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.
