...and someone I'd like to have a non-alcoholic beer with. I'm sure he'd be very interesting to talk to; he's highly intelligent and has a PhD from Harvard. He's also the son of two famous intellectuals, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb (bad names) and grew up in Manhattan. You can see him on Fox News Sunday each week or read his magazine, The Weekly Standard. Kristol is exactly what the British had in mind when they coined the term Chattering Class.
It's hard to picture Kristol outside of the Washington-New York-Cambridge axis, though. It seems that whatever he knows of the rest of the country he's gleaned from books or TV. I doubt if he has much direct experience beyond the elite circles in which he travels. In fact, I'd bet that he knows as much about life in Taiwan as he does about real life in America. And not only has he probably never held a real job, but I wonder if he's ever known or talked to anyone who has. His view of the world is so circumscribed, you have to ask yourself who he does talk to, besides people like Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan. In a different era, George Wallace would have called him an "ivory tower, pointy-headed intellectual."
Some of the highlights of Kristol's career have been managing Alan Keyes's Senate campaign in Maryland, serving as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and most recently as one of Sarah Palin's biggest boosters. He may have had more to do with her rise on the national scene than anyone else. Especially after Palin's latest blow-up, how would you like to have a resume like that? But a better question is, why is anyone still listening to Bill Kristol?
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