Whom are we trying to impress?

Well, that's easy. Certainly not the tea partiers or the general American population.

So whom are we trying to impress? The answer seems to be left-wing intellectuals, academics, voters -- "the educated class," in David Brooks's term -- who decried George W. Bush's policies as reeking of fascism and dictatorship. We are making policies to please those who hang out in law school faculty lounges.

Their numbers turn out to be less formidable than the amount of coverage they have received in sympathetic media suggests. For that we have evidence from the commonwealth of Massachusetts, where Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown called for handing over KSM and the Christmas bomber to military tribunals. His Democratic opponent disagreed. She carried "the educated class," blacks and Hispanics. Brown carried just about everyone else and, even in Massachusetts, won.