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More freshmen today say they frequently discuss politics than at any time since Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn't run for re-election. Just since 2000, that slice of young people -- 35.6 percent -- has more than doubled, and it even exceeds by a couple of points the previous high-water mark, when Richard Nixon was elected president. When you add in the number of today's freshmen who say they occasionally discuss politics, you're talking about nearly 86 percent of them, another record.

Today, the proportion of freshmen calling themselves liberal has hit 31 percent, the highest it's been in 35 years. At the same time, the number of students calling their political views middle-of-the-road has hit an all-time low, just over 43 percent, territory it hasn't been in since 1970. Only one out of five students today describes him or herself as conservative, an erosion of more than two points since the year before.

One difference between today's freshmen and the ones buying the Beatles' new "Sgt. Pepper" album -- the difference that makes sense -- is a drop in the number saying that it's very important or essential to find a meaningful philosophy of life. It was 86 percent in 1967. By 2004, that had fallen to a record low of less than 40 percent. Though it stands now at 51.4 percent, that's still a huge drop since 1967. At the same time, the percent saying that being well-off financially is essential or very important has risen from 43.5 percent in 1967 -- half the number looking for a philosophy of life -- to nearly 77 percent today.

Who can blame them? The years between the 1960-61 recession and the 1973 oil crisis saw economic growth, which made it an opportune time to worry more about the meaning of life than about financial security. But with the pall now cast over the economy, it's a wonder that only three out of four freshmen are worried about making ends meet.

To me, the real conundrum in the attitudes of today's freshmen has to do with news. In the late 1960s, keeping up with politics was an essential or very important goal to 60.3 percent of freshmen. By 2000, the number had fallen to less than half of that, a record low. It rose after Sept. 11, but today the figure is still south of 40 percent. How can it be that almost nine out of 10 freshman say they talk about politics, but six out of 10 don't think it's important to keep up with politics?

Gigot: So they were so looking for the technical infractions that they missed the bigger picture. All right, thanks, James.

Still ahead, Obama's choice for education secretary. Arne Duncan, is being touted as a reformer, but will he take on the teachers unions? Our panel examines his Chicago record when we come back.

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Obama: When it comes to school reform, Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn't just a theory and a book. It's the cause of his life.

Gigot: That was President-elect Barack Obama nominating Chicago school chief Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education. But does he have what it takes to fight the nation's teachers unions?

Here with a look at Duncan's reform credentials, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley and senior editorial page writer Collin Levy.

Jason, he's described Duncan as a compromise choice. What does that mean in policy terms?

Riley: Well, it means that he's not a product owned--wholly owned product of the teachers unions.

Gigot: Partially owned? Not wholly owned?

Riley: Perhaps. He supports reforms that many want, such as merit pay for teachers and charter schools and these sorts of things. So that's why he's described as someone who can please both sides of this debate.

Gigot: But merit pay is more pay for better teachers.

Riley: Yeah, pay for performance.

Gigot: But is he willing to take on the flip side of that, which is teacher tenure, which would allow you to get rid of bad teachers?

Riley: That's the big question. We don't know.

Gigot: Do we know?

Riley: We don't know. But we know that he's willing to close bad schools. He's done that. He has a history of doing that in Chicago, and that's a step in the right direction.

Gigot: All right, Collin, let's talk about his Chicago record. You've looked at it. Give us some of the pros and cons of what he's done there.

Levy: Yeah, I think the record in Chicago is certainly a mixed bag. I think the main thing that people point to is that graduation rates during his tenure improved. And that is something good in Chicago. But the flip side of it was that high school test scores didn't really go up. And in particular, Chicago's ranking among other major urban school districts also didn't improve during the tenure, so it's about status quo.

Gigot: But the graduation rates improved how much--nominally, or in a significant way?

Levy: Nominally. They're about 55% now. They were about 47%, I think, when he took over. So--

Gigot: That's not bad. That's pretty good improvement.

Levy: Yeah, that is good improvement.

Gigot: And how extensive were his--he's a big supporter of charter schools. How extensively did he spread them in Chicago? Are there a lot more now than there used to be?

Levy: There are a lot more now. And one of the things that he did that was very good was that Chicago has a cap on the number of charter schools that it can actually create. And what he did was he worked within that cap and said, OK, we're allowed to have 15 charter schools technically, so let's let each of those charters operate four or five campuses. So that was a way of expanding charters without actually breaking the rules.

Gigot: I see, so he wouldn't try to bust the cap politically, which is what Joel Klein--

Levy: Exactly.

Gigot: Joel Klein, for example, the New York City public school superintendent, really fought and succeeded breaking that cap, which in this state was 100.

I guess my question, Dan, is, if Chicago's public schools are so great, why didn't Barack Obama and Michelle Obama send their own children there?

Henninger: Because they're not great enough. And that's why they're not doing it in Washington, D.C., as well.

I think I have to introduce a note of cynicism into this conversation. Yeah, maybe he was a fairly effective commissioner in Chicago. What does that have to do with being secretary of education, which is mainly about money? The head of the Illinois state union, Ken Swanson, teachers union, put out a statement this week saying he was supporting Arne Duncan, and I have it right here. He said--why? He says, because Duncan said that funding is "the civil rights issue of our time." And he quotes Duncan at a big rally in Springfield, the capital of Illinois, saying "Fund our schools, fund our schools!"

Gigot: But money--

Henninger: This is about money! And Barack Obama has promised to spend a lot of money through the Department of Education.

Riley: He's not that much of a reformer in the sense that he still believes that the answer to our education problems is more money. And Dan's right. Most education reform in this country is not done at the federal level, which is only responsible for about 8% of school spending in the country. It's done at the state and the local level. And it's nice to have someone in Washington who will rhetorically back up the reformers doing the grunt work at the state and local level, and maybe Duncan will do that. He'll give some support to people for alternative certification and for school vouchers, perhaps, for charter schools and merit pay and so forth. But the hard work is going to be done at the state and local level.

Gigot: All right, Jason Riley, thanks very much.

We have to take one more break. When we come back, our "Hits and Misses" of the week.

Over at slate.com, conservatives were more critical.

Tucker Carlson apparently wasn't impressed with Palin's - um - verbal skills. On Slate's forum, The Conservative Crackup, he wrote:

After the (Republican) party has settled on what it believes, it ought to go shopping for a leader. I recommend someone who speaks fluent English. This matters, it turns out, and not just for aesthetic reasons. In a democracy, eloquence is a basic condition of leadership. A president has a moral as well as a political obligation to explain his program. His constitutional powers are limited to just a few (war, the veto). His real authority comes from persuasion.

It helps if you can talk.

Kathleen Parker didn't succumb to Palin's "folksy charm":

Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, "He's not one of us." We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out "Redneck Woman" while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.

They saw in Palin a kindred spirit who was fearless in defending bedrock values of family, country, and, yes, belief in a higher authority. What they failed to acknowledge was that Obama and family-churchgoing, well-educated exemplars of community service-were the embodiment of those same values, a Rockwellian portrait rendered with the brushstrokes of our professed core beliefs that all men are created equal-and that through hard work, anyone can become anything in the United States of America.

The Republican base is fast becoming a racial and cultural minority. . . .. Her supporters were willingly blind to her weaknesses. . .

What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge-and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity was a bonding agent with the Republican base.

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party's own educated members.

Sarah Palin will never hold national office nor will any Republican at the presidential level for a long time to come. Why? Because America has uneducated jerks in it but is not a nation of uneducated jerks. The Republicans are done, hoisted on the petard of their own "southern strategy."

The Republican Party is only a step away from becoming the fringe of the fringe, identified more with cross-burning weirdoes wearing hoods, folks like the Alaska secessionist party, all those gun owners stocking up on assault weapons before the "Socialist/United Nations/Obama/Muslim" conspiracy comes to fruition, than with anything remotely like a serious national political force.

The Republican Party--and I speak as a former lifelong Republican who, up through the 2000 primary campaign supported John McCain and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations--is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags. These folks include outright crazies (such as Sarah Palin's Assemblies of God pals who are waiting for Spaceship Jesus to rescue them and/or rooting out "witches" from their midst), white racists and a few not-very-bright attention seekers, including Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity etc.

The Religious Right, the racists, the anti-gay hate-mongers are now not only marginalized but thoroughly out of step with even members of their own former constituency. For instance the Gordon College student newspaper (Gordon is an influential Evangelical College north of Boston) endorsed Obama this year. Many young evangelicals voted for the Democrats. James Dobson, Fox News, Limbaugh et al. were utterly powerless to do more than stir up hate. They are losing the next generation of their "base."

Meanwhile many former Republicans--like me--ran to Obama as fast as our legs could carry us and away from our willfully "we're not an elite" moronic former party. Republican commentators such as David Brooks and George Will mourned the loss of the Republican center. Others noted the Republicans have become anti-intellectual. "Anti-intellectual?" They wish! How about simply anti-literate?

During a parliamentary session last Thursday, the day after Senator Obama's election victory, Mr Gorski had called him a "black crypto-communist", and a "naive individual whose election must delight al-Qaeda".

Senator Obama "is a disaster, it is the end of the white man's civilisation", he said.

Mr Gorski, 38, is a member of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which was founded by the president and his twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister who is still at the helm of the movement.

Mr Gorski has been in the spotlight before.

In 2006 he was among a group of lawmakers who filed a resolution in parliament calling for Jesus Christ to be proclaimed king of this overwhelmingly Catholic republic.

The bill was not passed and the move was ridiculed by Poland's senior Catholic bishops, who said members of parliament should stick to politics.

More than Palin herself, I'm looking forward to the end of an era in which the aforementioned gomers -- these relatively small pockets of bigots and witch hunters -- have enjoyed undeserved attention and disproportionate sway over American politics and policy.

The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it's the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

It'd be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we'll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin's of the world that there's no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn't it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

Barry Goldwater was one of the icons of the Republican Party and, yes, would be unhappy with many of the recent failures from within. I speak about this all the time and how mad I am that Republicans have lost their way. However, we do not find our way back by sheepishly going over to the other side. My father worked to rebuild the party in 1964 by taking it back from the liberal Establishment. He would work to do the same thing today.

CC does not help the Republican Party nor the cause by minimizing John McCain. McCain may not be everything she wants in a President or hold her exact values, but she should work within the party to promote the ideals Barry Goldwater stood for. Endorsing one of the most liberal Senators in Congress is certainly not the way to help fix any problem she sees; instead it is a betrayal of everything my father advocated government should be. My father would never endorse a candidate or a party that wanted to grow government, raise taxes or in any way step on our freedoms.

Together the Goldwaters, including CC, should work together to redefine the Republican Party and make it the model Barry Goldwater Sr. stood for.

There always have been a glimmer of hope that someday, someone would "race through the gate" full steam in Goldwater style. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened, and the Republican brand has been tarnished in a shameless effort to gain votes and appeal to the lowest emotion, fear. Nothing about McCain, except for maybe a uniform, compares to the same ideology of what Goldwater stood for as a politician. The McCain/Palin plan is to appear diverse and inclusive, using women and minorities to push an agenda that makes us all financially vulnerable, fearful, and less safe.

When you see the candidate's in political ads, you can't help but be reminded of the 1964 presidential campaign of Johnson/Goldwater, the 'origin of spin', that twists the truth and obscures what really matters. Nothing about the Republican ticket offers the hope America needs to regain it's standing in the world, that's why we're going to support Barack Obama. I think that Obama has shown his ability and integrity.

After the last eight years, there's a lot of clean up do. Roll up your sleeves, Senators Obama and Biden, and we Goldwaters will roll ours up with you.

Let us go where we always go during our Times of National Crisis: to the wingnut comments of our nation’s proud conservative blogs. These people were obviously very angry last night about how this Negroid Monster Obama Staffer nearly murdered the brave 20-year-old white gal from Texas who was working the McCain phone banks in Pittsburgh and only wanted to drive around the scary “Little Italy” neighborhood looking for an ATM but instead drove right to the very heart of the Obama movement, which is a crackhouse full of 15-feet-tall Kenyan monsters who hunt this wretched ghetto looking for McCain bumper stickers, so they can lightly scratch their symbol, a backwards letter “B,” on the cheeks of their Twittering victims.

So, as you maybe heard already, bitchy made it all up. It was just a desperate true believer/campaign worker for McCain/Palin deciding that a race-baiting frenzy might just “turn the corner” for Walnuts. And, now, the wingnuts are a bit disappointed.

Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a "B" on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn't mention in the initial report.

Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn't show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera's range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

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