Few men are so disinterested as to prefer
to live in discomfort under a government
which they hold to be right, rather
than in comfort under one which they
hold to be wrong.
—C. V. Wedgwood President Barack Obama’s Christmas
shopping for cabinet officers in
December of last year prompted the
national news media to rejoice in
the glad tiding that his campaign
slogan, “Change you can believe in,”
was just and only that, a slogan. Instead
of showing himself partial to
“closet radicals” who might pose
some sort of deep downfield threat to
the status quo, Obama was choosing
wisely from the high-end, happy few,
dispensing with “the romantic and
failed notion” that individuals never
before seen on the White House
lawn could provide the “maturity”
needed “in a time of war and economic
crisis.” David Brooks assured
his readers in the New York Times
that the incoming apparat, its members
“twice as smart as the poor reporters
who have to cover them,”
embodied “the best of the Washington
insiders.” “Achievetrons . . . who
got double 800s on their SATs,” said
Brooks, taking pains to list the
schools from which they had received
diplomas (Columbia, Harvard,
Wellesley, Harvard Law, Stanford,
Yale Law, Princeton, etc.)
attesting to the worth of their wise
counsel. Karl Rove, former advance
man for President George W. Bush,
informed the Wall Street Journal that
Tim Geithner (Dartmouth, Johns
Hopkins) as secretary of the Treasury
and Larry Summers (M.I.T., Harvard)
as director of the National Economic
Council were “solid picks,”
both investments rated “reassuring”
and “market-oriented.” Max Boot,
contributor to Commentary and visiting
fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, advised the wandering
spirits in the blogosphere that “only
churlish partisans of both the left and
the right” could quarrel with the
naming of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley,
Yale Law) as secretary of state
and Robert Gates (Georgetown) as
secretary of defense, appointments
that “could just as easily have come
from a President McCain.”

The mood was not as festive in the
workshops of the romantic left, but
even the churls who thought the appointees
insufficiently progressive in
their views of the American future
took comfort in the remembrance of
their candidate saying somewhere in
a post-election speech, “Understand
where the vision for change comes
from. First and foremost, it comes
from me.” David Corn, the Washington
bureau chief for Mother Jones,
told the Washington Post that although
the hotheads among his acquaintance
were “disappointed, irritated
or fit to be tied,” they held fast
to the belief that Obama (Columbia,
Harvard Law) would set the agenda,
reprogram the operatives complicit
in the stupidity and cynicism of the
Bush and Clinton administrations;
pragmatism was the watchword, and
the dawning of a bright new day was
guaranteed by the installation of
what Brooks proclaimed a “valedictocracy,”
post-partisan and nonideological,
its shoes shined, its hair
combed, its ambition neatly
pressed. The recommendation deserves to
be ranked with the ones until recently
in vogue at the Palm Beach
Country Club among the members
acquainted with the achievetron
Bernie Madoff. For the past sixty
years the deputies assigned to engineer
the domestic and foreign policies
of governments newly arriving
in Washington have come outfitted
with similar qualifications—firstclass
schools, state-of-the-art networking,
apprenticeship in a legislative
body or a think tank—and for
sixty years they have managed to
weaken rather than strengthen the
American democracy, ending their
terms of office as objects of ridicule if
not under threat of criminal arrest.
The Harvard wunderkinds (a.k.a.
“the best and the brightest”) who followed
President John F. Kennedy
into the White House in 1961 hung
around the map tables long enough
to point the country in the direction
of the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger,
another Harvard prodigy, imparted
to American statecraft the
modus operandi of a Mafia cartel.

The Reagan Administration imported
its book of revelation from the
University of Chicago’s School of
Economics (“privatization” the
watchword, “unfettered free market”
the Christian name for Zeus) and by
so doing set in motion what lately
has come to be seen as a longrunning
Ponzi scheme. Take into
account the Ivy League’s contributions
to the Bush Administration—
Attorney General John Ashcroft
(Yale), Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld (Princeton), director of
Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
(Harvard)—and I can imagine a doctoral
thesis commissioned by the
Kennedy School of Government and
meant to determine which of the
country’s leading institutions of higher
learning over the past fifty years
has done the most damage to
the health and happiness
of the American people. It’s conceivable that the Obama
Administration will prove itself the
exception to the rule, but when the
president says that his vision for
change “comes from me” he leaves
open the question as to whether he
intends to generate it ex cathedra or
ex nihilo. Neither method offers
much chance of success if what is
wanted or required is a recasting of
the American democracy on a scale
comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal. Socioeconomic alterations
of a magnitude sufficient to be
recognized as such tend to be collective
enterprises, usually brought
about by powers of mind and forces
of circumstance outside, not inside,
the circle of A-list opinion—the barbarians
at the gates of fifthcentury
Rome, the sixteenth-century
Protestant Reformation personae non
gratae at the Vatican, the authors of
the American Constitution far removed
from the certain truths seated
on velvet cushions in eighteenthcentury
London. Ulysses S. Grant,
perhaps Lincoln’s most effective
general, was virtually unknown to
the War Office in Washington before
the bombardment of Fort
Sumter; during the Great Depression
of the 1930s, FDR composed a
“Brain Trust” of individuals (some
of them academics, others not,

none of them rounded up from the
quorum of usual suspects) as willing
as the president to “take a method
and try it; if it fails, admit it
frankly, and try another.”
The courses of undergraduate instruction
at our prestigious colleges
and universities no longer encourage
or reward the freedoms of mind
likely to disturb the country’s social
and political seating plan. During
the early years of the twentieth
century, before America fell afoul
of the dream of empire, the students
on the lawns of academe,
most of them inheritors of wealth
and social position, already were assured
of their getting ahead in the
world. They could afford to take
chances, to read or not to read the
next day’s letter from Virginia
Woolf or Julius Caesar, to mess up
the protocols of political correctness,
worship false gods, maybe go
to Paris to try their luck with absinthe,
their hand and eye at modern
art or ancient decadence. If
they strayed into the wilderness of
politics, they did so in the manner
of both Theodore and Franklin
Roosevelt, with the enthusiasm of
the amateur explorer.
The amateur spirit, which is also
the democratic spirit, didn’t survive
the rising of the American nationstate
from the ashes of Dresden and
Hiroshima. The Cold War with the
Russians brought with it the lesson
that even the most amiable and
well-intentioned of republics can’t
afford to leave home without a
“meritocracy” so lacking in a disrespectful
turn of mind as to be fit for
service not only at the White
House and the CIA but also with
General Motors and the New York
Times. The doctrines of egalitarianism
forbid the convenience of a ruling
elite present at birth. The product
must be fabricated, not in the
same volume as the light trucks
made in Detroit, or the cattle fattened
in the Omaha feed lots, but
as a priority deemed equally essential
to the homeland security. After
some trouble with the realignment
of the educational objective during
the excitements of the 1960s, the
universities accepted their mission
as way stations on the pilgrim road
to enlightened selfishness. As opposed
to the health and happiness
of the American people, what is of
interest is the wealth of the American
corporation and the power of
the American state, the syllabus
geared to the arts and sciences
of career management—how to
brighten the test scores, assemble
the résumé, clear the luggage
through the checkpoints of the law
and business schools. The high fees
charged by the brand-name institutions
include surer access to the
nomenklatura that writes the nation’s
laws, operates its government,
manages its money, and controls its
news media. The catalogue also offers
electives in the examined life,
but the consolations of philosophy
hold little value for a novitiate encouraged
to believe that its acceptance
into a company of the elect
dispenses with the unwelcome news
that there might be more things in
heaven and earth than those accounted
for in Forbes magazine’s annual
list of America’s top 400 fortunes.

Achievetrons learn to work
the system, not to change it, to
punch up the PowerPoints for Citigroup
and Disney and figure the exchange
rate between an awkward
truth and a user-friendly lie. Where
is the percentage in overthrowing
the idols of the marketplace or the
tribe? If you’re not in, you’re out,
and when was out the
better place to be? Which isn’t to say that Hillary
Clinton hasn’t read the letters of
Abraham Lincoln, or that Tim
Geithner doesn’t know how to analyze
(in three languages and five currencies)
a Four Seasons hotel bill;
that Robert Gates isn’t familiar with
the theory of Admiral Alfred Thayer
Mahan, or that Larry Summers
might make the mistake of turning
to face Jerusalem instead of Mecca
when begging money from a Saudi
prince. What it does suggest is that
President Obama’s household staff,
in accordance with the protocols
observed by “the best of the Washington
insiders,” can be counted upon
to place their own self-interest
first and foremost and to avoid fooling
around with initiatives that
threaten to leave a stain on the rug.

Clinton as senator from New York
in 2002 voted for the invasion of
Iraq not because she knew or cared
why America was embarking on a
mindless war but because what was
wanted was a cheerful waving of the
pom-poms and the flag; Geithner as
the president of the New York Federal
Reserve Bank in the winter of
2007 neglected to address the impending
trouble in the credit markets
because to have done so would
have upset the Wall Street
achievetrons folding and refolding
sets of imaginary numbers into paper
hats and airplanes; Gates as deputy
director of the CIA in the 1980s
painted his portrait of the evil Soviet
empire to match the one walking
around in Ronald Reagan’s head,
unwilling to believe that the Red
Menace was mortal until the collapse
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 exposed
his intelligence estimates as
works of science fiction; Summers in
1998 as President Bill Clinton’s
deputy secretary of the Treasury
served as one of the principal sponsors
of our current financial debacle,
facilitating repeal of the Glass-
Steagall Act and joining with Secretary
Robert Rubin (Harvard, Yale
Law) and Federal Reserve Bank
Chairman Alan Greenspan (New
York University) to force the resignation
of Brooksley Born, chair of
the Commodities Futures Trading
Commission, who urged regulation
of the markets in new derivatives.
The motion to block the large-scale
accumulation of toxic debt ran
counter to the belief, then all the
rage among the bankers at JPMorgan
Chase and Goldman Sachs as
among the members of the Palm
Beach Country Club, that money,
deftly cultivated by its
cronies, grows on trees. Obama, in his custom-tailored
personae both as a United States senator
and as a presidential candidate,
draped himself in the same accommodating
cloth—careful to avoid offending
the people who count, content
to leave the management of the
country’s finances to the discretion of
the Wall Street banks, its Middle
Eastern policy to the judgment of the
Israeli lobby, its public-health care
under the supervision of the insurance
syndicates, its bankruptcy laws
in the hands of the credit-card companies,
its military spending to the
wisdom of the Pentagon. During last
year’s election campaign he enjoyed
the advantage of an incoherent opponent,
a faltering economy, and the
incumbent Bush Administration’s
record of failure and disgrace. His efficient
acquisition of money and
votes proved him to be a capable entrepreneur,
his eloquence showed
him to be a charismatic politician.
The greater achievement—the act of
electing a black man to the White
House, not the image of the actor—
is that of the American citizenry, a
collective enterprise drawing together
the energies of the democratic
spirit contained in the belief that
what is great about America is not
the greatness of its gross domestic
product but the greatness of its love
of liberty.
Our leading voices of informed
opinion like to say that America now
finds itself in a state of unprecedented
crisis, the whole of our political
and economic enterprise trembling
on the verge of extinction. They call
upon the president to be “bold,” to
throw the moneychangers out of the
temple, bail out the banks and the
automobile industry, disgorge from
the Augean stable on Capitol Hill its
dungheap of cowardice and selfcongratulation.
I don’t know anybody
who questions President Obama’s
willingness to perform the
labors of Hercules, but where does he
find the lionskin and the club? The
redistributions of the society’s rich
and poor require the hiring of domestic
help willing to move the furniture.
Achievetrons don’t do floors
and windows. As individuals they
make very good company, and at the
tables down at Mory’s the magic of
their singing no doubt casts its spell,
but if they have paid attention to
their studies, they can be trusted to
know, as does the valedictocracy otherwise
known as the national news
media, that it’s a far, far better thing
to live in comfort under a government
they hold to be wrong than in
discomfort under a government they
hold to be right.