Domingo Soto: Because Freedom Isn't Dumb

THE TRIBES OF YALE
Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the House, used to say that all politics is local. He learned his lessons in taverns and church basements and political clubs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His local was a working-class neighborhood where relationships mattered, where promises were remembered, and where memories were long. It was a physical place that changed only slowly over time.
The current crop of political figures—the Howard Deans and Hillary Rodham Clintons, the George Bushes and Karl Roves, already squaring off for the presidential prizes in 2004 and 2008—has a very different sense of "local."
...To the extent that they are the product of a place, a time, and a people, the place would be college campuses and high-powered law schools.
(VILLAGE VOICE)