Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Alberto Gonzales' testimony

Thanks for no memories

After hearing Alberto Gonzales uttering the words "I don't recall," "I have no recollection," or "I have no memory" sixty-four times during his April 19 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and pondering the fact that Gonzales's former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, had said "I don't remember" 122 times before the same committee three weeks earlier, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank suggested that the Justice Department might want to consider serving ginkgo biloba at the employee cafeteria.

The forgetfulness defense

It seems that Gonzales and Sampson may well have gotten their bad-memory defense from the same source who told them who to fire and hire, namely, Karl Rove. You will recall that Rove managed to escape a perjury charge in the Valerie Plame case by returning to the grand jury to correct his previous testimony that he hadn't talked to Matt Cooper, and declaring that he had simply forgotten the incident at the time of his first appearance before the jury. His memory had been "refreshed" after his lawyer learned from a pal at Time that Cooper planned to tell the jury that Rove had been his source. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, in a stunning display of persuasive advocacy, managed to sell this defense to Patrick Fitzgerald.

The ignorance defense

Now Luskin is using a variant of the defense to deflect accusations that Rove had anything to do with the Republican National Committee's deletion of his e-mails that might have shown his role in Justice Department personnel decisions. Instead of "I forgot," the defense is now "I never knew." Luskin tells the Post's Michael Abramowitz that not only did Rove not know the messages had been deleted but that he has always understood "that his RNC and campaign emails were being archived from very early in the administration." What is so impressive about this defense is that it can't be disproved.

After Adlai

"He doesn't have the handicap that a lot of smart people have, which is that they come across as 'You're not smart enough to talk to me,'" a friend of Barack Obama's tells the New Yorker's Larissa MacFarquhar. In that sense, the friend says, Obama is the "opposite" of Adlai Stevenson.

I can't tell you how those words delighted me. I've long thought the Democrats began to lose their bearings in the 1950s, when they began to value seeming smarter than the next guy over seeing themselves as equals and talking to the rest of us with down-to-earth common sense.

My father, like many other Democrats of the thirties and forties, thought of himself as "a common man." Indeed, a liberal leader of that era even wrote a book called The Century of the Common Man, a term that disappeared from the Democratic vocabulary with Stevenson's emergence. But in the thirties and forties, men like my father valued the plain speaking of their heroes--Will Rogers, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, who cared more about making themselves clear to the average American than showing how smart they were. And instead of feeling superior, as liberal intellectuals are especially prone to do, they could reach out to find common ground. That's what we must do if we're ever going to win anything like the five straight elections that Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman won.

An admission about admissions

I must say that I feel sorry for Marilee Jones, the MIT admissions director who recently resigned after admitting that she had lied about her credentials twenty-eight years ago. Certainly she shouldn't have done that. But now that she has performed the admissions job more than successfully for all that time, hasn't she proved that she is qualified? We put far too much emphasis on the possession of degrees compared to demonstrated ability. My favorite example was when Paul Blair was denied the opportunity to coach a high school baseball team because he...