Your humble Goliard has been moderately enthusiastic about John McCain this Presidential campaign season, despite strenuous disagreements with the Senator on several issues. Yet the results of the Florida primary were unsettling and disappointing all the same.

It is, after all, still less than a month since the Iowa caucuses, which marked the end of the phony war and the start of the real race. There has been enough politicking and enough results to narrow the field, enough to make Republicans comfortable with seriously thinking about nominating one of these men…but not nearly enough to make a final choice. So the prospect of Mr. Romney being doomed after another second-place finish, and that locking us into a McCain nomination—well, it’s bound to induce panic, even outside the core of dedicated McCain-haters.

It is now clear that the race was only ever about two men. Why? Consider the others.

• Mr. Huckabee’s ceiling was too low as an evangelical identity candidate, an uber-Bush compassionate conservative on domestic policy, and a foreign-policy naïf. Despite his impressive rise from nowhere, on next to no money, there was no way he could ever put together a majority—or even a solid top-two finish—outside a handful of tailor-made states, and without a crowded-enough race to split the opposition.


• Giuliani either never was a suitable national candidate, or catastrophically miscalculated with his Florida/big-state strategy. (Or both.)


• Mr. Thompson’s fizzling out was inevitable once he decided to stay off the customary presidential-candidate hamster wheel, and run like Calvin Coolidge instead. (Alas.)


• Rep. Paul was always a non-starter. Too strident, too wrong on foreign policy, too many ways in which he scared the horses. (Sorry, Paulist friends.)

Which leaves McCain vs. Romney. A straight-up contest between these two, including a full test-drive shakedown of each, is still badly needed. Can Super-Duper-Schmooper Tuesday still provide anything like that, after McCain’s winner-take-all victory in Florida?

One can only hope. It’s too soon to commit. Too soon for it to be over. And way too soon to have to start enduring what will be the longest pre-convention phony war between presumptive nominees, ever.

As Americans, proud citizens of a country that made a critical and purposeful break with aristocratic traditions, a country that proudly addresses its head of state simply as “Mr.”, we should chafe at the use of any title by any of our fellow citizens. “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States,” our Constitution states (Art. 1 § 9); and your humble Goliard has never heard any serious argument that, two centuries on, we should start making exceptions.

Then how did we get ourselves into the habit of conferring lifetime titles on our politicians?

Of all people to turn into an American nobility, surely Senators as a class are among the worst we could choose. And yet we bow and tug our forelocks and call an utterly undistinguished retired one-termer (*cough*JohnEdwards*cough*) “Senator” for the rest of his days. As if it were a title of nobility…or an honor so great, and so dearly and valiantly earned, that its omission in any setting or context would be a sin against civic piety.

At least with most Senators, the practice doesn’t strike the ear quite as oddly as it might, since they spend practically their entire adult lives in the Senate anyhow. Who can remember a time when Robert Byrd wasn’t a Senator? or if Strom Thurmond ever actually retired?

It grows pointedly absurd, however, as one moves further down the political food chain. Even if the city was New York, should two terms as Mayor make Rudy Giuliani “Mayor Giuliani” for life? If he never becomes President, will Mitt Romney’s tombstone read “Governor Willard Mitt Romney”? And then there are the fringe candidates: the title “Ambassador” makes Alan Keyes even more ridiculous as a Presidential candidate, if that’s possible.

I say enough of this. I hope that the readers of Blog Goliard will join me in calling upon all those who write and publish and broadcast political news and comment to amend their style sheets in a democratic, American (even Constitutional) direction, and henceforth refer to the non-office-holding candidates for President as simply “Mr. Romney”, “Mr. Giuliani”, “Mr. Huckabee”, and “Mr. Edwards”. (”Mr. Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts” shall of course remain proper and fitting on second reference.)

Once we’ve got that straightened out, we can work on the others—current Congress-critters all, and thus even more urgently in need of deflation, some way, somehow. Eternal vigilance and all that, you know.

In the course of a discussion of H-1B visas, John Derbyshire is concerned about the career choices of young people if they are indeed being displaced or discouraged by imported workers:

Smart youngsters will drift away into junk disciplines — or worse yet, into Law School, adding to our already way-overstock of verbal-ability parasites, and piling yet more nuisance lawsuits on the ever-shrinking productive part of our economy.

If only it were so! In reality, today’s law school graduates have far dimmer job prospects than the info-tech folks he is (still rightly) concerned about.

There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve got way too many law graduates already—there’s a limit to how many parasites can feed on any host—yet both applications and available places continue to increase. Second, even those who do find well-paying legal jobs after graduation are often quickly miserable and seeking a way out.

Why the latter? The ratcheting up of work hours and expectations in recent decades has been at its fiercest in law firms…and to what end exactly? For those of us under 40, we’re not sure. The problem of the dead hand of the Boomers is as strong in the law as anywhere: the higher echelons are jammed full of them, and they are remorselessly reluctant to get out of the way, or to cut us anywhere near the same deal they got when they do make way. (Academia—your humble Goliard’s second line of qualifications, in addition to law—is even worse in this regard.)

As an academic advisor at a large state university, I try to educate and/or disillusion my young charges, who think their only career choices in this world are lawyer, cop, or doctor, and that two of these three are a guaranteed ticket to the upper classes. (At best only the latter is…and you might be surprised there too.)

Their naïveté I understand—they’re young and know little of the world beyond the fantasies they’ve had planted in their heads in school, and almost every prime-time television drama they’ve ever seen has been either a cop show, a lawyer show, or a doctor show. What continues to amaze me is that their parents overwhelmingly share this perspective. Don’t they know how the work world works themselves? Don’t they have any friends with kids who went off to law school and came back home with a J.D., $100,000 in debt, and a short-term gig doing document review for $20 an hour?

(Think that’s an outlandish scenario? See this entry on the WSJ Law Blog, and the Journal article it links to. The blog’s comments section is worth a browse too.)

Now I know that there are people in my age cohort who have nonetheless done very well for themselves, and that I could be one of them if I had more of a knack for making money and rising in this world. Or if at least one of the many things I am very good at had a tendency to pay well. Also, my life is sweet and full in any number of non-financial ways. So I don’t seek pity for myself, or to seem more whiny than is called for on behalf of my age cohort.

On the other hand, I know that I am far from the only thirty-something who—whatever my numerous flaws—is bright, highly (over?) educated, works hard, plays well with others, is honest and upstanding…and feels stuck. (And, in my case, lucky to be making nearly $30,000 a year with good benefits—and that after a mere six years in the job and ten years of higher education!)

How much of this has to do with immigration, how much with the changes and disruptions in family life, how much with education, how much with the broader crisis in young men, how much with Gen-Xers simply sucking as an age cohort…I dunno. What I do know is that precious few of these concerns seem to be reflected in any of the political campaigns so far this year.

Which may, actually, be one of my generation’s few bits of luck: being mostly overlooked by the folks in Washington. Life is challenging enough without the President and Ted Kennedy trying to help us.