Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: On the Costa Concordia mishap, Ivy League graduates and the Livingston Group

Wonder why?

The Discovery Channel recently ran an hour-long documentary on the Costa Concordia disaster. If the name of the ship's owner, Carnival Cruise Lines, was mentioned, it was so sotto vote as to go undetected by my ear.

A ray of hope

"Fewer graduates of elite Ivy League schools are choosing careers in finance," reported the New York Times recently. The Wall Street Journal, however, ran this headline: "On Campus, Wall Street Still Carries Its Cachet." But the evidence offered by the Journal confirms that the Times has it right. The University of Pennsylvania reports that the proportion of its graduates going into financial services declined from 38 percent in 2008 to 33 percent in 2011; at Harvard the decline was from 28 percent to 17 percent; Dartmouth from 23 percent to 12 percent. The trend may be modest, but I still find it encouraging. Maybe this last recession will have a similar effect to the Great Depression. "In the 1920s an ambitious young man headed for Wall Street," observed historian Robert McElvaine. "During the New Deal, though, he went into government."

At one point in the 1930s, in one section of the Department of Agriculture, fifteen of the twenty-six lawyers were graduates of Harvard Law School. Fifteen of twenty-six! The Department of Agriculture!

"It's a great idea, but ..."

As a veteran observer of clever bureaucrats, I have come to admire a tactic often employed by the secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner. When the White House is considering reforms that he does not favor--and major reform is something Geithner rarely embraces--he doesn't say, "This is a terrible idea and I'm against it." Instead, he begins by praising the proposal and its proponents: "It's a great idea, really brilliant of you fellows to think of it." Then, seemingly almost as an afterthought, he adds, "Have you considered that there's just a chance that it could lead to a Wall Street meltdown?" It is a technique worthy of Sir Humphrey, the wily civil servant played by Nigel Hawthorne on the British television series Yes Minister.

When the 800-pound gorilla speaks ...

You may recall the firing of Shirley Sherrod. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, dismissed her hours after a video purporting to show her making a racist remark was posted by the late right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. The White House denied having been involved. Vilsack agreed, saying he had made the decision on his own. It later turned out that Sherrod was innocent. The Breitbart video had been edited to give a false impression of what she said.

Recently, 2,000 pages of internal e-mails concerning the event were released by the administration. In the eighth paragraph of a Washington Post story about the messages there is what I suspect is a major clue as to what really happened, and maybe even the smoking gun. When informed of the video by an official at Agriculture, Reid Cherlin, then a White House spokesman, responded by inquiring what USDA was going to say about the matter and asking, "Has she been fired? I'll alert folks here."

At some agencies--Treasury is an example--frequent contact with the White House is the norm, and such a message would barely cause a ripple, let alone a wave. But in a place like Agriculture, where contact from Pennsylvania Avenue is relatively rare, words like Cherlin's can rocket around the agency with incredible speed. As the message is repeated from one person to another, there is a temptation to make it sound more and more dramatic, so that gradually "Has she been fired?" will be transformed into "The White House wants her out of here pronto."

Block the vote

If you have doubted that the efforts of Republican state legislators to suppress minority voting are succeeding, ponder this news. From the time when Florida's new election law took effect in July of last year through late March of this year, 81,471 fewer people have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 elections. This is the troubling finding of an analysis by the New York Times, reported by Michael Cooper and do Craven...