'Pro-Youth' Kristol on Douthat: 'He'll Do a Great Job'

If Bill Kristol is miffed at being replaced by a 29-year-old, you won't hear him say so.

At a luncheon held to celebrate the recent redesign of Commentary under new editor John Podhoretz, I asked Kristol for his thoughts on Ross Douthat, the conservative wunderkind who recently became the newest member of the Times's op-ed stable.

"I'm a big fan of Ross," he said. "I think he'll do a great job."

Fair enough. But seriously, though, no reservations about turning over your Monday column space to someone who spent the Reagan revolution in diapers?

"No, no. I'm pro-youth," Kristol said. He added that he doesn't see Douthat as a successor, necessarily, in the sense of carrying a conservative banner through hostile territory. "He should represent himself," he said. "I wasn't representing a point of view; I was expressing my views and making my arguments, and he should be doing the same thing."

Kristol declined to comment on why his contract with the Times wasn't renewed for another year. "I'll leave that between them and me."

But during the panel discussion with Podhoretz and The National Review's Jonah Golberg, Kristol volunteered an anecdote suggesting a reason the Times may have been looking for an upgrade. He recalled a column of his that surged to the top of the paper's online "Most Commented" list with 963 comments. Of those, he said, only eight were favorable.