Scrapbook

...RNC committee members openly speculate Barbour's plan is to use these consultants to bring their supporters from the different camps behind his eventual "favorite" as the January 17 election nears...

...It's amazing how many one-person cars there are," tut-tuts one of the car poolers...

...While the individual commuters crawl bumper to bumper, the Carpool Heroes sail by...

...Neuter Thts Dog The Scrapbook thought the ne plus ultra of Christmas-book marketing madness had been achieved several years ago when the counters of our favorite bookseller were chockablock with handsome volumes that contained . . . absolutely nothing...

...Yours for $9.95 ($13.95 in Canada, where we like to think sales will be much brisker...

...People don't want to give up their independence...

...Marto, Mario, Wherefore . . . Even with all the eulogic rhapsodizing over the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio, whose heart gave out last month after the passage of Prop...

...This season, however, brings a title more inane even than an empty box...

...Almost corny...

...209 (or after the rearrangement of heavy furniture, depending on whose autopsy you believe), Wendy Lesser wrote such a mushy mash note in the December 15 New York Times Book Review, one isn't certain whether she should have published it or kicked it under his desk and giggled...

...We really did have unanswered questions searching for words, though to say so sounds almost corny...

...Huffington, of course, was widely denounced by the media as the pluperfect plutocratic Republican trying to buy an election...

...The $11 Million Loser Back in November, we noted on this page that Democrat Mark Warner not only outspent Republican John Warner in Virginia's U.S...

...So, thanks to Mrs...

...The program will begin in the next school year...

...RNC counsel and Barbour confidant David Norcross got off to an early start in the chairman's race with encouragement from Barbour partisans on the 165-member national committee...

...Each story (hold your nose) was "proofed (and woofed) by the author's two wiener dogs...

...Next Barbour quietly "dispatched" two of his law partners, Lanny Griffith and Chris Henick, to work on behalf of New Hampshire governor Steve Merrill at the Republican Governors' Association meeting in Michigan...

...Not for them the complications to which selfish solo commuters succumb—no coming in early, no working late...

...Not content with only two chances, Barbour opened a third front when John Grotta, another loyalist, and Bill Greener, who was Barbour's man at the San Diego convention this summer, began to run the campaign of Colorado national committeeman Jim Nicholson...

...They all work for the government, of course, and so can be counted on to keep, shall we say, regular hours...

...The Heroes were glimpsed riding a van along a recently opened high-occupancy-vehicle, or HOV, lane in suburban Maryland, outside Washington...

...You remember the Heroes—"good citizens," as the Post put it, who have "left their cars at home, saving money, saving the environment," and feeling pretty darned pleased with themselves...

...Oops, poor metaphor...

...The president of the Albany school board said that the public schools are "the only system that I...

...Andrews and McMeel has just unleashed Bedtime Stories for Dogs, a book, its jacket blurb advises, to "make dog owners sit up and beg for more...

...That ride, the final figures show, cost the Democratic Warner $11 million, not $8.3 million, meaning that Warner spent $3.30 per Virginia voter, a new record for futility and a whopping 62 percent more than the $2.03 per voter Huffington spent...

...Senate race, but that in the process he spent more per voter than Michael Huffington had two years earlier in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in California...

...The Three Little Pugs," "Snow White and the Seven Chihuahuas," and other such tales "are written just the way dogs like things—they're short and simple, they have happy endings, they usually involve food, and they frequently refer to things that smell really awful...

...But it is with Lesser's already overstated assessment of Savio's eloquence that we quibble: "He was the only person I have ever seen . . . who gave political speech the weight and subtlety of literature...

...Excepting, of course, his own "literature," like this weighty, subtle passage from an essay entitled "Why it Happened in Berkeley": "The Berkeley students now demand what hopefully the rest of an oppressed white middle class will some day demand: freedom for all Americans, not just for Negroes...

...Thanks go to the Post for bringing us this blast from the past: the HOV honchos, the Carpool Heroes, stuffed in a van and proud of it, quirkless to the last...

...And a teachers-union mouthpiece (who refers to ABC as "A Big Con") declared, "These people [are] lobbying to take money away from their public schools...

...But by the time of the Northeast meeting in Philadelphia on December 18, more than a few committee members were muttering about this "consultant" strategy, tired of the influence of what they see as a Washington-based crowd that underperformed in the '96 elections...

...But the outgoing chairman of the Republican National Committee is quietly using the same formidable political skills that got him the job to influence who gets it next...

...The Scrooges of Albany Further proof of educrat hostility to school choice comes from Albany, New York, where "A Better Choice" (ABC) is offering to rescue 650 kids—an entire student body—from the worst school in the city...

...That's one of the quirks of being an American, I suppose...

...Half of the student body is currently unable to meet the state's minimum reading requirements...

...Giffen Elementary is a miserable failure, and ABC, with more than a million dollars offered by Virginia Gilder, a New York City investor and philanthropist, is providing its hostages a way out: scholarships for everybody, good for 50 percent of private-school tuition up to $1,000 annually, for three to six years, depending on the age of the student...

...Which is not to diminish Savio's legacy of casting the die for the modern academy (free expression over education), which unleashed thousands of liberal-arts professors to explore then-uncharted disciplines such as gay cinema...

...In particular, conservatives on the committee are rallying behind Pauken to a greater degree than many expected, and some observers now put him in the first tier of candidates along with Haley's trifecta...

...would encourage students to get into...

...Lesser calls Savio "a poet," "a sainted Dostoyevskyan fool," "a martyr," "the last surviving member of a rare and beautiful species," even "a dead end in our evolutionary development...

...This may well allow "outsiders" Tom Pauken, Texas chairman, Bob Bennett, Ohio chairman, and Chuck Yob, Michigan national committeeman, to pick up more votes than anticipated...

...ABC, said one functionary, will be "cherry-picking some of our best students...

...Warner basically got a free ride...

...Gilder, and with no expenditure of public funds, 650 kids will have a chance for a good edu-cation—and the education establishment hates it...

...Norcross's campaign is being managed by Bill Harris, who ran Barbour's campaign in 1993...

...Virtue on Wheels In an amazing feat of psycho-archaeology, the Washington Post Style section last week unearthed several perfectly preserved specimens of a creature not seen since the late 1970s: the Carpool Hero...

...Not so the local education establishment...

...Giffen parents are responding, naturally, with glee and gratitude...

...Or this passage from the same essay: "Many of us came to college with what we later acknowledged were rather romantic expectations, perhaps mostly unexpressed at first, about what a delight and adventure learning would be...

...The idea was to put your valuables inside the box-disguised-as-a-tome and so thwart burglars...