The New Roman Century

[elfs]

When President Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, he was rejected by the Senate. One of the more damning indictments was a statement from the American Bar Association that Carswell's legal opinions were, at best, mediocre.

Senator Roman L. Hruska (immortalized in the song "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun") rose to Carswell's defense, saying, "Even if he was mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?"

I was reminded of Hruska today as I read in the New York Times the following:

Whatever the roots of Mr. Bush's overriding devotion to loyalty, it partly stems from his disdain for the concerns of old-style meritocrats, the kind of people who wince when the president places his confidence in someone like Mr. Kerik. Mr. Bush has never been comfortable in America's so-called meritocracy. Undistinguished in college, business school and in the private sector, he spent nearly 30 years sitting in seminar rooms and corporate suites while experts and high achievers held forth.

Now it appears that he's having his revenge - speaking loudly in his wave of second-term cabinet nominations for a kind of anti-meritocracy: the idea that anyone, properly encouraged and supported, can do a thoroughly adequate job, even better than adequate, in almost any endeavor.

Read it all.

Comments

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Work like that is always strange to read. Suskind should know better, but to read this, you'd find that Bush believes 'that anyone, properly encouraged and supported, can do a thoroughly adequate job, even better than adequate, in almost any endeavor', but not a single reference to if this actually seems to happen. No mention of the Bush administrations handling of trade and deficit issues under O'Neil and Snow at Treasury. Not a word about the results of our foreign policy as run by Rumsfeld and Powell. Bush's belief in the power of his gut feelings about people remains unchallenged by reference to the results he gets.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't think the point of the article was to critique the technique, merely to illustrate it. The blogosphere has done a good job of critiquing it. And, to some extent, I believe that the thesis, as Suskind puts it, is true: there is only one indicator for success from art school students, music school students, and others: how much they studied. Those who studied the most had the best careers afterwards.

The problem is that I don't believe that Bush is creating an environment where anyone can do a "thoroughly adequate" job.

There's a tongue-in-cheek, oooh-I-want-to-say-it feel to the article that, well, will get said soon enough.