1 Boring Old Man

Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, who is considered to be one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a scholar of the Victorian era in literature. Kristol graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan. In 1973, he received a B.A. from Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in three years; in 1979, he received a Ph.D. in political science, also from Harvard. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol was Alan Keyes’ roommate; this is significant, because many years later, in 1988, Kristol would run Keyes’ unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign against Paul Sarbanes in Maryland. After teaching political philosophy and American politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to Education Secretary William J. Bennett during the Reagan Administration, and then as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush.

Kristol first made his mark as leader of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank, and rose to fame as a conservative opinionmaker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan. In his first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend or compromise on, the Clinton health care plan. In doing so, Kristol presented the first public document uniting Republicans behind total opposition to the reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase There is no health care crisis, which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton’s 1994 State of the Union address.

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, arguably a result of the debacle over health care reform, Kristol established, along with neoconservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded, with Robert Kagan, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a movement credited in part for some of the foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration as evidenced by their 1998 letter to US President Bill Clinton advocating military action in Iraq, to "protect our vital interests in the Gulf". He is also a member of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute from which the Bush administration has borrowed over two dozen members to fill various government offices and panels. Kristol is currently chairman of PNAC and editor of The Weekly Standard.

Kristol has not always been accurate in his political predictions. In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show Fresh Air and made the following statement:

"There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular."

My take on William Kristol is that he is a dangerously irresponsible person, living in the shadow of his father just like President Bush – both so driven by a need to make a mark on the world but lacking either their fathers’ experience or wisdom. I wonder how having a famous father has endowed both of these men with such a penchant for flippant and arrogant responses to major world situations. They both come across to me as cocky little bully boys trying to act bigger than they will ever be.

Dark leaders in dark times. See Kristol’s latest on Crooks and Liars. He’s still pushing unilateral, preemptive war in Korea or Iran. What’s difficult about listening to him is that, even if he stumbled onto a good idea [this one isn’t!], his reasoning is wrong. With all his education and training, he’s just an articulate dandy who tries to talk like a tough guy. George W. Bush, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld – they are all marginal-at-best characters entrusted with things that are much too big to be in their inept little hands.