A conservative who has been quite successful in Hollywood writes in to dispute the notion that studio bias is the primary impediment to conservative cultural influence. He’s referring to the arguments in this section of the Morning Jolt:

Once More into the Breach of Conservatives’ Struggle to Influence the Culture

Rod Dreher, crunchy con and former contributor to National Review, now writing over at The American Conservative, examines and expands upon the common lament that conservatives need to become better storytellers:

• Argument has its place, but story is what truly moves the hearts and minds of men. The power of myth—which is to say, of storytelling — is the power to form and enlighten the moral imagination, which is how we learn right from wrong, the proper ordering of our souls, and what it means to be human. Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind whose own longtime residence in his Michigan hometown earned him the epithet “Sage of Mecosta,” considered tending the moral imagination to be “conservatism at its highest.”

  Through the stories we tell, we come to understand who we are and what we are to do. This is true for both individuals and communities . . .

  Stories work so powerfully on the moral imagination because they are true to human experience in ways that polemical arguments are not. And because the moral imagination often determines which intellectual arguments—political, economic, theological, and so forth—will be admitted into consideration, storytelling is a vital precursor to social change.

But there’s one note in his lengthy cover piece that grated on me:

• [Sam] MacDonald came from a working-class western Pennsylvania family, graduated from Yale, and worked in Washington journalism at Reason before returning home to raise his kids. His experience has taught him how hapless the right is at understanding the power of storytelling.

  “The smart people on the Right are working in the conservative infrastructure,” he says. “You want a conservative view on healthcare? It comes from Heritage, or maybe the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Except most people don’t care. It’s too confusing.”

  It would make a much greater difference, MacDonald believes, if conservatives were bringing their insights to bear writing for the network medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” But that is hard to imagine, he says.

Well, no kidding. My views about, say, the need for tort reform would catch on a lot quicker if Patrick Dempsey were to express them, shaking his fist in righteous indignation, about how the hospital’s fear of a lawsuit is interfering with him performing a high-risk but needed surgery on the critically ill adorable little girl of the week.* I’ll cast Wise as the ambulance-chasing lawyer and the audience will instantly know he’s the bad guy.

“Hi, I’m Ray Wise, perhaps best known for playing Leland Palmer and The Devil. When I appear as a guest star on your favorite show, you can rest assured that I was indeed the one who committed the murder the protagonists are trying to solve.”

But a writing gig on Grey’s Anatomy or any other highly-rated network drama is hard to get. This is where the discussion amongst conservatives usually turns to, “and liberals in Hollywood will never hire a conservative writer, or allow a conservative message to get through!”

And that’s true, at least in some cases. A few years back, Ben Shapiro did a great job getting interviews with producers and executives who more or less openly admit that they see their work as a chance to promote their viewpoints, and that sometimes they put in story elements to emphasize a message of “’f*** you’ to the right wing.”

But the obstacle isn’t purely ideological. Some of the obstacle is that there aren’t that many high-quality shows with mass audiences, those shows only have a certain number of full-time writing gigs, and the supply of potential writers is way, way, way higher than the demand. Yes, there are probably a bunch of talented conservatives trying to make it in Hollywood and finding the doors closed. But there are probably some talented liberals trying to make it in Hollywood and finding the doors closed.

Trying to be a screenwriter in Hollywood requires being willing to endure a lot of rejection, with no guarantee of success, and probably trying to write, on spec, some sort of brilliant, attention-catching, so-good-the-producers-can’t-possibly-pass work while simultaneously holding down a day job to pay the bills. It means living in Los Angeles — with a cost of living 36 percent higher than the national average — and spending a lot of time trying to make connections in an intensely competitive field. And of course, the process of bringing a concept for a show or film to the airwaves or silver screen is legendarily complicated, arbitrary, consensus-driven, and difficult.

We’ve heard a lot of “we need to take back the culture!” and “Breitbart warned us, ‘politics is downstream from culture’” in the past nine months or so. Jonah reminded us:

• [Hollywood’s] influence is agonizingly hard to predict or dismiss as unthinkingly liberal. Studies of “All in the Family” found that viewers in America, and around the globe, took different lessons from the show based on their politics and cultural norms. Despite Norman Lear’s liberal best efforts, many found Archie Bunker more persuasive than his “meathead” sociologist son-in-law. HBO’s epic series “The Wire” was a near-Marxist indictment of urban liberalism and the drug war, making it quite popular among many conservatives and libertarians. The popular BBC series “Downton Abbey” is shockingly conservative in many respects. The aristocrats are decent, compassionate people, and the staff is, if anything, more happily class-conscious than the blue bloods. And, yet, as far as I can tell, liberals love it.

  Obviously, the market is a big factor. No doubt many Hollywood liberals would like to push the ideological envelope more, but audiences get a vote. And that vote isn’t cast purely on ideological grounds.

  There’s a difference between art and propaganda. Outside the art house crowd, liberal agitprop doesn’t sell. Art must work with the expectations and beliefs of the audience. Even though pregnancies are commonplace on TV, you’ll probably never see a hilarious episode of a sitcom in which a character has an abortion — because abortion isn’t funny.

  The conservative desire to create a right-wing movie industry is an attempt to mimic a caricature of Hollywood. Any such effort would be a waste of money that would make the Romney campaign seem like a great investment.

It’s worth noting that some liberal efforts to influence public opinion through art fall flat on their collective faces, perhaps the most notable recent example being a slew of mostly heavy-handed anti-Iraq-War films:

• A spate of Iraq-themed movies and TV shows haven’t just failed at the box office. They’ve usually failed spectacularly, despite big stars, big budgets and serious intentions.

  The underwhelming reception from the public raises a question: Are audiences turned off by the war, or are they simply voting against the way filmmakers have depicted it? . . .

  The Iraq war-themed “In the Valley of Elah,” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon, received mixed critical notices and did little business upon its release last September (total domestic gross: $6.8 million). “Redacted,” a Brian De Palma-directed film about a renegade Army unit, was barely seen when it came out in limited release in November (it grossed just $65,388).

  An even more paltry reception greeted “Grace Is Gone” (2007), in which star John Cusack deals with the aftermath of his wife’s death in Iraq; “Home of the Brave” (2006), about a group of soldiers (including Samuel L. Jackson and Jessica Biel) adjusting to life after the war; and “The Situation” (2006), about a love triangle set amid the conflict.

To make a good movie requires talent, yes, but also capital — you need to get the equipment to make the film, hire actors, build sets or get filming permits in locations, costumes, music, etc. — and that’s just the basics, never mind special effects, stunts, sound effects and editing, renting the crane for a crane shot or helicopter, etc.

Notice that we don’t lack conservatives who can thrive in radio and more recently podcasting, web videos, etc. I think a big factor is that those products are cheap to produce.

* Why, no, I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy out of the corner of my eye while Mrs. CampaignSpot watches it on the DVR, and by no means do I mock that every episode ends with some patient croaking in melodramatic fashion during a montage set to Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” (“If I lay here . . . If I just lay here . . . Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”) leading to perpetual basket case Dr. Grey offering a voice over with some sort of pseudo-philosophical Chinese-cookie-worthy life lesson that the doctors learned while botching their latest life and death surgical procedure (“You spend your entire life searching for a place to call home, and only when all seems lost do you turn around and realize, you’ve been there all along”) and I absolutely totally don’t mimic EKG flatline noises every time “Chasing Cars” comes on the radio.

Today is the last Morning Jolt until April 1 — I’ll be away for Easter week. Today’s edition looks at the Senate vote on repealing Obamacare’s medical-device taxes, a creepy poll out of the Ivy League, and this thought on the difficulty of influencing politics through culture . . .

The Difficulties of Winning the Argument in a Fragmenting Culture

In her assessment of this year’s CPAC, Melissa Clouthier laments:

Pardon me, but why are we kvetching over social issues when the nation is staggering under it’s own indebted weight? It would be one thing if there seemed to be a reasoned, respectful, fact-based argument around some of these divisive issues, but no. Instead, the right is being treated to the same sort of shrieking emotionalism that one is used to getting from the left. The misinformation and loping strawmen arguments have been embarrassing to watch. Why are average Americans, trying [to] pay their bills and scraping by, supposed to take the Right seriously? The Right certainly isn’t acting like they care about how the average person is faring. For more on this read Ben Domenech’s excellent piece on which issues should animate the Right.

Domenech’s points about self-employed, home-business or contracting moms are indeed great. But beyond that, Clouthier hits on something important: whether the issues that inspire, drive, and excite the average conservative are the same as those that inspire, drive, and excite voters as a whole. And part of the problem may be that there may not be that much of an “average American” anymore.

Our electorate, and the culture, feel really fragmented right now. You can be in a bubble and not know it. It used to be if you wanted to know what was on everybody’s mind, you watched the evening news and looked at the front page of the newspapers. Now to the extent these programs tell you what the “big news” and “big issues” are, they reveal what is on the mind of the rapidly aging audiences for those products; the rest of the population is scattered in a million different directions. There are very few moments where a lot of us are looking at the same place at the same time.

At its peak years of 1986 and 1987, “The Cosby Show” had an audience of 30.5 million people, out of a country of 240 million people — meaning about 12 percent of the population were watching each week.

The top show last week was “The Big Bang Theory,” which had an audience of just under 16 million people — in a country of about 314 million people — eaning about 5 percent of the population were watching.

Every day, you can discover some little subculture that a lot of folks dabble in, and some folks can get completely wrapped up in:

There are 211 million video-game players in the United States. For perspective, 130 million voted in last year’s presidential election.

About 35 million Americans and Canadians play a fantasy sport (fantasy football, fantasy baseball, etc.).

At least 31 million Americans are “foodies,” with an avid interest in food and culinary trends, as of 2008.

A site of “Bronies” — grown men and women who are really into “My Little Pony” — estimates that there are 7 to 12 million of them in the United states.

I don’t begrudge any of those interests (okay, the Bronies are weird*) but the point is that there is no common popular culture anymore, which makes it particularly tough for conservatives to start influencing that culture. If we’re Balkanizing into more and more niche subcultures, it’s easier than ever to live in an unrepresentative bubble without ever realizing that you’re in an unrepresentative bubble.

Mind you, the niche culture has been good for conservatives in a lot of ways. You could argue we’ve become a “niche” culture ourselves, with our own news channel (Fox News) and entertainment programming (“24”, the History Channel’s “The Bible” series, Sarah Palin’s reality show, some would argue “Duck Dynasty”), sports heroes (Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin) , our own books, our own newspapers, magazines, web sites, morning newsletters . . .

But by becoming the well-cultivated niche, we’ve become this acquired taste, not always easily appreciated by newcomers and outsiders. Things that we think are absolutely vital, like the debt or Benghazi, end up being ignored by large swaths of the electorate, while things that seem absolutely unimportant to us, like the latest celebrity news, are given enormous attention and focus by millions of citizens who have a vote just like the rest of us. (Right now on YouTube, a guy getting punched by a street performer has 11 million views in three days. Remember, that’s about two-thirds of the audience of the most-watched broadcast television show last week.)

There are topics that we’re pretty sure are largely irrelevant to the voting electorate at large, but the speakers at CPAC go on at length about them because A) they think they’re important regardless of the public’s attention and/or B) they’re convinced their issues and views are popular, because everywhere they go, they encounter like-minded folks who agree with that assessment.

*My Libertarian side argues that as long as what you choose to do with your free time doesn’t harm others, it’s none of my business. But hearing about grown men dressing up like “My Little Pony” characters, I’m also reminded a bit of the Internet film critic Harry Knowles flipping out at the end of Toy Story 3, upon seeing the now-grown protagonist give away his favorite childhood toys.

If you are lucky enough to find a way to keep your favorite childhood joy in your life as an adult, good for you. Some kids who grew up loving “Star Wars” ended up working in Hollywood, I’m sure almost every professional athlete loved their sport as a child, and so on. But as one of Harry’s commenters pointed out, “not everyone has the luxury of holding onto their childhood.” Some people had to grow up and put their favorite toys aside and become farmers and lawyers and accountants and doctors and parents.

Some argued that when television was an endless succession of “Friends” clones, our culture was celebrating an extended adolescence — the carefree dorm-room life extending well into your 20s. Seeing grown adults almost obsessively embrace something designed for children exacerbates this sense that our culture is having a hard time groping with the concept of maturity.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

Our Increasingly Prominent National Scapegoat: YOU

Last Thursday, David French kindly praised this newsletter in the Corner, in a post about modern parenting and the ‘effort shock’ some people experience once they leave the protected enclaves of high school and college and enter the real world. (He added that he wants to see the culture-based material up top, so we may experiment in that direction.)

One of the commenters on that post responded:

You know what would be awesome? If well-intentioned people stopped trying to fix the world. Seriously. All of you. Just go get a good job, love your kids, home-school them, and stop worrying about how terrible the schools are, what bad parents your neighbors are, how much obesity there is, what drugs people are taking and what light bulbs they are using.

Another commenter responded, “refreshing.” And indeed, that notion sounds really appealing at times. But a lot of powerful forces prevent most of us from doing that…

…I remember a comment from Mark Steyn a few NR cruises ago, and I’m going to paraphrase it now: “Americans are first citizens of a global superpower with no interest in conquest. We don’t want other territory, we don’t seek to subjugate other nations, we’re not trying to wipe out any culture we deem inferior. And yet through the rhetoric and of the environmental movement, you, driving your SUV and drinking your Big Gulp and eating your Big Mac, are accused of literally destroying the planet! Not even history’s most brutal dictators faced an accusation on that scale!”

Our political culture and our popular culture are the one-two punch contending that you, ordinary American, going to work or looking for work or looking for better work and just taking care of your families, have somehow become the root of the biggest problems facing the country. It’s your fault.

Don’t scoff; we see this in the way the state chooses to enforce its laws.  We are a nation of laws… lots and lots of them. But we don’t really enforce all of them. Sometimes, as with speeding, the law chooses to arrest and prosecute the worst offenders – if you go 59 in a 55 zone, they’ll usually let it pass, but if you’re going more than ten miles over the limit, you’re taking a gamble.

Right now, one of our biggest debates at the moment is whether entering the country illegally should carry any significant legal consequence. There is an enormous, loud, consistent push for a giant, official “eh, never-mind that entering the country illegally thing,” after decades of spotty enforcement, where everybody in local, state, and federal government knew where to find illegal immigrants: every morning, there were a bunch of guys outside the Home Depot willing to work hard for a little cash paid under the table.

Certain laws just aren’t that important, apparently. As of January 2012, 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes.

D.C. attorney general Irvin Nathan cited “prosecutorial discretion” in his decision to decline to bring criminal charges against Meet the Press host David Gregory for his display of a 30-round magazine on air as he discussed the role of high-capacity magazines in the Newtown shooting. “According to D.C. law, it is illegal to possess a large capacity magazine — defined as holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition — even if it is empty. The misdemeanor is punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and/or up to one year in in prison.” Of course, other people, not so famous and influential, have been prosecuted and convicted for breaking the same law.

Remember Hadiya Pendleton, the girl who sang at Obama’s inauguration and who was fatally shot in Chicago? Her alleged slayer had multiple arrests, and yet he kept being released back out onto the street.

The reputed gang member accused of gunning down 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton last month was on the street even though he had been arrested three times in connection with break-ins and trespassing while on probation for a weapons conviction in recent months, the Tribune has learned.

In two of those arrests, including one just 2 1/2 months ago, Cook County probation officials failed to notify prosecutors or the judge that Michael Ward had been arrested on the new misdemeanor charges and allegedly violated his probation.

… Police also arrested Ward numerous times as a juvenile on charges ranging from robbery to battery to marijuana possession, court records show. At least two of those arrests resulted in convictions, and Ward spent time in 2011 on juvenile probation.

Apparently keeping him off the streets just wasn’t enough of a priority for the government.

Meanwhile, Michael Arrington tells us about his recent experience with the Transportation Security Administration seizing his boat… after he pointed out an error in their paperwork:

The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars.

It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.

I pointed out the error and suggested that we simply change the currency from US $ to CAD $ so that is was correct. Or instead, amend the amount so that it was correct in U.S. dollars.

I thought this was important because I was signing it and swearing that the information, and specifically the price, was correct.

The DHS agent didn’t care about the error and told me to sign the form anyway. “It’s just paperwork, it doesn’t matter,” she said. I declined.

She called another agent and said simply “He won’t sign the form.” I asked to speak to that agent to give them a more complete picture of the situation. She wouldn’t allow that.

Then she seized the boat. As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it.

What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her.

The people of this country increasingly feel that the government and its laws are a rigged game, only enforced when convenient to those running the show. David Gregory, White House staffers, illegal immigrants  - for some reason, their lawbreaking isn’t worth the attention  or time of the government. Not even Michael Ward warranted more than a cursory punishment for crime after crime. But if we break any one of the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws issued by Washington or our state capitals, we’re likely to face expensive and consequential punishments.

Also in today’s Jolt is a long — some would say, meandering – series of thoughts on the nature of satire and conservative efforts to influence the culture at a time of cultural fragmentation:

At the heart of satire is the notion that you’re poking fun at someone or something that is held in high regard, but really shouldn’t be. The satirist is usually saying ‘the emperor has no clothes,’ but for that to work, the audience has to believe that A) the emperor indeed has no clothes and B) that they always knew that the emperor had no clothes.

I wonder if it’s getting harder to do satire because we just don’t hold many people or institutions in high regard anymore. Or perhaps the only people or institutions that are still held in high regard are ones that you really would have second thoughts about poking fun at – our men and women in uniform, charities, etc.

The problem is that the satirical worldview can drift towards nihilism – you’re constantly tearing down, you’re not building up. You can’t really have positive satire. You can’t build up and mock at the same time.

The big guns of modern satire today are Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and the Onion, and we can argue whether they’ve pulled their punches on Obama or whether they’ve grown constrained by political correctness. I’d defy any fair-minded student of modern comedy to dispute that a lazy, predictable, knee-jerk inclination to ridiculing anyone on the Right has permeated most of what Hollywood deems funny. I recall seeing some joke about Callista Gingrich’s haircut on one of the NBC sitcoms from this fall, and thinking… really? Really? That’s the freshest, best joke the writers can come up with at that moment? Newt Gingrich had been out of the race for six months, and I wonder how many viewers even remembered what Callista Gingrich’s hair looked like. And putting aside whatever you think of Newt, what did Callista Gingrich ever do to warrant making her a target of mockery? Really, the hair? That’s it?

Anyway, with offerings like this, it’s not surprising conservatives feel alienated from most pop culture. And some folks think that’s holding us back. Kurt Schlicter recently asked us to do something very difficult and painful: watch HBO’s series, “Girls.”

There’s plenty about Girls to annoy conservatives, yet this often creepy, usually skeevy, critically-acclaimed HBO series is also a test for conservatives.

Will we finally heed Andrew Breitbart’s warnings about the importance of taking pop culture seriously or just keep fiddling as the culture burns?

If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion…

You can watch nothing but ABC Family (assuming that’s still a thing – is it still a thing?) and you may never again see anything that will offend or annoy or bother you. But by not participating, you miss the larger discussions that pop cultural events outside your safety sphere spawn. You cede the culture to the liberals, and we’ve seen how that’s played out.

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance.

A lot of conservatives have responded to the defeats of 2012 with the slogan of “culture, culture, culture.”  But one of the challenges of this effort will be that, with 500 channels and oodles more options on the Internet, we don’t have much of a unified popular culture anymore. The splintering and fragmenting offerings are eroding the common frame of reference. In the coming years, the Right may end up building fantastic cultural offerings – and yet people may not come, because they have already found their niche cultural offerings.

Tying this back to my earlier point about satire, think of the times we’ve seen Jay Leno make a joke about some story that’s big on the political blogs or back in Washington, and the studio audience just titters nervously. They didn’t hear about the story, and so they don’t get the joke; Leno usually pivots back to “boy, Americans are getting so fat” jokes.

In the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, a look at Obama tipping his hand on what he really wants out of the immigration debate out in Nevada, Massachusetts Democrats get ready to replace John Kerry, and then this bit of thinking about the GOP’s image . . .

Adding New Cultural Indicators to the Republican Brand Image

Since Election Night, the cry on the Right has been, “culture, culture, culture.” And we’re probably going to get a bunch of good ideas and a bunch of bad ideas coming out of this new focus.

I’ve talked in the past about Obama as a ubiquitous pop-cultural phenomenon, and looking back to Obama’s rise in 2007-2008, perhaps we ought to look closer at his coverage in the non-political media than in the political media. Because we’ve had a lot of black politicians before, a lot of liberal politicians before, and a lot of charismatic politicians before, but clearly Obama managed to achieve a level of public adoration (deification?) unique in modern political history.

In the end, maybe the institutions that we consider the MSM were less relevant to Obama’s rise than the glowing coverage of him in places like Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Vogue, Fast Company, Men’s Health and so on. (We can put put Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and the New Yorker in the quasi-political magazine category.)

Think about Obama’s embrace of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. There are a lot of Americans, particularly young Americans, who have no real interest in, say, how federal stimulus money gets spent. But they’re sure as heck interested in Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Almost every politician before Obama wouldn’t have touched Jay-Z with a ten-foot pole. One look at the lyrics of “Girls, Girls, Girls” (you’ve been warned, it depicts the rapper assessing and categorizing his harem by ethnic stereotype) and they would run screaming from any stage with Jay-Z. But Obama assessed, correctly, that the “cool” factor of having an association with Jay-Z would overwhelm any complaints about Obama’s de facto association with or approval of the seedier side of the life depicted by the hip-hop star.

So along comes Obama, and he’s worlds apart even from what we had seen nominated by the Democrats in recent cycles, like Al Gore and John Kerry. He’s black, he’s urban, he’s young, he’s only recently wealthy and tells tales of financial woes as recent as 2000. He can sound like a preacher when he needs to (listening to Jeremiah Wright all those years) but also is the kind of politician your average outspoken atheist could warmly embrace. As a result, you have large swaths of a not-usually-terribly-engaged, not-usually-terribly-interested voting public gravitating to him: African-Americans, obviously, but also young voters, urban voters . . . they look at him and see a cultural figure who reflects themselves, not merely a political figure.

What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we’ve seen, that’s not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country – mostly the West Coast and Northeast – where those indicators either don’t help us or work against us.

So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head…

Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way they just weren’t a generation ago. (See Vic Matus’ great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can’t the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg’s ban on 32 ounce sodas, California’s idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete’s sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.

College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you’ll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18, 19 and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you’re really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.

I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which…

Wasteful college spending: Turn the highest-paid university presidents in America into the new villains of our economy, hiking tuition and letting standards slide while they take home ever-bigger paychecks and wildly generous payouts upon retirement. How soft are the Democrats on this issue? They ran the highest-paid university president in America (more than $3 million in a year) for Senate in Nebraska last year. At least the companies run by greedy CEOs are forced to compete in the marketplace; universities can keep going under bad management by sucking up government aid, forced tuition hikes, and alumni donations for a long while.

Isn’t it time to bring a salary cap to university administrators?