Hi, my name is Matt Bandyk. I’m a senior and political science major at Davidson College in North Meck. While I hail from Florida, I’ll be doing some writing about Meck transportation and land use policy for the JLF.

Last night, Davidson College hosted William Kristol from The Weekly Standard and the Project for the New American Century as its 2006 Wearn lecturer on the topic of “US Foreign Policy After 9/11.”

When Kristol began his lecture with a biographical note describing himself as the “token conservative” at the Kennedy School of Government when he briefly taught political philosophy there, he could have been describing his position as a lecturer at Davidson. Following an academic year featuring lectures from Paul Krugman, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and former Sandanista Fernando Cardenal, Kristol is the only right-of-center speaker of note to come to Davidson in quite a while.

The audience, of which by my guess 80% were not students, had many conservatives who may have been hoping for a strident defense of the Bush doctrine and biting response to liberal criticisms, but instead got a soft-spoken and sometimes self-deprecating Kristol.

Instead of engaging the heated debate over the US response to 9/11, Kristol’s speech was mostly descriptive, seeking to place the war on terror in a historical context and focusing on the rather uncontroversial, but substantial, point that the United States can never return to the pre-9/11 view of national security.

One might have expected a more heated question-and-answer session. After all, this is chance for progressives of Mecklenburg County to grill the man often described by anti-war publications as the head of the neocon cabal that created the “blueprint” for the Iraq war.

But anyone hoping for the drama of another pie attack was disappointed. Many of us held our breath as one feisty elderly lady prefaced her question with the observation that she was an “ardent Democrat” in contrast to most of the room, but she followed it up with a rather mundane question about China and India holding US bonds.

Kristol, however, did offer some interesting speculation about upcoming domestic elections. With Republican support of the Bush doctrine in question and a good chance that the Republican candidate will not hail from the Bush camp, the 2008 presidential election may be a uniquely unpredictable one. Also, Kristol pointed out the possibility that another Supreme Court vacancy could open up later this year, with Stevens at age 85 and rumors of Ginsburg’s fading health. Such a development would make for an unprecedented Senate race this fall where the primary issue would be how the candidates would vote on a SC nominee.