11/16/00 4:45 p.m.
Brazen Brazile
Gore’s campaign manager makes an incendiary charge, with no evidence.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he election is over (sort of), but the race baiting never ends. Here's Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile, in today's New York Post: "In disproportionately black areas, people faced dogs, guns and were required to have three forms of ID. I called the NAACP. They'd already heard this, and they're now on the case investigating. I mean, one day before we were ahead in Florida by three points and we lost? It's like uh-oh, somebody's doing something they shouldn't."

People faced dogs and guns? And her evidence for this is…what?

Brazile doesn't have any. At least none that Cindy Adams of the New York Post shares with readers. It's hard to say who's being more irresponsible: Brazile, for making such an assertion, or the New York Post, for letting it appear without any kind of corroboration.

Wilentz Watch
Last week, we reported that Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, was organizing an ad in the New York Times demanding new elections in Palm Beach and that in Salon he had suggested an internationally supervised runoff election. We observed in passing that Wilentz had some years back "signed a 'historians' brief' to the Supreme Court arguing — on the basis of falsified evidence — that abortion was a common-law right at the time of the American Founding." Since we published that item, two ads from Wilentz's "Emergency Committee of Concerned Citizens" have appeared in the Times. The second became something of an embarrassment since a number of the people listed as signatories had not seen it and did not in fact endorse it. (See here for details.)

We provided Wilentz's e-mail address in case any of our readers wanted to sign his petition. At least one of our readers did begin a correspondence with him. In response to a query, Wilentz wrote, "What I said about Kofi Annan [supervising a runoff election] was meant as a joke — but it didn't come across that way." (No doubt because Wilentz said "no kidding" after making the suggestion.) Wilentz continued, "I have never said anything about abortion, common law, and the Founding. You've been badly misinformed."

The historian's memory fails him. In our files we have a copy of the infamous historians' brief to the Supreme Court in the 1989 Webster abortion case. That brief argued that at the time the Constitution was adopted, "abortion was not illegal at common law" and was "the liberty of the woman" — as we accurately reported. The brief has been influential, having been uncritically cited in the New Republic by Walter Dellinger (who later served as an assistant attorney general under Clinton) and in books by Ronald Dworkin and Laurence Tribe. It is, nonetheless, thoroughly fraudulent, contradicting both the sources on which it purports to rely and the published work of many of the signatories. One of your correspondents wrote an article summarizing the evidence of the brief's fraudulence in National Review ("Aborting History," October 23, 1995).

The brief was endorsed by over 400 historians. These include, as a glance at page 21 of the appendix to the brief reveals, one "Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University."

We don't believe Wilentz is lying. He probably just didn't remember the brief. He isn't an expert on its subject, and he probably didn't give it a moment's thought when he signed it. Which suggests something about the weight that ought to be given to the political pronouncements of academics.