Back during the transition and early days of the new administration, when Obama was announcing the names and qualifications of his first nominees, I complained that he seemed to restrict his choices to people who had graduated from the country’s most elite universities…Stanford, Berkeley, and the Ivies, mainly. It was rare to find someone who had attended a second or third-tier university. Why did I see that as a problem? Well, it’s complicated, but growing up in Princeton, New Jersey with the sons and daughters of Ivy League professors, I know a bit about the culture of elite academia and the kind of kids who are educated there. I have a ton of respect for Princeton as a learning institution and for the superachieving kids that make up the Student Body. But they are living in an alternative reality that is disconnected from the common experience of the vast majority of people in this country and the larger world. I don’t have a problem with hiring a lot of Ivy Leaguers to positions of governmental responsibility, but I do have a problem with overpopulating the government with people who have mostly enjoyed a very privileged upbringing.
I’m not an absolutist about this at all. Princeton and Columbia educated Michelle and Barack Obama, and Sonia Sotomayor. Not everyone who attends Stanford or Yale is born with a silver spoon in their mouth (or, like Chelsea and Barbara, is the daughter of a president). It’s just that I think someone who went to, say, Miami University of Ohio and graduated with honors should be taken seriously and be given a shot at working in high positions in government. You want people who are top-notch achievers, but not everyone need be an A-student from the age of thirteen on. So, I can almost relate to P.J. O’Rourke’s anti-Obama rant, A Plague of ‘A’ Students: Why it’s so irksome being governed by the Obami.
Except, O’Rourke’s complaint is not that stupid schlubs like himself aren’t allowed to work in Obama’s administration. His problem is that Obama is treating something seriously that O’Rourke desperately wants to treat unseriously: namely, the governance of the United States of America:
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the left…
…The secret to the Obama annoyance is snotty lecturing. His tone of voice sends us back to the worst place in college. We sit once more packed into the vast, dreary confines of a freshman survey course—“Rocks for Jocks,” “Nuts and Sluts,” “Darkness at Noon.” At the lectern is a twerp of a grad student—the prototypical A student—insecure, overbearing, full of himself and contempt for his students. All we want is an easy three credits to fulfill a curriculum requirement in science, social science, or fine arts. We’ve got a mimeographed copy of last year’s final with multiple choice answers already written on our wrists. The grad student could skip his classes, the way we intend to, but there the s.o.b. is, taking attendance.
Now, I understand how something as simple as tone of voice can grate like nails on a chalkboard. I felt that way about George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. It was hard for me to get past how they were saying things to listen to what they were saying. So, if Obama’s style is distracting and irksome to P.J. O’Rourke, I don’t begrudge him that. And I know he is a humorist (sometimes, but not here, a quite accomplished one) and one ought not take him too literally. But he really is arguing that people of average intelligence founded this country and that they can run it best.
The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn’t need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.
Nevermind that this is an atrocious reading of history, our country was, at least, populated by people who were not part of the dissolute European aristocracy. But it was founded by people like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, who were certainly some of the smartest and high-achieving people of their day. (I’d note here, for the record, that Franklin and Hamilton’s frivolous and humble upbringings might have prevented them from serious consideration in the Obama adminsitration).
What O’Rourke viscerally dislikes is Obama’s earnestness and raw intellect. Politics should be a mud-fight, and policy only exists to be cynically mocked. How dare this president treat the electorate as if they might learn something? It feels like we all might be surprised at any moment with a pop-quiz. Can you explain the CBO score of the health care bill in 500 words or less?
Whatever insecurities O’Rourke may have, he’s actually much smarter than the average person. But his discomfort with Obama is obviously shared by a lot of people who just don’t like his style and manner (and I’m not even talking about race). George W. Bush was a ‘C’ student at Yale. Yet, O’Rourke could relate to him. He wanted to blow off ‘Nuts and Sluts,’ too.
I know of P.J. O’Rourke, but I don’t know why he’s well known. Is he supposed to be the Conservative version of Matt Taibbi? Colbert(without the TV show)? George Carlin?
Modern Manners An Etiquette Book for Rude People was a brilliant book. He can be quite funny when he isn’t being needlessly cynical.
Contrary to popular belief, Obama is not a reincarnation of FDR. It took polio and personal experience with the poor of Appalachia to turn that wealthy patrician into a socialist, into a decent human being. To date, we have not heard the word, “poor,” uttered by Obama, unless I just missed it.
The first clue I received which said maybe, just maybe, Obama has it in him to become an FDR up the road. And no it was not the anti-single payer, anti-socialist medical care reform act.
He likes pie. Well, it’s a beginning at least.
Shergald, I like FDR and his legacy too (for the most part). But by no stretch was he a socialist.
*He saw the New Deal as saving capitalism from its own worst impulses.
*He backed dictators like Somoza in Nicaragua.
*He cut deals all the time with segregationist Democrats in Congress.
(E.g., Social Security originally did not cover domestic or agricultural workers. Why? Because most domestic and agricultural workers in the South were African-American. The Wagner Act still doesn’t cover agricultural workers. The FHA would not guarantee home loans for buyers in integrated neighborhoods.)
In other words, FDR was a politician living in the “world as it is”, trying to make it more like the “world as it should be” (to use terminology Obama would have learned and used during his brief community organizing career).
Roosevelt also had the advantage of far greater Democratic majorities than Obama. Having taken office 3 1/2 years into the Great Depression, he was dealing with a Republican Party that was more discredited than the version Obama is dealing with.
Obama, having been raised by his (teenaged at his birth) mother and his grandparents, having moved around as a child, having worked as an organizer on Chicago’s South Side, and having settled there in America’s largest African-American community, has his own credentials when it comes to the kind of personal experiences that can turn one into a “decent human being”.
By all means, go ahead and criticize Obama when you disagree with him, or think he’s failed. But don’t weaken your argument by romanticizing past political heroes.
I hear FDR went nuts for Eleanor’s pecan pie.
http://cheddarbay.com/0000Presidents/fdr.html
O’Rourke is supposed to be a wit, but the few times I heard him on the above radio show he didn’t strike me as all that funny. I remember he wrote a few funny things for the National Lampoon decades ago. Or was editor when someone else was funny.
So what’s his point? Some kind of faux populism of the right? Boo, I think he was trying to be funny.
I agree that he wasn’t funny in this piece. It was rambling, stupidly mean to Pelosi, Reid, and Barney Frank, and told from the point of view of academic slackers. A faux populism? Mostly.
I agree. He was one of a few that brought down the wit of the show whenever he appeared. He was always so desperate to score points against Clinton or somebody that he came off most of the time as just another Aynnie trying desperately to live up to the wit going on around him.
I got pretty much the same impression from the few articles of his I’ve read — much like the greatly overrated Wm Buckley. Haven’t read any of his books, so maybe he does better there.
C students or not, did not create the United States of America.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were definitely written by A students.
I wouldn’t expect him to have this position, given that he’s a libertarian and all. Shouldn’t he be supporting a country that has the best and brightest minds? I mean, you don’t need to obsess over Ivy League to find them, and there are obvious outliers in the schools themselves…but why would he adopt the “have a beer with me” line of thinking?
Because it pays. It paid, and well, for the last ten years and bids fair to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
No Republican does anything for any other reason.
If C students gave us the Bush Administration, then I will take all the A students. The only problem I see is that the C students probably would have held Bybee and Yoo accountable for their wrongs. As a smart C student with common sense is able see things that may be missed by the “A” student.
I just happen to be rereading Darkness at Noon. Is here something wrong with that?
I think this fool should write a book on baseball. He certainly hasn’t had anything else of importance to say in a very long time.
I have some affinity with O’Rourke’s libertarianism and this essay’s alleged distaste for the academic elite, but I think he’s lying here. He’s just following the GOP talking points about Obama the “elitist”, now that targeting his sleazy Chicago roots and broken home-background didn’t get any traction.
O’Rourke, like Wm Buckley before him, is no hater of the the Ivy Entitled. I don’t believe that has anything to do with why Obama annoys him. You want snotty lecturing by 3rd-rate intellects elevated by inherited entitlement? Listen to Bush. Any Bush.
I think O’Rourke’s real annoyance comes from the opposite of what he claims — that the US finally has a president who can hold his own with the rest of the world’s leaders, unlike the sorry embarrassments that the Right has inflicted on us for more than half a century.
O’Rourke is getting at something — the professorial tone Obama has lately adopted in speeches is off-putting to some people ( I myself don’t mind it, but I’m a professor). How a president relates on an emotional level to ‘the people’ is important, like it or not. I would go back to the tone and cadence of his earlier speeches, if I were him — less Princeton prof, more Sunday service. More stories about him ‘shooting hoops with the troops’, or ‘liking pie’ as someone said in the thread above, would also be helpful.
I disagree – Obama doesn’t talk down to people, and imo that’s good, shows he respects the electorate, the seriousness of the issues and respects the intellectual traditions of the founding fathers and others (Abraham Lincoln, for example). I’m curious when the usa’s anti-intellectualism set in; it certainly wasn’t part of our culture during the colonial period.
Is there a large enough “Oooh! Oooh! Condescend to me! That’s what I really like” bloc to swing an election?
Whatever insecurities O’Rourke may have, he’s actually much smarter than the average person. But his discomfort with Obama is obviously shared by a lot of people who just don’t like his style and manner (and I’m not even talking about race).
Sorry BooMan. I’ve been a well-educated Black woman from a family of well-educated Black folk going back 4 generations for me to believe that it’s not about race. The discomfort, from more than a few corners in White America, to a well-educated Black person…
I could tell you stories.
Sure, these types don’t like white “eggheads” “elites,” or other such smarty-pants types, but it takes on a whole other level of insanity when that person is Black.
He’s smarter, more attractive–better in every way–than they. AND he looks like he has fun every now and again. Deep down, these fools know this, but can’t admit it to themselves. Which is why you have folks who try to escape into deeper denial (e.g., Palin is “more qualified” than Obama when ANY objective standard would render the belief ludicrous), cartoon hero fantasy (that he’s some “other” and only a true American riding his/her noble steed and carrying an AK-47 can liberate the country) or 7th grade (secretly jealous of the A-student).
The more reasonable he is, the more it drives these wingnuts crazy, so I say, “Carry on, Mr. President!”
With a smile.
Good post. As a certified meritocrat (Yale, Econ), friends in the highest places, I can’t agree more. Of my acquaintances, most have more than the usual amount of common sense, but if you didn’t come up from the bottom as I did, there are things you will never understand, like what it’s like to know that your father could lose his job and you are out of house in a second, or the sheer fatigue and wear of the men coming home in the long line out of the shop at 5:00. Few if any kids from the middle class (or what it used to be) understand the guts of that life.
To quote Medvedev on Obama “He is a thinker. He thinks when he talks.”
I am sure that that turns the anti-intellectual person off. We know that from the Tea Party folks comments.
Or it may turn off people who are scared spitless because they can see how smart he is. The anti-intellectual talk is mostly to try to de-legitimize his intelligence and accomplishments and in the process his presidency.
It is the old trick of attack your opponent’s strong points.
I don’t think that he talks down to people. I think that he talks as though he thinks people have the intelligence to understand what he is saying. Too bad so many people don’t seem to have that intelligence.
I agree that he needs to put some passion back into his speaking… and he is doing that in his fund-raising speeches and town halls.
Many times P.J. is not a comedian, rather he is a clown.