Yet Another Politician's Thesis

I've been following now for some years the periodic stories about politicians' writings when they were in college or law school.  Hillary Clinton's Wellesley College thesis on Saul Alinsky got some attention a few years back.  We've heard about Barack Obama's "lost law review article" (a case note, actually, in the Harvard Law Review) and about the work he did on one of Laurence Tribe's articles.

Some time ago, I actually began to keep a running list of the early publications of the now famous.  There's all sort of great stuff there--like Michelle Robinson's senior thesis at Princeton.

Why do we care about this stuff?  Well, I suppose we think that student writing contains something of a key to the thinking of adults.  At least that's what I hope is the case, because I study academics' writings with the hope that they will illuminate something about the mind of the times.  What?  You missed my article on literary addresses at the antebellum University of Alabama?!  Well, that's understandable.  But I'm working on a companion piece using literary addresses at UNC--more to come on that in the spring.  One of my favorite books on antebellum southern history, Michael Carmichael's The Last Generation, relies heavily upon student writings at places like the University of Virginia to create a picture of the ideas of the last generation of Virginians to come to adulthood before the Civil War.  (Here's a link to my review of it for Reviews in American History.  The review is called "God and Man at the University of Virginia."  Don't you just love the title?)

So it should come as no surprise that the Washington Post is talking about the master's thesis of Robert F. McDonnell, who is running for Virginia's governor.  McDonnell submitted the thesis, "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of The Decade," in 1989 to Regent University (it was then called "CBN University"), where he was studying for a masters in public policy and a JD.  From the Post article:

The Washington Post learned of the thesis in a recent interview with McDonnell, who mentioned it in answering a question about his political roots. McDonnell brought up the paper in reference to a pair of Republican congressmen whom he interviewed as part of his research. McDonnell then offered: "I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

Of particular interest to me today as I sit here preparing for trusts and estates tomorrow, is this paragraph:

McDonnell's thesis also spends a good deal of time on the importance of tax policy to the health of families. He called for the repeal of the estate tax and for the adoption of a modified flat tax to replace the graduated income tax. Awarding deductions and distributions based on need "is socialist," McDonnell wrote.

The Post summarizes the thesis this way: it "wasn't so much a case against government as a blueprint to change what he saw as a liberal model into one that actively promoted conservative, faith-based principles through tax policy, the public schools, welfare reform and other avenues." The thesis is on-line at the Wa-Po's website.

I'm inclined to believe McDonnell's overall assessment of the thesis' importance (or lack of importance) and its relationship to his current ideas: "Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."