From a disclosed location

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol spoke last night at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Bill spoke as the St. Olaf College Political Awareness Committee fall speaker.

I picked Bill up from the airport and drove him down to his lodging in Northfield at a fully disclosed location, as I sought to document in the photo I took with my iPhone (below). I don’t think I have ever used the camera app on the phone before. Getting the photo from the phone to the site and getting it to align vertically have been a challenge — I usually have to ask John Hinderaker or our publisher, Joe Malchow, for help on technical issues — and I don’t want to waste the effort.

Bill earned his Ph.D. in government at Harvard as a student of Harvey Mansfield. Leaving academia after teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he served as chief of staff to Bill Bennett when he was Secretary of Education during Reagan’s second term and then as chief of staff for Vice President Quayle during the Bush administration. He took a timeout to help kill Hillarycare in 1993-94 before moving on to found the Weekly Standard in the wake of the historic midterm congressional elections of 1994. Bill wears his learning lightly, but he brings deep knowledge and a long perspective to his analysis of current events.

Coincidentally, Bill served as the keynote speaker at the Buckley Program event at Yale this past weekend, discussed in the adjacent post. Yesterday we had a chance to discuss current events, including the OWS protests. We think they signify something important about the American left, though we are still working on exactly what that might be. While Obama is taking us back to the days of Jimmy Carter, OWS seems to represent a case of the left’s eternal return to adolescence and the 1960′s. (That’s me speaking, not Bill.) Next time around I’ll shoot for one of those four-minute videos that Steve Hayward has been working up for us.

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