[Mb-civic] Meet the New Elite - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Meet the New Elite

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; Page A21

With the nomination of Princeton and Yale Law grad Samuel Alito to the 
Supreme Court, I'm beginning to sense a theme in the Bush 
administration's rocky second term: We are witnessing the rise of the 
Republican A students. The preppy frat boy is gradually assembling a 
government of GOP meritocrats.

Alito is as pedigreed a member of America's new aristocracy of brains as 
you could hope to find. After Princeton and Yale, he punched all the 
right tickets: circuit court clerk, assistant U.S. attorney, assistant 
to the solicitor general, Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice 
Department, U.S. attorney and then a spot as an appellate judge.

The president's new court nominee follows his supremely credentialed 
choice for chief justice. John G. Roberts was a grad of Harvard and 
Harvard Law, then made the grand tour of elite law jobs as a Supreme 
Court clerk, associate White House counsel and deputy solicitor general. 
What was striking during Roberts's confirmation process was that all of 
Washington's other A students, Republican and Democratic, seemed to know 
and like him.

You can argue that this is excellence by default, and that the 
president's first instincts were shown in the nomination of Harriet 
Miers. But Miers herself was no slouch in the resume department, with a 
trailblazing role as the first female president of the State Bar of 
Texas. In fact, the only job she arguably wasn't qualified for was the 
Supreme Court.

The confirmation fight over Alito is going to be ideological, but for 
the moment it's the sociology that interests me. Once upon a time, 
conservatives instinctively mistrusted the A students who had won all 
the merit badges. That sort of government-by-rsum 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.

You can see the rise of Bush's A students in other recent nominations: 
His choice for Fed chairman was Ben Bernanke, a brilliant Princeton 
economist whose selection pleased even the Bushophobic Paul Krugman, a 
fellow Princeton professor. In choosing Bernanke, Bush went for the 
smart guy with the fancy rsum in preference to more reliably 
conservative economists.

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. Joining Rice as a key decision maker is John 
Negroponte, a graduate of Yale and former ambassador to everywhere -- a 
man who at one point was even chairman of the French-American Foundation.

President Bush -- despite his own Andover and Yale pedigree -- still 
does a surprisingly good job of sounding like an outsider. (Am I crazy, 
or does he speak with more of a Texas accent today than when he took 
office?) But when you look at the people he has nominated for key posts, 
it's the GOP nomenklatura . This particular group is lopsidedly white 
and male and, like most collections of meritocrats, too little shaped by 
the hardscrabble America that politicians like to celebrate. But they 
will give Bush some bottom and balance in his second term.

The larger point is we are living in the post-Reagan era. The outsiders 
of old are insiders; the conservatives are credentialed and networked. 
It has fallen to George W. Bush, the combative underachiever, to create 
a second-term government of the best and brightest, GOP-style. The 
problem for the Republicans is that, now that they're the elite, who are 
they going to denounce for elitism?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101258.html?nav=hcmodule
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