By Fred Schwarz
Saturday, October 20, 2012
The most important question in this year’s presidential
election is not “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” or “What
about your gaffes?” or even “Joe Biden said what?” No, the key inquiry comes
from none other than John Cusack, the eternally boyish star of Say Anything,
Grosse Pointe Blank, and High Fidelity, who asked on the leftist site
Truthout.org: “Is Obama just another Ivy League ***hole?”
Most National Review readers would be inclined to say
yes, though they might not put it quite so vividly. But the salient part of
Cusack’s question lies in the words “just another.” Ever since Ronald Reagan, a
Eureka College graduate, rode off into the sunset, the ensuing run of
presidents has been distinctly mediocre — and all have been Ivy graduates
(college or law school). Regardless of who wins this November, the streak will
continue, since Mitt Romney (though he may not entirely fit the Ivy mold) has
law and business degrees from Harvard. Is Cusack, an NYU dropout, onto
something?
Before proceeding further, I should explain what the Ivy
League is. Officially, it’s a group of eight colleges in the Northeast (Brown,
Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale) that
play football against one another, rather badly. It was not formally organized
until the early 1950s, when the reaction from Harvard was probably, “Wait a
minute, we’re in with who?” (Actually it would more likely have been whom.)
Unofficially, of course, the Ivy League, even avant la
lettre, has for centuries been a symbol of everything Middle America hates:
rich, snobbish, exclusive, Eastern, and too smart for its own good. With the
exception of Cornell, a post–Civil War parvenu, the schools were all founded before
the Revolution, and ever since, they have been filling the ranks of America’s
Establishment: intellectuals, bankers, lawyers, businessmen — and now,
increasingly, presidents.
In that capacity, their record has been decidedly mixed.
To be sure, the Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin, both Harvard grads) managed
to stay highly popular while taking bold actions that changed the country and
the world, for good and for ill; but if you look at the last 50-odd years of
presidents, starting with JFK, the Ivy grads have been talkers and dreamers,
while the non-Ivy grads have been doers. LBJ (San Marcos State) had Vietnam, to
be sure, but also the space program, civil-rights legislation, and the Great
Society. Richard Nixon (Whittier) established relations with China and the
USSR, signed the first strong environmental legislation, ended the Vietnam War
and the draft, and even began affirmative action. Jimmy Carter (Annapolis) . .
. well, we’ll come back to him. And of course Reagan dealt a mortal blow to
Communism and at least a glancing one to dirigisme, while making the political
world safe for conservatism.
Now let’s look at the Ivy Leaguers. JFK (Harvard, after a
semester at Princeton) is best remembered — except for his untimely death — for
almost starting a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Gerald Ford
(Yale Law) was overwhelmed by events during his brief term in office; Bush 41
(Yale) let Reagan’s defeat of Communism play out, won an easy war, and then
raised taxes and couldn’t even get reelected; Clinton (Yale Law), while
coasting on the peace dividend, flopped with Hillarycare and lost the
Democrats’ 40-year hold on the House; Bush 43 (Yale, Harvard MBA) made
grandiose plans but had considerable trouble following through; and Obama
(Columbia, Harvard Law) narrowly passed a health-care law that everyone hates,
plus he’s given some nice speeches.
This pattern has been going on for a long time. George
Washington (no college) established the standard for every president since;
Jefferson (William and Mary) bought much of the continent from France, defeated
the Barbary pirates, and got the slave trade abolished; and Monroe (William and
Mary) had a doctrine named after him. In between these, John Adams (Harvard)
showed irresolution against the French, was pressured into signing the Alien
and Sedition Acts, and lost control of his own cabinet; and Madison (Princeton)
started a disastrous war with Britain that saw the nation’s capital set on
fire.
Then came John Quincy Adams, who set the pattern for most
modern Ivy League ***holes (IL*s) in the White House: earnest, smart, eager,
ambitious, self-righteous, and uncomfortable with practical politics. In his
first annual message to Congress, he proposed, to general mirth, that the
federal government should establish a national university and build an
astronomical observatory. The Washington political machine, much smaller back
then but no less vicious, chewed him up and spat him out, and in the 1828
election he was routed by alpha-alpha male Andrew Jackson, whose success
ushered in a series of hastily countrified hacks, time servers, generals, and
amateurs that ended only with Abraham Lincoln (a genuinely countrified amateur,
and a brilliant one).
For more than seven decades after JQA, the only Ivy
graduate to serve as president was Rutherford Hayes (Harvard Law). Then the
arrival of the 20th century brought Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard) and William
Howard Taft (Yale), followed by the Great Ivy Presidential Smackdown of 1912, a
three-way free-for-all that pitted those two against Princeton’s Woodrow
Wilson. The nation has yet to recover.
Now, you may have noticed that while the Ivy League has
eight members, the same three schools keep popping up. Indeed, within the
league, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have hogged the presidency the way they
used to hog the football championship. That’s why some think Barack Obama’s
most path-breaking accomplishment was becoming the first Ivy president to break
the Big Three’s monopoly.
Obama did go to Harvard Law School, though, and never
mind black vs. white, East vs. West, or uniter vs. divider, because here’s the
true, the fundamental conflict in Obama’s soul: Is he a Columbia ***hole or a
Harvard ***hole? The answer is important, because those are two very different
types of ***hole. Both are obsessed with showing you how smart they are, but
the Columbia ***hole does it by telling you everything he knows, while the
Harvard ***hole does it by acting bored with whatever you say. The Harvard
variety is at least laid back, and the Columbia variety can be interesting; but
put them together and you have a world-weary pest. That may not be an exact
description of Obama, but he’s certainly getting there.
All right, I know you’ve been waiting patiently for me to
get back to Jimmy Carter, so here goes. Carter graduated from high school in
1941 and went to Annapolis in 1943 amid stiff wartime competition. As the son
of Deep South farmers, he would not have been a likely Ivy candidate in any
case. But beginning in the 1960s, the Ivies have opened their doors to a much
wider class of students (women, for example) and made much greater efforts to
recruit nationwide. So if high-school hotshot Jimmy Carter had come along a
couple of decades later, he would probably have been an Ivy Leaguer too.
All of which raises the question of whether Ivy schools
mold their students to be a certain way, or whether the students were that way
to begin with. Richard Nixon won a scholarship to Harvard, but it was during
the Depression, and his family couldn’t afford the train fare. Would going to
Harvard have removed the lifelong chip on Nixon’s shoulder over his social
status, or just reinforced it? Probably the latter — though the Watergate tapes
might have had fewer expletive deleteds and more quotes from Herodotus.
In any case, as the Ivies become increasingly national
and offer generous financial aid, it’s growing more common for high achievers
to go Ivy instead of enrolling at local universities. So the recent trend of
Ivy presidential domination is likely to continue. What can we expect from the
IL*s of the future?
Two trends are at work here. On the one hand, there is
much greater ethnic diversity throughout the league, with Changs and Patels and
Rodriguezes now joining the Winthrops and Whitneys and (more recently) Kennedys
and Bernsteins. The typical student is no longer a banker’s son but the
daughter of a doctor and a professor. So the Ivy students of today are less snobbish,
perhaps, but more leftist, technocratic, self-absorbed, and hyperintellectual.
The flip side of this greater openness is that the competition to get in is
much stiffer, which means you have to spend your entire childhood and
adolescence jumping through hoops. Today’s Ivy students are even more likely
than earlier ones to be that annoying and ubiquitous overachiever type that you
hated in high school — except now they start overachieving in kindergarten.
This explains our recent history, because the depressing
truth is that the skill set required of a modern presidential candidate aligns
quite closely with that of an Ivy League ***hole. Today’s office seeker needs
the ability to figure out how each new test works, and provide the expected
answers; to be offhandedly glib on a vast range of topics; to know that he has
the best solution for everything, if only people would listen; to assume
effortless superiority; to skim through CliffsNotes-type briefings and act as
if he read the whole book; to move among the wealthy and influential as if he’s
always been one of them; and to have other people do things while acting as if
he did them himself. These are the skills that you need to get into an Ivy
League university and to succeed once
you get there. They’re also the skills you need to be elected president in
today’s relentless, media-saturated, politics-obsessed, 24/7 world.
Unfortunately, they’re not the skills you need to
patiently build support in Congress, or to arouse the public to action once
Election Day is over, which is why IL*s make better candidates than presidents.
And from a small-government perspective, this inability to enact grand schemes
may not be entirely a bad thing. Still, after the current long run of Ivy
League mediocrities ends, it would be a refreshing change if we could somehow
have another Reagan, or even a Truman, once in a while.
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