Here I Go Again!

The bane of my so-called career at the Collegium Excellens was the biennial insanity of asking callow 18-year-olds — in their first semester of college — to evaluate my teaching in terms of preparation and breadth of knowledge. The questionnaire asked these naifs if they thought I was a (choose one) "5-excellent to 1-poor" teacher. Hell, compared to most of the football coaches who taught history in Texas high schools, I was the equivalent of an professor at Harvard. (History teaching in Texas high schools is another crime against humanity because the school superintendents and principals — former football coaches themselves — assume that these assistant coaches will do the least harm in history classes. History of the United States, after all, is required three times in most Texas public schools' curricula, so what harm could be done by putting linebacker coaches in front of junior-level history classes?) The stars — in terms of the pernicious surveys at the Collegium — were folks like a long-time English prof ("Just call me Pat.") who organized group hugs in her classrooms and had students bring doughnuts to class to complete the party atmosphere. A student in one of Professor Pat's composition classes told me that Professor Pat openly sneered at scholarly literature as sources of information in student papers. An article in American Literature, proclaimed Professor Pat, was merely published to gratify someone's ego. Of course, Professor Pat was wildly successful on the so-called "student evals" because she reinforced the anti-intellectualism that most callow undergraduates bring with them when they enroll at the Collegium. I left that dreary place after years and years of this nonsense and I was rotten glad to be away from the fraud.

Now, I just received an envelope in the mail from Geezer College. I opened it and what did I find? A summary of the "student evals" of the interdisciplinary course that I offered in the term just past. What jumped out at me? The majority of the respondents found my offering wanting in some respect because a significant majority rated me "Good," not "Excellent." I have enough ego and enough self-awareness to know that I was better than "Good" in this course. I created PowerPoint slides for each class. I posted those slides on a special Web site I created for the class Most importantly, I offered new — not hackneyed — information to those enrolled. The vast majority of the course offerings I've witnessed in Senior University did not compare to the materials I created for this class. I guess I should have invited the members of the class to participate in a group hug and asked, "Who's bringin' the doughnuts next time?"

As William Faulker wrote upon resigning as postmaster in the Ol' Miss campus postoffice:

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant son-of-a-bitch who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

Like Faulkner, I'll be damned if I will be judged by any itinerant son-of-a-bitch who has $50 bucks to invest in tuition in Geezer College. If this is a (fair & balanced) repudiation of SEF (student evaluation of faculty) anywhere, so be it.

[x Michael Huemer's Web Site]
Student Evaluations: A Critical Review
by Michael Huemer

Informal student evaluations of faculty were started in the 1960's by enterprising college students.¹ Since then, their use has spread so that now they are administered in almost all American colleges and universities and are probably the main source of information used for evaluating faculty teaching performance.² There is an enormous literature on the subject of student evaluations of faculty (SEF).³ The following is a summary of some developments in that literature that should be of special interest to faculty, with particular emphasis on criticisms of SEF that have emerged recently. But I begin with the arguments in favor of the use of SEF.

1. Reliability and Validity of SEF

A test is said to be "reliable" if it tends to give the same result when repeated; this indicates that it must be measuring something. A test is said to be "valid" if it is measuring what it is intended to measure. E.g., a scale that always reads "5" whenever a red object is placed on it is "reliable" but not "valid" as a measure of weight.

Most researchers agree

(1) that SEF are highly reliable, in that students tend to agree with each other in their ratings of an instructor, and

(2) that they are at least moderately valid, in that student ratings of course quality correlate positively with other measures of teaching effectiveness. In one type of study, multiple sections of the same course are taught by different instructors, but there is a common final exam. The ratings instructors receive turn out to be positively correlated with the performance of their students on the exam. The correlation is in the neighborhood of .4 to .5, meaning that 16 to 25% of the variance in one variable can be explained by variance in the other.

SEF also tend to correlate well with retrospective evaluations by alumni; in other words, former students rarely change their evaluations of their teachers as the years pass.⁴

Furthermore, other methods of evaluating teaching effectiveness do not appear to be valid. Ratings by colleagues and trained observers are not even reliable (a necessary condition for validity)--that is, colleagues and observers do not even substantially agree with each other in instructor ratings.⁵

2. Usefulness of SEF

Instructors who received results of a midsemester evaluation tended to have higher ratings on end-of-semester evaluations than those who did not, suggesting that SEF cause changes in teaching behaviors which result in higher ratings. The improvement was greatest when (a) the professor's self-evaluation was very different from the students' evaluation, (b) the professor received professional consultation on the interpretation of the evaluations, and (c) the student evaluation forms included specific items (such as, "Professor gives preliminary overview of lecture"), as opposed to vague items such as, "How well planned are lessons?"

In spite of the above, SEF have come under fire on several fronts.

3. Grading Leniency Bias

The most common criticism of SEF seems to be that SEF are biased, in that students tend to give higher ratings when they expect higher grades in the course. This correlation is well-established, and is of comparable magnitude, perhaps larger, to the magnitude of the correlation between student ratings and student learning (as measured by tests) described in section 1 above. Thus, SEF seem to be as much a measure of an instructor's leniency in grading as they are of teaching effectiveness. The correlation holds both between students in a given class and between classes. It also holds between classes taught by the same instructor, when the instructor varies the grade distribution. And it affects ratings of all aspects of the instructor and the course.⁶ Many believe that this causes rampant grade inflation.⁷

Optimists have suggested that this correlation might be due to the fact that greater teaching effectiveness on the part of the instructor leads to both higher grades and higher ratings of the instructor; thus, the effect might actually be a sign of the validity of student ratings. However, this hypothesis fails to explain (a) why the correlation also holds among students within the same class (who presumably are beneficiaries of the same teaching effectiveness), (b) why it holds between classes taught by the same instructor when the instructor varies the grade distribution, (c) why there is a greater correlation between grades and ratings when one looks at the student's relative grade (i.e., the student's grade in this class compared with his/her grade in other classes), as opposed to the student's absolute grade. These and other facts are explained by the leniency bias hypothesis: people tend to like those who praise them (particularly if the praise is greater than expected) and dislike those who criticize them. The instructor who grades leniently in effect praises the students, who then like the instructor more. They then reward the instructor with higher ratings in general.⁸

Despite some dissenting voices,⁹ the influence of grades on student evaluations seems to be an open secret in colleges and universities. In one survey, 70% of students admitted that their rating of an instructor was influenced by the grade they expected to get.¹⁰ Similar proportions of professors believe that grading leniency and course difficulty bias student ratings.¹¹

4. Dumbing Down Courses

A related complaint many have is that SEF encourage professors to dumb down courses in an effort to keep students happy at all costs. In one survey, 38% of professors admitted to making their courses easier in response to SEF.¹²

Peter Sacks provides a more detailed, though anecdotal picture. Sacks reports having almost lost his job due to low teaching evaluations from his students. He was able to dramatically raise his teaching evaluations and gain tenure, he says, by becoming utterly undemanding and uncritical of his students, giving out easy grades, and teaching to the lowest common denominator. Sacks claims that this behavior is not unusual but is rather the norm at his college, where students are king and entertainment is all that matters. An excerpt from Sacks' book:

And so, in my mind, I became a teaching teddy bear. In the metaphorical sandbox I created, students could do no wrong, and I did almost anything possible to keep all of them happy, all of the time, no matter how childish or rude their behavior, no matter how poorly they performed in the course, no matter how little effort they gave. If they wanted their hands held, I would hold them. If they wanted a stapler (or a Kleenex) and I didn't have one, I'd apologize. If they wanted to read the newspaper while I was addressing the class or if they wanted to get up and leave in the middle of a lecture, go for it. Call me spineless. I confess. But in the excessively accommodative culture that I found myself in, "our students" as many of my colleagues called them, had too much power for me to afford irritating them with demands and challenges I had previously thought were part and parcel of the collegiate experience.¹³

5. Educational Seduction, or the Dr. Fox Effect

In a well-known study, a professional actor was hired to deliver a non-substantive and contradictory lecture, but in an enthusiastic and authoritative style. The audience, consisting of professional educators, had been told they would be listening to Dr. Myron Fox, an expert on the application of mathematics to human behavior. They were then asked to rate the lecture. Dr. Fox received highly positive ratings, and no one saw through the hoax.¹⁴ Later studies have obtained similar results,¹⁵ showing that audience ratings of a lecture are more strongly influenced by superficial stylistic matters than by content.

Adding support to this conclusion was another study, in which students were asked to rate instructors on a number of personality traits (e.g., "confident," "dominant," "optimistic," etc.), on the basis of 30-second video clips, without audio, of the instructors lecturing. These ratings were found to be very good predictors of end-of-semester evaluations given by the instructors' actual students. A composite of the personality trait ratings correlated .76 with end-of-term course evaluations; ratings of instructors' "optimism" showed an impressive .84 correlation with end-of-term course evaluations. Thus, in order to predict with fair accuracy the ratings an instructor would get, it was not necessary to know anything of what the instructor said in class, the material the course covered, the readings, the assignments, the tests, etc.¹⁶

Williams and Ceci conducted a related experiment. Professor Ceci, a veteran teacher of the Developmental Psychology course at Cornell, gave the course consecutively in both fall and spring semesters one year. In between the two semesters, he visited a media consultant for lessons on improving presentation style. Specifically, Professor Ceci was trained to modulate his tone of voice more and to use more hand gestures while speaking. He then proceeded, in the spring semester, to give almost the identical course (verified by checking recordings of his lectures from the fall), with the sole significant difference being the addition of hand gestures and variations in tone of voice (grading policy, textbook, office hours, tests, and even the basic demographic profile of the class remained the same). The result: student ratings for the spring semester were far higher, usually by more than one standard deviation, on all aspects of the course and the instructor. Even the textbook was rated higher by almost a full point on a scale from 1 to 5. Students in the spring semester believed they had learned far more (this rating increased from 2.93 to 4.05), even though, according to Ceci, they had not in fact learned any more, as measured by their test scores. Again, the conclusion seems to be that student ratings are heavily influenced by cosmetic factors that have no effect on student learning.

6. Academic Freedom

Some argue that SEF are a threat to academic freedom.¹⁷ Not only do SEF influence instructors' grading policies, teaching style, and course difficulty, but they may also restrict what a professor says in class. Professors may feel inhibited from discussing controversial ideas or challenging students' beliefs, for fear that some students will express their disagreement through the course evaluation form. More than one author has described SEF as "opinion polls," with the suggestion that SEF require professors to think like politicians, seeking to avoid giving offense and putting style before substance.¹⁸

Alan Dershowitz reports that some of his students have "used the power of their evaluations in an attempt to exact their political revenge for my politically incorrect teaching." One student, who complained to Dershowitz about his (Dershowitz') teaching about rape from a civil liberties perspective, informed Dershowitz that he should expect to be "savaged" on the student evaluations at the end of the term. Several students subsequently complained on their teaching evaluations about the content of his lectures on the subject of rape, saying that they were offensive, that he should not be allowed to teach at Harvard, and so on. Alan Dershowitz, of course, need have little fear of losing his job. The same is not true of less prominent, junior faculty at institutions across the country.¹⁹ I have personally received evaluation forms complaining that the professor "teaches his own views," and I have as a result been influenced to remove controversial material from my classes.

College students do not have a universal appreciation for the ideals of free speech and academic freedom. An anthropology professor I once had at Berkeley became locally (in)famous for his criticisms of affirmative action and for his view that minorities and women had lower average levels of intelligence than the rest of the population. Subsequently, a group of students disrupted his class to protest against his allegedly racist, sexist, and homophobic teachings. The students went on to call for his dismissal from the university. Signs appeared on campus saying, "No more racist bullshit in the name of academic freedom."²⁰ Berkeley, it seemed, had come a long way since the days of the free speech movement. Fortunately for him, the professor already had tenure. But what would have happened to a junior faculty member in a similar position? Given the student reaction in this case, it is not difficult to imagine that even much less controversial statements might have elicited low end-of-term evaluations from those students who wished to see the professor fired. Even a small percentage of such extremely negative evaluations could have a significant impact on a professor's career.

Professors discussing unconventional or controversial ideas may also receive a larger number of very positive student evaluations, relative to other professors whose classes are more bland and, perhaps, boring. In spite of this, there are two reasons why the overall incentive created by SEF will be for the professor to avoid controversy. First, the average rating professors receive is 4 or above on a scale of 1 - 5; therefore, a very hostile student can give a rating three points below the average, whereas a very enthusiastic student can only give a rating one point above the average. Thus, assuming the professor is average, the marginal unusually hostile student has an impact up to three times greater than the marginal unusually enthusiastic student. Second, there is a saying in American politics to the effect that one doesn't gain votes, one only loses them--meaning that it is much easier to earn a voter's opposition through taking substantive stands on issues than it is to gain support by doing so. If a politician says three things that I agree with and one that I disagree with (all concerning emotionally charged issues), I am more likely to vote against him, provided the other candidate did not say anything I disagreed with, even if this was because the latter said very little at all. This explains why American politicians often avoid taking non-trivial stands on issues. A similar principle applies to professors, when their retention is decided in a similar manner: any statement or question a teacher raises that anyone could take offense at will run a risk of evoking hostile reactions from a few students who will regard the statement or question as grounds for a negative evaluation, while there is little chance that even a non-hostile student will take it as grounds for an especially positive evaluation. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that the degree to which a professor is controversial would be a strong depressive factor on his student evaluations, although this thesis has not yet been subjected to systematic testing.

There exist simple and well-known ways for a professor to avoid giving offense. One technique, when a class ostensibly focuses on a controversial subject matter, is to focus one's lectures on what other people have said. For example, a professor may, without raising any eyebrows, teach an entire course of lectures on ethics without ever making an ethical statement, since he confines himself to making reports of what other people have said about ethics. This ensures that no one can take offense towards him. During classroom discussions, he may simply nod and make non-committal remarks such as "Interesting" and "What do the rest of you think about that?", regardless of what the students say. (This provides the added "advantage" of reducing the need both for preparation before class and for effort during class, on the part of the professor.) Although pedagogic goals may often require correcting students or challenging their logic, SEF-based performance evaluations provide no incentive to do so, while the risk of reducing student happiness provides a strong incentive not to do so. Some students may take offense, or merely experience negative feelings, upon being corrected, whereas it is unlikely that students would experience such negative feelings as a result of a professor's failure to correct them. Overall, SEF reward professors who tell their students what they want to hear.

G. F. Schueler draws our attention to a related case:

Socrates, who is usually thought to have been one of the world's "Great Teachers," nevertheless received rather low marks from his "students" on his final teaching evaluation. At a time of life when most of us would long since have retired, the Athenian jurors at his trial met his request for a pension by voting to put him to death...²¹

As Schueler notes, there is no reason to believe that the majority of Athenian citizens who were familiar with Socrates' activities would have evaluated his work as a philosopher much differently. The death sentence, allegedly for corrupting the youth and believing in gods of his own invention, was Socrates' payment for his lifelong efforts at challenging the beliefs of his fellow citizens. Though today's students lack the power to put to death professors with whom they disagree, the lesson that such challenges are not always welcome is unlikely to be lost on those professors who hold unconventional views.

7. Why Use SEF?

In the light of the preceding objections, why do most institutions continue to use SEF? The main reasons are probably the following: (a) SEF are easy and inexpensive to administer. (b) SEF give an impression of objectivity, in comparison with more "subjective" measures such as letters from observers, since SEF produce definite numbers. (The impression seems to be an illusion, however, since the numbers are merely measurements of subjective impressions.) (c) There are few alternatives to SEF, if one wants to assess teaching effectiveness. Steven Cahn argues that teaching should be assessed by experts in the field, i.e., one's colleagues, but as indicated in section 1, such measures appear to be even less valid. Greenwald and Gillmore suggest using student ratings but with statistical corrections for grading leniency; this, however, would not address the concerns of sections 4, 5, and 6 above.²²

8. Other Approaches

Institutions seeking to improve teaching quality may take one or more of the following measures, which would not be subject, or would be less subject, to the objections of sections 3-6:

1. Faculty members could be offered courses or workshops on improving teaching effectiveness, receiving recognition on performance reviews for having taken such courses.

2. Student evaluation forms could be redesigned to emphasize relatively objective matters, such as "Did the professor come to class on time?", "Did he read student work and return it within a reasonable time frame?", and so on, rather than subjective items such as "How would you rate this instructor?" or "How fair was the grading?" The former sort of questions would probably be less subject to the effects of bias than the latter. In addition, they have a better chance of inducing improvements in teaching performance.

3. Written comments might be taken into account in weighting student ratings. Evaluation forms on which low ratings are given without explanation, or where the complaints are directed at the professor's beliefs, the harshness of the grading, the difficulty of the course, or the professor's personal characteristics (such as physical appearance, clothing style, or personality) might be discounted.

4. Teaching can be evaluated in part by examination of syllabi and other course materials. These can be used to verify that a course contains substantive content; but professors should not be monitored for the "correctness" or moral or political value of that content.

9. The Philosophy of Consumerism

A fourth reason why SEF are widely used may be the belief that the university is a business and that the responsibility of any business is to satisfy the customer. Whether they measure teaching effectiveness or not, SEF are probably a highly accurate measure of student satisfaction (and the customer is always right, isn't he?). However, even if we agree to view the university as a business, the preceding line of thought rests upon a confusion about the product the university provides. Regardless of what they may themselves think at times, students do not come to college for entertainment; if they did, they might just as well watch MTV for four years and put that on their resumes. Students come to college for a diploma. A diploma is a certification by the institution that one has completed a course of study and thereby been college-educated. But that will mean nothing unless the college or university can maintain intellectual standards. A particular student may be happy to receive an easy A without having to work or learn much, but a college that makes a policy of providing such a product will find its diplomas decreasing in value.

Part of a university's responsibility may be to satisfy its students. But it is also a university's responsibility to educate those individuals whom it is certifying as educated. Unfortunately, those goals are often in conflict.

References

Abrami, Philip C., Les Levanthal, and Raymond P. Perry. "Educational Seduction," Review of Educational Research 52 (1982): 446-64.

Ambady, Nalini and Robert Rosenthal. "Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 431-41.

Cahn, Steven M. Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986).

Cave, Martin, Stephen Hanney, Mary Henkel, and Maurice Kogan. The Use of Performance Indicators in Higher Education: The Challenge of the Quality Movement , 3rd ed. (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1997).

Centra, John A. Reflective Faculty Evaluation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993).

d'Apollonia, Sylvia and Philip C. Abrami. "Navigating Student Ratings of Instruction," American Psychologist 52 (1997): 1198-1208.

Dershowitz, Alan. Contrary to Popular Opinion (New York: Pharos Books, 1992).

Gilbaugh, John W. "Renner Substantiated," Phi Delta Kappan 63 (Feb. 1982): 428.

Goldman, Louis. "The Betrayal of the Gatekeepers: Grade Inflation," Journal of General Education 37 (1985): 97-121.

Greenwald, Anthony G. and Gerald M. Gillmore. "Grading Leniency Is a Removable Contaminant of Student Ratings," American Psychologist 11 (1997): 1209-17.

Haskell, Robert E. "Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Student Evaluation of Faculty: Galloping Polls in the 21st Century," Education Policy Analysis Archives 5 (1997). Available online at .

Marsh, Herbert W. "Student Evaluations of University Teaching: Research Findings, Methodological Issues, and Directions for Future Research," International Journal of Educational Research 11 (1987): 253-388.

Marsh, Herbert W. and Lawrence A. Roche. "Making Students' Evaluations of Teaching Effectiveness Effective," American Psychologist 52 (1997): 1187-97.

Naftulin, Donald H., John E. Ware, and Frank A. Donnelly, "The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction," Journal of Medical Education 48 (1973): 630-5.

Rice, Lee. "Student Evaluation of Teaching: Problems and Prospects," Teaching Philosophy 11 (1988): 329-44.

Ryan, James J., James A. Anderson, and Allen B. Birchler, "Student Evaluations: The Faculty Responds," Research in Higher Education 12 (December, 1980): 317-33.

Sacks, Peter. Generation X Goes to College (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986).

Schueler, G. F. "The Evaluation of Teaching in Philosophy," Teaching Philosophy 11 (1988): 345-8.

Selvin, Paul. "The Raging Bull of Berkeley," Science 251 (1991): 368-71.

Williams, Wendy M. and Stephen J. Ceci. "'How'm I Doing?' Problems with Student Ratings of Instructors and Courses," Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 29 (Sept./Oct. 1997): 12-23.

Wilson, Robin. "New Research Casts Doubt on Value of Student Evaluations of Professors," Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 16, 1998): A12.

End Notes

¹Cahn, 37.

²Cave, et al., 147; Haskell; d'Apollonia and Abrami, 1198; Wilson.

³According to Wilson, nearly 2000 studies of SEF have been completed.

⁴For a summary of the data on reliability and validity, see Centra, 58-65.

⁵Marsh and Roche, 1190.

⁶See Rice, 335-6; Wilson; Greenwald and Gillmore, 1214.

⁷See Goldman; Sacks.

⁸See Greenwald and Gillmore. The authors discuss five alternative interpretations of the grades-ratings correlation, arguing that only the leniency-bias hypothesis explains all the patterns in the data.

⁹d'Apollonia and Abrami, 1204-5.

¹⁰See Gilbaugh, who reports that 360 of 518 students surveyed at San Jose State University gave the response indicated. This result may be taken with a grain of salt, as Gilbaugh reports it in a letter to the editor and does not give details as to survey methods. However, the results are more likely an underestimate than an overestimate, both because students may be reluctant to admit to what most would regard as unfair behavior on their part and because some students may be unaware of their bias.

¹¹See Marsh.

¹²Ryan et al.

¹³Sacks, 85.

¹⁴Naftulin, et al.

¹⁵See Abrami, Leventhal and Perry. However, the authors caution that these results provide little information about the validity of student ratings, in part because it is not known how much either content or stylistic factors vary among actual college professors. If, for instance, actual professors varied very little in presentation styles, then the Dr. Fox effect would not be relevant in most cases.

¹⁶See Ambady and Rosenthal.

¹⁷See Haskell.

¹⁸Williams and Ceci, 12, 23; Schueler.

¹⁹Dershowitz, 117-19.

²⁰The incident is discussed in Selvin.

²¹Schueler, 345.

²²Cahn, 36-41.


Michael Huemer is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his B.A. from Berkeley in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1998. His contributions are mainly to epistemology and ethics and include phenomenal conservatism. He is well-known as a proponent of direct realism and as a critic of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

Copyright © 2006 Michael Huemer

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

This Is Rich!

Welcome back, Frankster! The Big Apple's fishwrap duo of The Cobra and The Frankster make a formidable tag-team to pummel Dub and The Dickster or Dub and The Rumster. I enjoy body slam after body slam and look forward to a leap from the top rope by either The Cobra or The Frankster. Poor Dub doesn't stand a chance. Hiring Tony Snowjob as the equivalent of Bobby (The Brain) Heenan won't help Dub and his cronies a whit. The Cobra and The Frankster have the Bushies' number: zero, zilch, nada. Dub is so far behind that he thinks he's in first place. If this is (fair & balanced) delusion, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Bush of a Thousand Days
By Frank Rich
LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie," the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand days to go and no way out.

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.

To mark the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion last month, the White House hyped something called Operation Swarmer, "the largest air assault" since the start of the war, complete with Pentagon-produced video suitable for the evening news. (What the operation actually accomplished as either warfare or P.R. remains a mystery.) It will take nothing less than a replay of D-Day with the original cast to put a happy gloss on tomorrow's anniversary. Looking back at "Mission Accomplished" now is like playing that childhood game of "What's wrong with this picture?" It wasn't just the banner or the "Top Gun" joyride or the declaration of the end of "major combat operations" that was bogus. Everything was fake except the troops.

"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker.

These days Mr. Bush seems to be hoping that we'll just forget every falsehood in his "Mission Accomplished" oration. Trying to deflect a citizen's hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president asserted at a public forum last month that he had never said "there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." But on May 1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct connection. "With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States," he intoned then. "And war is what they got." It was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.

At the time, "Mission Accomplished" was cheered by the Beltway establishment. "This fellow's won a war," the dean of the capital's press corps, David Broder, announced on "Meet the Press" after complimenting the president on the "great sense of authority and command" he exhibited in a flight suit. By contrast, the Washington grandees mostly ignored the Downing Street memo when it was first published in Britain, much as they initially underestimated the import of the Valerie Wilson leak investigation.

The Downing Street memo — minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began — has proved as accurate as "Mission Accomplished" was fantasy. Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix "the intelligence and facts" around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to "faulty intelligence," but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

The latest evidence that Mr. Bush knew that "uranium from Africa" was no slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address was uncovered by The Washington Post: the coordinating council for the 15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday "60 Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.

"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war," Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year C.I.A. veteran and an on-camera source for "60 Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the C.I.A. in fall 2004, Mr. Drumheller has played an important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Mr. Drumheller conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent W.M.D. labs, an Iraqi émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator. "The real tragedy of this," Mr. Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the [300,000] to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi Army."

Mr. Drumheller says that until the White House "comes to grips with why it did this" and stops "propping up the original rationale" for the war, it "will never get out of Iraq." He is right. But the White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost two years.

Set against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him.

Frank Rich's opinions appear on Sundays in The Times.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

¡Basta ya!

I have an electoral death-wish; I've only voted for a single winner in the presidential elections since 1960 and that was my vote for James Earl Carter, Jr. (D-GA) in 1976. Along with former Congressman Tim Roemer (D-IN), I have had my fill (and then some) of the Moron-in-Chief. However, as I look among the Jackass hopefuls, I am not inspired. I watched Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) on a talking head news show yesterday. He was bloviating about the current "gas crisis" and I found him inarticulate and banal. However, Salazar is a rocket scientist when compared to Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who made the news show circuit during the flap about illegal wiretapping done by Dub's minions at the NSA. Senator Roberts is a featherweight champeen in his own right. This AM, former Congressman Roemer offered a campaign slogan for the Jackasses in 2006 and 2008. However, I don't see a Harry S Truman among the potential Jackass presidential nominees. If the Dumbos nominate Condi (What a thought!) to face The Hillster as an estrogen counterpoise in 2008, I will look toward the Vegetarian party or some such source of loony amusement. I wouldn't vote for either of the distaff frontrunners because they are both inauthentic. If this is (fair & balanced) ennui, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Enough Already
By Tim Roemer

Americans have clearly had enough of the Bush administration's record: 7 in 10 say the nation is headed in the wrong direction. But with the 2006 Congressional elections fast approaching, Democrats must not get so irrationally exuberant that they lapse into old, bad habits.

In January, President Bush's adviser Karl Rove outlined the issues he believes will lead Republican candidates to victory in November: national security, the economy and taxes, and the courts. Democrats cannot allow Republicans to define the terms of the debate. Instead, they should take a page from history and from a different Karl.

In 1946, Karl Frost, an advertising executive, suggested a simple slogan to the Massachusetts Republican Committee: "Had Enough? Vote Republican!" Frost recognized that these simple words could unite his national party and blame its opponents, who controlled Congress, for causing or failing to solve the many problems facing the country, including meat shortages, economic difficulties and labor unrest. The strategy worked: in 1946, both houses of Congress flipped.

Sixty years later, Democrats would be smart to turn Karl Frost's slogan on Karl Rove's strategy.

"Had Enough? Vote Democratic!" is a slogan that spotlights the many mistakes in Iraq, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and the mangling of fiscal responsibility with "bridges to nowhere." Indeed, you can see and hear Democratic candidates rallying their voters at Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners with a passionate and rhythmic chorus:

"The administration said Iraqis would greet us with roses as liberators, yet our soldiers are attacked with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Had Enough? Vote Democratic.

"The administration said it was prepared for a hurricane in New Orleans, yet our government's feeble response prompted Bangladesh to offer us $1 million in aid. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!

"The administration said it would bring competency to our federal budget, yet our nation faces catastrophic deficits. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!"

And if you want to fire up the base, you can string together references to Jack Abramoff, Abu Ghraib and the Dubai ports deal. "Had Enough?" works well on classic campaign materials like buttons and bumper stickers while its simplicity makes it a cinch to "go viral" on the Internet.

"Had enough?" will speak to both Democrats and disillusioned Republicans. Liberals can use "Had Enough?" to reach out to voters enraged over the incompetent management of Iraq. Moderates might use "Had Enough?" to persuade swing voters on fiscal issues. And the implicit rejection of neoconservative politics will appeal to all voters who seek to spurn tainted Republican candidates.

"Had Enough?" also pre-empts Democrats' worst habits. Too often we've made campaigns complicated and policy-heavy. We love to unveil 40-page position papers and wonky diagrams. "Had Enough?" clears a broad path through such minutiae. "Public sentiment is everything," Abraham Lincoln said 150 years ago. "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Karl Frost's simple words can serve as the cavalry charge to help win the coming electoral battles — something Democrats are in an incredibly strong position to do. But make no mistake: new ideas matter. Democrats will also need the artillery of a disciplined, focused set of core proposals to complement their criticism of Republican excesses.

As we head into the midterm elections, Democrats should finally understand, as Lincoln and Frost did before, that you must win the majority before you can make public policy.

Tim Roemer is a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. and he was a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

The Student Is Always Right?

The second prexy during my time at the Collegium Excellens was a "businessman" who clawed his way up the greasy pole of success at our hallowed sanctum. President Chuckles replaced my first wacko prexy (Duke) who had gotten the Collegium placed on the censure list of the AAUP for the longest term in that organization's recent history. President Duke had summarily fired (before my time) a tenured faculty member who got on his nerves and the AAUP investigating committee was stonewalled by both Duke and the Board of Regents who decided to back their man. In any event, Chuckles was brought on board by several business types on the Board of Regents to serve as a buffer between Duke and the outside world. Chuckles was a graduate of the Harvard Business School (BBA, not MBA) who had married an Amarillo woman and managed to run her family's business into the ground (bankruptcy) when he was plucked out of the madding crowd in Amarillo to perform PR repairs following the AAUP censure of the Collegium. Chuckles moved up the ladder at the Collegium by outwitting the nitwits who were above him in the administrative food chain. Ultimately, Chuckles manipulated the faculty to support him as a less wacko alternative to Duke. After retirement, Duke spent a two or three years in an Amarillo retirement home. One day at lunch, Duke excused himself from the table in the dining room and told his wife that he had forgotten something in their apartment. Then Duke went into a broom closet on his floor and ate a .38-cal. revolver. In the meantime, Chuckles began to make proclamations of his own. Early in his reign, Chuckles proclaimed that the "unofficial slogan" of the Collegium should be "The student is always right." Brilliant! It was a play on the retail bromide that "The customer is always right." In his own way, Chuckles was as paranoid as Duke. My department, housing history and government teachers, was suspect. In fairly short order, I ended up on Chuckles' enemies list. I came up for promotion to professor in Chuckles' last year on this earth. Word was passed along to me that my promotion was "in trouble." Later that same month, Chuckles — with a history of heart trouble — was found face down at his desk. I remain convinced that my promotion file was under Chuckles' face when the EMTs lifted his head to remove the body. The Collegium never recovered from Chuckles' nonsense over the next quarter-century. Today, a president I didn't know sits on the throne at the Collegium. I did hear this guy's pitch to the faculty during the search process prior to his hire. The current prexy said that he "really liked" the idea that the student is always right at the Collegium. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. If this is (fair & balanced) hucksterism, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Brand U.
By Stephen Budiansky

I recently did some research for a satirical novel set at a university. The idea was to have a bunch of gags about how colleges prostitute themselves to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings and keep up a healthy supply of tuition-paying students, while wrapping their craven commercialism in high-minded-sounding academic blather.

I would keep coming up with what I thought were pretty outrageous burlesques of this stuff and then run them by one of my professor friends and he'd say, Oh, yeah, we're doing that.

One of my best bits, or so I thought, was about how the fictional university in my novel had hired a branding consultant to come up with a new name with the hip, possibility-rich freshness needed to appeal to today's students. Two weeks later, a friend called to say it was on the front page of The Times: "To Woo Students, Colleges Choose Names That Sell." Exhibit A was Beaver College, which had changed its name to Arcadia University. Applications doubled.

I also had created a character, a former breakfast-cereal executive who returns to his alma mater as vice president for finance (to give something back) and tries to get everyone to call the students customers. It turns out Yale was already doing that.

I knew that Tom Lehrer, the great satirical songwriter of the 60's, had said he had to give up satire when it kept being overtaken by reality. The final straw, he said, was Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

My final straw came when a friend at Case Western Reserve University (now referred to as Case, after their consultant concluded that all great universities have single-word names) sent me a packet of information on the university's new showcase undergraduate seminar program. Called SAGES (this supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), the program offers as an essential component of its core intellectual experience an upscale cafe that serves Peet's Coffee and is "staffed by baristas whose expertise in preparing espresso is matched only by their authoritative knowledge of all things SAGES."

As the program's Web site explains (complete with footnotes, bibliography and quotes from the urban theorist Jane Jacobs): "In the bustling personal-but-impersonal rhythms of campus activity, as in the streets of a big city, proprietors of public establishments occupy a special position... The SAGES cafe staff are patently not interested in providing grades or passing judgment." And, not only that, but "there are no compromises that would undermine the quality of our drinks.... Our chai latte is made not from a bottled concentrate, but from a fresh-brewed base made from scratch every day on site."

As a model of pandering to students in the guise of lofty academic purpose, I thought that was pretty hard to top. Then I started reading the 92-page guide Case has created for teachers of these seminars.

If students fidget, talk or walk out of class, the guide advises seminar leaders not to "manage" such behaviors, but to explore their underlying causes. Instructors must remember that to such characteristically American cultural beliefs as the importance of morality, rationality and personal responsibility, there are equally valid alternatives that must be respected.

Instructors must be wary of spurious objectivity, such as a 0-100 grading scale; much better is a 0-5 scale, or, best of all, a check, check-plus, check-minus scale. And finally, if students do not contribute to discussions at all, seminar leaders should "make space for silence."

It's enough to drive a satirist to something stronger than chai latte.

Stephen Budiansky is the author, most recently, of Her Majesty's Spymaster.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

Sean Wilentz Is The Decider: Dub Is The Worst Ever!

It gets worse and worse. We have a thousand more days with the village idiot in the White House. Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz nails Dub to the barn door with this savage polemic in Rolling Stone (no less). If this is (fair & balanced) rabble rousing, so be it.

[x Rolling Stone]
The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
by Sean Wilentz

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty — and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole — a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled — and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating — reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled — nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success — flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

* * * *

How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

* * * *

THE CREDIBILITY GAP

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age — a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 — a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections — but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff — a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition — represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.

* * * *

BUSH AT WAR

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well — including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor — much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president — Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies — including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill — suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq — an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered — the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy — yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops — accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

* * * *

BUSH AT HOME

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush — sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" — insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing — a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states — including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds — have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws — a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions — over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science — dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them — much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.

* * * *

PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law — most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers — HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger — left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon — a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison — investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" — threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" — a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

* * * *

Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockon Professor of History at Princeton University. Wilentz won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award (OAH, 1985), the Annual Book Award (Society for the History of the Early American Republic, 1985), and the Albert J. Beveridge Award (AHA, 1984) for his first book: Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class: 1788-1850 (1984). His second (and most recent) book — The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Copyright © 2006 Rolling Stone

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

Jane Jacobs, RIP

I dabbled in urban history for a number of years (1976-1986?) in my survey courses at the Collegium Excellens. Jane Jacobs exerted tremendous influence on the field of urban studies. In fact, give me Jane Jacobs over Lewis Mumford anytime. If this is (fair & balanced) urban wisdom, so be it.

[x Financial Times]
Jane Jacobs: Leading voice of the city
By Jeff Pruzan

Jane Jacobs, a giant among urban critics and enthusiasts who died on Tuesday aged 89, spent her entire career fighting for one deceptively simple principle: leave the cities alone and let them develop by themselves.

In many ways, Jacobs's tireless fight for the organic, spontaneous city - for wide sidewalks, old buildings, a mix of businesses, semi-supervised children at play, and trees - was ahead of its time.

But in retrospect, Jacobs's message initally surfaced as a final warning, nearly coinciding with the dawn of government-sponsored neighbourhood-razing and cement-pouring. Today, her first and most important book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), reads as a tragedy of sorts: Jacobs's countless suggestions about preserving street life were ultimately ignored. Numerous cities cited in her study - Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit - still wear the excesses of ill-advised renewal spending. The Back-of-the-Yards neighbourhood on Chicago's south side earned Jacobs's praise as poor but vital; today, it scarcely exists.

Jacobs's pleas may have been muffled by her circumstances. Born May 4 1916 in hardscrabble Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jane Butzner moved to New York City during the Depression and began a career in journalism, writing in a spectrum of publications, from The New York Herald Tribune to Vogue. During the second world war, Jacobs worked at the Office of War Information, where she met her future husband, Robert Jacobs.

Her career began to accelerate in the 1950s, when the mother of three held a writing and editing job at Architectural Forum. This job provided her only paper credential as she began compiling her observations about what made her Greenwich Village neighbourhood so lively, exciting and self-possessed - a project that eventually became Death and Life. She would publish seven books during her lifetime, most recently Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In clear, direct prose, Jacobs extolled the virtues of the local bar; the mom-and-pop shopkeeper who looks after the vacationing family's keys; short city blocks that create more street corners; and older, “mixed-use” buildings. Even the neighbourhood snoop plays an essential role in Jacobs's dream cities.

Jacobs also scolded an emerging urban trend: governments corralling the poor into brightly-lit, cheap high-rise housing; the old buildings in poor neighbourhoods should not be torn down, she said.

This was not what most developers and planners wanted to hear. Jacobs quickly suffered withering, smirking critiques from social experts. Lewis Mumford's 1962 dismissal of her observations appeared in the New Yorker beneath the condescending title “Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer”.

Meanwhile, state, federal and local governments carried on, building sky-high housing projects for the poor, threading expressways through once-vital neighbourhoods, and throwing money at “renewal” projects - from prematurely shabby pedestrian malls to empty, pointless convention centres - that only hastened decline. (Her memorable phrase for such spending was “cataclysmic money.")

The 1960s prodded Jacobs away from her writing desk and into the street, where she agitated on behalf of New York neighbourhoods. She famously helped prevent Robert Moses, New York's legendary developer king, from putting a new motorway through Manhattan's SoHo neighbourhood, then a decaying warehouse area but today one of Manhattan's most popular shopping, restaurant and gallery districts.

At the time, the Vietnam war was raging, and Jacobs found herself with another problem on her hands: a conflict she and her husband opposed, and teenage sons approaching draft age. In 1968 the family moved out of harm's way to Toronto. Jacobs would stay there permanently; by the time of her death, she was one of Toronto's most celebrated immigrants. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974.

Only recently has American city planning caught up with Jacobs's laissez-faire prescriptions for keeping cities thriving.

Today's US city centres enjoy renewed street-life and energy, thanks in part to fashionability among young professionals with money, and in part to the wisdom learned from past planning mistakes. Meanwhile, Jacobs's perfect American city proved to be just over the border in Canada.

Jeff Pruzan is an editor on the Financial Times's Americas desk.

Copyright © 2006 Financial Times

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.