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Inventive candidate

Mitt Romney has made it clear "that when it comes to nimble and inventive maneuvering, he'll be the candidate to beat" for the Republican presidential nomination, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes.

"Last Monday, the Romney campaign held its first major fund-raising event, a high-powered call-a-thon that pulled in $6.5 million. It demolished not only the modern record for political donations raised in a single day, but the paradigm of what a campaign fund-raiser can be," Mr. Jacoby said.

"Instead of inviting several hundred supporters to a $1,000-a-head dinner, Romney invited several hundred political and financial all-stars -- eminentoes like Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri and [EBay Chief Executive] Meg Whitman -- to spend a day working their Rolodexes and dialing for dollars. Unlike a typical boiler-room operation run out of a hole-in-the-wall, Romney's 'National Call Day' was staged in a giant convention center, with old and new media on hand to record all the action.

"All in all, it was a remarkable display of smarts and organization. It suggested, as Boston blogger Dean Barnett put it, 'that the Romney campaign, like his business career, will be marked by innovation. ... As he has done throughout his career, Mitt Romney will build a better mousetrap.' "

Leftist literature

The modern-day literature department at American universities is an insular world where "Jane Austen was a feminist subversive whose novels express her rage against the patriarchy," where "Stalin was valiantly struggling to turn the Soviet Union into a democracy" and where "Shakespeare wrote 'Macbeth' to domesticate women."

So says Elizabeth Kantor, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature," who addressed an audience of about 65 Friday afternoon at the monthly gathering of the Conservative Women's Network at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"Literary education has been politicized by the left" with race, gender and Freudian theories and the largely discredited Marxist labor theory of value, she said at the luncheon, co-hosted by the Herndon-based Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.