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David Brooks, in a column from last month, issued a warning about the FDR- and JFK-like list of the Best and the Brightest that Obama is choosing for his advisers. Obama has nearly finished the roll call for his top management team, and it’s worth reconsidering Brooks’ objections, since we’re likely to hear them repeated often from the Right.
Bobo turns the irony in David Halberstam’s description of JFK’s team as the best and the brightest into snark: Buoyed by a “vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haut-bourgeoisie,” Obama is making government a Grecian gift of a Trojan Horse of talented Ivy Leaguers. As if Bush’s team came from Podunk U, instead of, say, George Bush (Yale, Harvard "B" School), Dick Cheney (Yale, suspended, expelled), and Scooter Libby (Yale, Columbia Law, pardoned felon). Bobo (Chicago) airbrushes them into oblivion, as he does the political appointee-moles that BushCheney plan to leave burrowed in the civil service.
Brooks sets up his warning to the Rump Republicans by first describing Obama’s new advisers as “open-minded,” “admired professionals”, not “excessively” partisan or ideological, who have “practical creativity”. Everything Bush’s team is not. Except that for Brooks, such talent in Democratic hands turns its holders into “overeducated Achievatrons,” who will give us a “French-style government dominated by Enarchs”.
Brooks is bragging that he once read Le Monde. He assumes we all have, because he fails to say that “Enarch” is the acronym for France’s “old boys” and the exclusive professional schools they went to. It’s Brooks’ longwinded way of saying that Democratic old boys are “effete government snobs,” while Republican old boys are manly men. Right.
Bobo’s concern seems to be that the Democrats might engage in government planning. Not for the purpose of enriching themselves — that’s OK, Serious People do that when in public office and have done since the lays of ancient Rome — but to perform a public service. For Brooks, that would be reprehensible. Mind you, he’s writing for a president who thinks that’s a kind of tail on New World monkeys.
Bobo buries his major concern mid-column, where he describes the attribute of Obama’s team that he’s really afraid of: They are,
twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.
Bobo finally gets it right.
4 Comments
Obama’s team is mighty impressive. Gotta say! The Warren issue seems uncharacteristically bone-headed. What’s the deal?
Warren does seem to be a bit of an outlier. He’s an unnecessary poke in the eye to progressives, a remarkably untimely one, given Prop. 8 in CA, and I predict he’ll gain little from it.
Management picks, rather than “special events” picks, however, are mixed. Kirk Murphy comments on some of them upstairs. Vilsack and Salazar seem poor choices. Holder seems weak, a missed opportunity. I presume Obama is both exhibiting his “centrist” (really, right of center) preferences and paying back a laundry list of supporters, while constantly trolling for more votes both in Congress and with the public.
The Holder nomination, especially, suggests that Obama wants technical competence at the DOJ, but with little time spent on Team Bush’s serial lawbreaking. He’s not a new broom, just a competent Hoover too big to reach into the corners where filth collects, and too clumsy to reach underneath the carpet, which Obama has no intention of pulling up. That approach will ensure that Obama’s Republican successor will be back at the Bush lawbreaking, since the GOP has no “centrist” leaders at present, Congress remains soporific and the MSM is firmly in the corporations’ grasp. Many other picks are better, especially the normally tangential science-based ones.
Typo or not a typo? You be the judge.
Misspelt? No. A pun? Yes.
The Victorian Web describes the accepted appreciation of the impact of Macaulay’s romantic 19th century ballads about ancient Rome on the boys who learned to rule an Empire on the playing fields of Eton (a claim apocryphally made by Wellington after his win over Napoleon at Waterloo):
The key phrase is indoctrination: Macaulay and Kipling in 19th century England; David Brooks, Bill Kristol, the Kagans, Dick Cheney, for 21st century American neocons. The pun reflects the GOP’s official disdain for sexual license, contrasted by its unofficial adoration of it as proof of one’s aggression and will to dominate.
Schoolboy indoctrination in the mythology of Roman politicians and Greek gods was not much use in helping twenty or thirty year-olds police Indians or Kenyans or South Africans. Orwell, who went to Eton, didn’t find it much use in policing the downtrodden Burmese. It probably prepared him as well as listening to Limbaugh or Coulter, or reading the Kagans or David Brooks prepared young American officers in how to police Iraqis in present-day Baghdad.
T.E. Lawrence was an exception, but then his preparation for understanding the Middle East unusually came from actual field work and language skills, not from playing rugger in the Thames Valley. Hope I haven’t laid it on too thick.