The thing about Elena Kagan that bugs me is she reminds me too much of Bernanke. Both of them look like charter members of the Eloi.
She graduated from high school a few months after turning 17, then got a degree summm cum laude from Princeton in political history. Then on to Oxford for a Masters in Philosophy. Then directly to Harvard law school, where she was an editor of the law review. Then a clerkship for a DC Circuit Judge, then a clerkship with Thurgood Marshall. Then a couple years at a white-shoe firm in DC, after which she re-cloistered herself in academia, at the age of 31, as a professor at the University of Chicago School of Law (where she met Obama). Then a few years on the Clinton legal team, and then back to academia for another ten years, this time at Harvard Law again. And lastly, a year ago Obama made her Solicitor General, even though she had never tried a case.
That may be the most pristine legal resume in existence, and she didn't put it together without being brilliant. But she's spent pretty much her whole life in the best schools in the world and has probably never got her hands dirty. Like Bernanke, she's been walking among the clouds her whole life, and mundane issues that involve the little people are probably only theoretical to her. She's like a legal nun who's never set foot outside the convent walls.
Bernake spent most of his life in the Princeton monastery before being appointed Fed head. I sometimes get the feeling he's having fun with his grand experiment and he's rubbing his hands together waiting to see how it all turns out. If everything falls apart, maybe he'll have to admit someday, like Greenspan, that his model had a flaw. But it's all nothing but a big intellectual exercise to him, and he seems oblivious to the pain his actions cause to the Morlocks. He and Kagan seem to be cast from the same die. |
