I Don't Quite Follow You

There's something to David Ignatius's column about the Republican outsiders becoming insiders. That's what happens when you win elections. So there's something to it, but not much. The old Democrat elite, as he says, depended on:

...the A students who had won all the merit badges. That sort of government-by-resume was a phenomenon of the old, patrician Democratic elite. They sailed out of Harvard and Yale and into government with the self-confidence born of good grades and a network of mentors. The Reagan Revolution was partly driven by indignation against that privileged caste. Now, nearly 25 years after Reagan took office, the patrician Democrats are in disarray and the pedigreed elite is Republican.

But much of his conclusion argues against the premise--these two sections of his column really should talk to each other more often. Ignatius:

This elite tone is evident in Bush's appointments to senior administration positions, too. It's a little-noticed fact that the No. 2 spots at State, Defense and Treasury have gone to a triumvirate of like-minded men with elite backgrounds: Robert Zoellick at State graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore and magna cum laude from Harvard Law; Gordon England at Defense studied electrical engineering at the non-Ivy University of Maryland, but his brains catapulted him to positions on the Defense Science Board and as executive vice president of General Dynamics; and Robert Kimmitt at Treasury was a West Point graduate who took a law degree at Georgetown and then served in a range of top government and corporate positions. I'm told that this troika has functioned unusually smoothly in meetings of National Security Council deputies this year, helping put a badly bruised NSC process back in good working order.

The dominant personality in the Bush Cabinet is the ultimate meritocrat, Condoleezza Rice, a black woman from Alabama who rose to the top of American life in an A student's bubble that kept her from the harsher realities of race....

If you say so. Meanwhile: Zoellick, Swarthmore, a little Ivy, okay. England, undergrad at Maryland. Kimitt, West Point--prestigious, yes, except at Ivies (not to mention some newspapers). And Rice, an undergrad prodigy at the University of Denver. Got her Masters at Notre Dame and her Ph. D. at.. oh, Denver again.

And now all these folks have risen to great heights. Since when did Republicans ever say they were against achievement?

Comments

[Amy Ridenour]

I thought it was a bizarre column as well -- almost as if Ignatius believes the GOP's electoral successes in recent years were based on their portrayal of others as "elites." In addition to the oddity of the premise, it is pretty much the opposite of the thesis the mainstream press has given about the GOP in the past, namely, that the GOP represented the elites and the Democrats, the masses.