Tom Campbell gave this tutorial in a recent campaign appearance in Oakland, California.   For the few political junkies actually paying attention at this early date, Campbell, a former US Congressman and Dean of the Cal Haas Business School, is running for Governor of California.  Tom Campbell is stunningly competent on matters of economic theory (PhD with Milton Friedman), and he's put this in to successful practice within government service at almost every level.  He also has legal knowledge of the highest caliber.  For my tastes, he might hit the books on reputation theory, behavioralism, and a few other newer topics, but his foundation on the basics of monetary policy and his rejection of the cynical fallacy and false hope of applied Keynesianism and academic marxism is irrefutable.

His sensible politics aside, Tom Campbell has a resume that could land him at the helm of any university in America.  This makes Tom Campbell a very valuable asset to the Republican Party, which at its apex held a small but devoted coterie of academic luminaries, a significant band of silent fellow travelers, and a solid majority of those that passed through institutions of higher learning. Today, with Joe the Plumber more articulate on economic matters than its 2008 Presidential standard bearer, the party's academic credentials need serious burnishing.  Outside the party, potential allies range from the sensible sophisticates (Marginal Revolution, Reason, Cato, Heritage, AEI, etc.) to the strident blunt instruments (Rush, Hannity, etc.), whose capacity to persuade those other than the foregone is limited.

Given the growth in government financing of higher education, and the unsurprising drift toward statist ideology and conformism, it is unlikely that the Republican Party will ever be the belle of the non-hard science academic ball.   Still, the party ignores academia at its perils, and it needs to do everything it can to elevate and embrace sensible academics to positions of prominence.  Ronald Reagan went to a modest college, but he had WF Buckley and Milton Friedman to help light his way.

The conundrum remains:  can Tom Campbell reach out to a broad enough audience with his ideas to make a difference?   Jack Kemp he is not.  I have these words of advice.  Plato and Aristotle had little good to say about the rhetorical slight of hand employed by the sophists, however, their teacher Socrates admitted the Sophists were better teachers than he on linguistic weapons.   Clinical truth and elucidiation is fine for monks, but charts and graphs didn't get Ross Perot very far, and a mastery of emotion and the dark arts of language is required to persuade the assembly.  He may not be a star football player or an action hero, but Tom Campbell might aspire to Harry Potter.