The Collected Works (Claremont edition)

Our friends at the Claremont Institute have updated their archives to fill in the institute’s edition of our collected works. As a result, two of our rare and hard-to-find items have been restored to print.
In 1997, you may recall, Bill Clinton appointed former Vice President Walter Mondale to chair a commission with Nancy Kassebaum on campaign finance reform. It was Clinton’s response to his own wrongdoing — creating a team to advise him how he might be kept from doing it again.
The time was ripe to dig deep into the history of the University of Minnesota Law School and unearth Walter Mondale’s anonymous 1956 law review note opposing the kind of campaign finance regulation that he has advocated throughout his political career. The column I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune was “Fritz ’56: Thoughts of the young Mondale on campaign finance reform.”
The institute has also archived our response to the personal attack on us this past August by Star Tribune editorial page deputy editor Jim Boyd. After the Star Tribune had published our initial column on John Kerry’s bogus journey to Cambodia earlier that month, Boyd wrote an abusive diatribe that the Star Tribune published in its widely read Sunday paper.
Boyd’s column was of the kind that a not particularly honest fellow might write if he was sure that no reply would be allowed. In fact, Boyd counted on the Star Tribune’s editorial policy of prohibiting the publication of columns that respond to columns that are themselves replies to a given column. What Boyd had done was to pull a bully’s trick.
Fortunately for us, Boyd’s colleagues and superiors at the Star Tribune realized that Boyd had done something wrong. In violation of the paper’s standing policy, the Star Tribune gave us the opportunity to respond to Boyd’s column in the subsequent Sunday paper.
Our column responding to Boyd’s attack has now been archived by the institute as “Apocalypse Kerry redux: Fisking Jim Boyd’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad column.” It’s not exactly timeless, but I feel better knowing it’s there.

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