking up his campaign team, and not a moment too soon, since he's been foundering for weeks, if not months. But before Republicans get psyched, they need to read this paragraph:

Mr. McCain is uncomfortable firing people or banishing them entirely. His orbit remains filled with people who have been demoted without being told they are being demoted, like Mr. Davis, who continues to hold the title of campaign manager even as Mr. Schmidt manages the campaign. Yet, Mr. McCain inspires uncommon loyalty in those who serve with him — hence the willingness of Mr. Murphy to consider coming back into the McCain campaign, despite his own rather brutal history of enmity with Mr. Davis.

Loyalty is a good thing, of course, but the hesitancy of McCain to take a direction—any direction—out of fear that it would alienate a staffer or close friend suggests executive weakness. Would he run the White House this way? That sort of management style is the stuff of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, neither of whom are worth imitating.

On the other side, Bob Herbert suggests that Obama's new penchant for realism is sparking cynicism among those who bought into his idealism. This is a potential problem insofar as it seems to dampen the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters, enthusiasm that Obama is counting on to boost voter turnout in states where working class white voters distrust him.

Partly, the problem emerges from the way the Democratic party's long-held position as the party of idealistic identity politics. While this gets the faithful out, it's also a losing position. Clinton went one way. Obama is searching for another. He may not need to find that vision to win; McCain's mismanagement of his campaign may cede the field. But if he does, watch out.

Three days

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on the discovery of a tablet—or, rather, the interpretation of a tablet that was bought about a decade ago—that suggests that the Christian tradition of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah was neither as new nor as scandalous as previously thought.

Most likely discovered in the Dead Sea region, the tablet's authenticity is taken to be credible, and like the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which give us an idea of what a radical group of Jews called the Essenes were doing and thinking in the years around the birth of Jesus, it is thought to add to our understanding of the intellectual climate of the time.

The tablet, apparently written following the death of what a group of Jews thought as a candidate for their long-awaited Messiah, contains 87 lines of text, many of which are indecipherable or difficult to read. The English translation of the text (in Word) makes no effort to hide the difficulties in reading or in interpretation. The lines that are getting the most attention are the following:

19. In three days you shall know, that(?)\for(?) He said,
20. (namely,) yhwh the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Israel: The evil broke (down)
21. before justice.

as well as line 80:

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

The discovery and interpretation of the text is interesting, but the larger question is what these lines actually mean. Speaking conservatively, they suggest that the motif of a 3-day resurrection was part of the Jewish tradition, though how widespread this belief was is unclear. We shouldn't be surprised by this, since the Gospels draw heavily from the imagery of the Jewish prophets to show that Jesus was precisely who he said he was. (The Book of Jonah, for instance, also has the prophet in the belly of a whale for three days before he is spouted back on land.) As a result, this leads credence to the historical-political reading of the Gospels that many contemporary scholars support:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

But if the idea of a resurrection was part of the Jewish canon before Jesus arrived, what accounts for the hostility and violence of the Jews toward the early church? Something deeper must have been going on. The early church, perhaps, was more than just literary tropes or a political cause.

David Horowitz is freaking out right now

Because he won't know what to do with himself. After all, he has created a career fighting the activist counterculture academics of the 1960s, painting all of academe is a haven of iniquity and poststructuralist evil.

But this is all changing, the New York Times reports, as the vanguard of Baby Boomer intellectuals who teach in America's universities are nearing retirement age. "More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969," Patricia Cohen writes. "How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets."

In their place is a new crop of younger folks who, while still overwhelmingly liberal, are no where nearly as politically partisan and radical as their parents. Or in some cases, as the young academic quoted in the story says, their grandparents.

Could this mean a new trend in the perception and self-definition of American academia? Truly, the inexorable conflict between radical countercultural ideologies and the vitriolic, anti-intellectual, and often paranoid ravings of conservative critics had to end some time. But what will this new generation bring? Will they mark a return to the civic republican style of the nineteenth century, when academics sought to steep students in great ideas to allow them to enter the public sphere? Or will they bring a bureaucratized, intellectually safe, glorified-high-school-teacher sort of existence to an industry—and I do not shrink from calling it that—that is struggling to justify its existence and costliness?