Great Words About A Great Conservative

It's nice to see that one can have nice things said about them publicly without dying.

Except for being a Cubs fan, I love this guy.

George F. Will Has Eyes on the Nation

As he gets older, George F. Will admits to seeing things differently
June 29, 2008

BY HILLEL ITALIE

George F. Will, the conservative columnist and pundit, seems too young and young-looking to be anyone's ''elder statesman.'' He is 67, his hair still boyishly parted, his face hardly lined, his wire-rimmed persona that of a graduate student whose idea of a vice is skipping class to catch a ball game at Wrigley Field.

But Will has been a presence in print, and on the air, for more than 30 years. He has written thousands of columns and reviews and spent thousands of hours on television, mostly as a panelist on ABC's ''This Week.'' He has also published more than a dozen books, his latest, One Man's America, the first to come out in a world not shared by his late friend and hero, William F. Buckley Jr. ''Bill was a founder of the conservative movement and his task, beginning with 'God and Man at Yale' and the National Review [in 1955], was to make it acceptable," Will says. "That's long been achieved, vastly simplifying the work of people like me.''

Interviewed recently on a sunny afternoon, Will works out of a brick Georgetown town house that could easily be converted to a flea market for baseball, with its bats and posters and pictures, and its CD of songs about the Chicago Cubs.

Age has relaxed Will and the subtitle of his new book, The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation, reflects a man who has seen enough history not to be shocked by current events. The writings collected include little about the Iraq war but a great deal about baseball, old friends such as Buckley and Ronald Reagan, and a surprisingly affectionate portrait of Beat poet-publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
''You get older and you see a lot of error and folly. If you keep your mind open, you think about things differently and see things differently,'' says Will, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. ''I don't get quite as excited about things. Washington's a town where everything that dominates every eight-hour news cycle seems so important.''

Will was born in Champaign, Ill., in 1941, his parents so liberal that they voted for socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas in the 1930s. Will supported John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, but time spent in England helped turn him off the welfare state. In 1964, he was back in the United States and at the founding of the modern right, the disastrous presidential campaign of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson but anticipated the successes of the next four decades.

''You can't imagine what fun it was to be for Goldwater,'' Will says, ''because it was kind of naughty.''

After receiving a Ph.D. in political science, from Princeton University, in 1967, Will taught briefly at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto, then joined the staff of Sen. Gordon Allott, R-Colo. By the mid-1970s, Allott had been voted out of office and Will had become a syndicated columnist and TV presence.
He met Reagan in the late '70s and his affection for Reagan brought him the rewards and follies of power; Will was a visitor at the Oval Office and Reagan dined at the writer's home. But in fall 1980, speaking on ABC's ''Nightline,'' Will praised candidate Reagan's performance in a debate against President Carter without fully revealing that he had assisted Reagan during preparation.
''I got into magnificent trouble for that,'' Will says. ''I wouldn't do it again, if only because you wind up 20 years later, still talking about it.''
Like Buckley, Will is more loyal to the ideals than to the leaders of the Republican Party. He famously referred to the first President Bush as a ''lap dog'' and scorns the current Bush administration's foreign policy, commenting that a government that can't run Amtrak is equally unfit to run Iraq. He has often criticized Sen. John McCain and said he will ''hold his nose'' and vote for him in the fall.
''Journalists love him and I don't,'' he says of the Republicans' presumptive nominee. ''I admire him. He's a brave man. He's got strong views, strong if incoherent.''
Will has been wrong, and knows it. He once swore the Berlin Wall would not come down, but it did and he now says he was unduly pessimistic. Asked to cite an issue on which conservatives erred, he quickly answers ''civil rights.''
''They were absolutely right,'' he says of civil rights supporters. ''The transformation in this country that we've had in the past 50 years -- it takes your breath away.''
Will has praised Sen. Barack Obama in ways Will has been described by his own admirers. He has written that the presumptive Democratic nominee is ''refreshingly cerebral'' and ''an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains.''
''I'm not advocating this, but there is something to be said for a market cleaning mechanism,'' Will says when asked how he would feel if the Democrats triumphed in 2008. ''The political market does enforce cycles, up and down, and it wouldn't be an unmitigated disaster for that to happen this year.''
AP