RECENTLY, I took part in a series of auditions for a .television talk show. I’m a conservative white male so I was put on a panel with a black male liberal and a white Jewish feminist. On the next panel, there was a blond feminist, a white male centrist, and a liberal Catholic priest. Another panel had a conservative thrown in with a gay male and a black woman cartoonist. Filing in for subsequent auditions, I saw a rabbi and a Hispanic man, and, if you had hung around for the whole series, no doubt you would have seen a pro-life Eskimo, a Perot-minded Asian American, and probably a lesbian with an interest in financial-services reform.