Mercy, how can we even consider electing a President without a
sheepskin?
[G]raduating from college is what makes you a “gentleman.” . . . If you don’t have a college degree, by contrast, you are looked down upon as a vulgar commoner who is presumptuously attempting to rise above his station. Which is pretty much what they’re saying about Scott Walker. This prejudice is particularly strong when applied to anyone from the right, whose retrograde views are easily attributed to his lack of attendance at the gentleman’s finishing school that is the university.
That brings us to the heart of the matter. I have observed before that left-leaning politics has become “part of the cultural class identity of college-educated people,” a prejudice that lingers long after they have graduated. You can see how this goes the other way, too. If to be college-educated is to have left-leaning views—then to have the “correct” political values, one must be college-educated.
You can see now what is fueling the reaction on the left. If Scott Walker can run for president, he is challenging the basic cultural class identity of the mainstream left. He is more than a threat to the Democrats’ hold on political power. He is a threat to the existing social order.
Walker's success would be a threat to a Liberal's sense of self--his very ego.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
I think people on both sides are making way too much of this.
ReplyDeleteThe guy got 3/4 of the way through college, so the notion that there's some enormous difference between him and someone who spent just a few more months there (and got a degree) merely b/c he doesn't have a degree strikes me as extremely suspect.
People read into it, what they want to read into it.
Why did he drop out if he was that close?
ReplyDeleteSupposedly he had a triple major. Who knows?
ReplyDeleteDoes it really matter? He was in good academic standing, he chose to leave for whatever reason.
He was very young. I guess I don't get all the kerfuffle. I left college too - I had several reasons. Not a single reason.
I don't get why everyone's acting as though this were really some very significant thing. Surely he showed he's capable of finishing, and his record since leaving school suggests it didn't hold him back much, if at all.
It just seems like people are trying to turn it into more than it merits.
FWIW, I think it's reasonable to ask, though not reasonable to waste huge amounts of time/digital ink on it.
ReplyDeletePeople do lots of things when young that tell us little about the people they eventually come to be. You couldn't have predicted much about me at 21.
It seems like people on both sides want to shoehorn this into some broader narrative. But he's not a guy who never went to college - he's a guy who triple majored and got to his senior year in good standing.
Doesn't argue for him being either stupid/ignorant or uber-maverick.
Does it really matter? He was in good academic standing, he chose to leave for whatever reason.
ReplyDeleteI was merely curious.
I had a friend in college who finally dropped out over Spanish class. He was otherwise completely done, but he just couldn't somehow learn a foreign language. That was a hard requirement -- it didn't have to be Spanish, but it had to be some foreign language -- so eventually he dropped out over that one thing.
Smith, I think his name was. He was a smart guy! Just had a hole he couldn't fill, for some reason.
This is one of the reasons for the rage against Sarah Palin: yes, she did graduate from college, but it wasn't an "elite" college, and she does not speak with the verbal mannerisms that have come to be associated with the political, academic, and media elites.
ReplyDeleteFrom the standpoint of someone who has educational credentials, but has not achieved much else (or, at least, as much as they had expected to achieve), any threat to the value of those credentials represents a severe psychological danger.
I think Palin was a good governor in 2008; the constant mockery and abuse got to her, though. George W. Bush somehow managed to take the abuse without getting bent by it: but then again, he was a Yalie and a graduate of Harvard business college.
ReplyDeleteA related story: Networking is king.
Bush had also been an officer and a pilot. Whatever else the military is, it does teach you to get over yourself. I think Bush just didn't care what anybody thought of him.
ReplyDeleteGood point.
ReplyDeleteAnd a devout Christian, who works hard to forgive, I think.
ReplyDeleteThis whole credentialing backlash seems to be a meme flogged by a few pundits on the right (all of whom, amusingly, are themselves credentialed and some of whom continue to make their living by providing the very credentials they despise to more of the people they're suggesting are "rubes" for falling for a "scam" they don't scruple to participate in).
ReplyDeleteLike most things in life, credentials are signals but not absolute guarantees. Can't figure out why anyone would be surprised at what seems fairly obvious. The notion that merely possessing a college degree makes one educated or guarantees employment/financial success is the world's biggest straw man.
Rebutting it is no great feat and indicates no special insight or bravery.
I often wonder how many of these folks have tried to get a decent job themselves without a degree? Oh yeah, I forgot - people without degrees can just start their own businesses.
*cough*
It's all very well to disparage degrees when you've already gotten one and hold a job you couldn't have gotten (or would be extremely unlikely to be considered for) without one.
Is there snobbery? Sure. I got into one of the Ivies, quit after a year, and returned to school in my 30s. I chose not to go into debt and got my degrees from local schools I could afford, figuring that the books are pretty much the same. I took a ton of classes and read books I would never have made myself read on my own, and believe I emerged better educated.
My husband emerged from NPS with a Masters and a broader understanding of the world than he had going in.
Reverse educational snobbery seems like the same sort of categorical error as the more garden variety of educational snobbery.
Palin seemed to be competent as a governor, but her inability (or perhaps refusal) to suit her speech to the situation bothered me. Likewise, I find Obama's faux folksiness to be unpresidential.
Walker interests me, but I don't understand the fetishizing of what seem like irrelevant traits ("What we need to combat all those elitists is a guy who didn't graduate from college!!!"). His native intelligence, adaptability, integrity, and political acumen are more likely to matter in the long run than whether or not he was a few semesters short of a college degree.
Just not sure that signifies anything important, either way.
This whole credentialing backlash seems to be a meme flogged by a few pundits on the right
ReplyDeleteI am afraid I'll need to disagree with you here, Ms. Cass. You've not seen my Facebook feed. Quite a few liberal friends (mostly teachers) are really bent out of shape about him and his lack of degree (though admittedly, they are likely already primed to hate him because of his fight with the teachers' unions).
Yeah, I don't think I can see this as a right-fueled thing.
ReplyDeleteBy "credentialing backlash", I am referring to the notion that credentials are somehow irrelevant, not to the polar opposite of this view (that they're an inviolable requirement).
ReplyDeleteI find this whole thing rather funny in light of the reaction on the right to Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers :p
Then, having the right credentials and having attended the right schools was uber important. Now, not so much.
I think there were principled reasons for opposing Ms. Miers (and in fact I wasn't automatically inclined to support her) simply b/c she didn't get her degree from a top law school.
Like Tex, my head is spinning of late :p
To make my point even clearer, I do not agree that a college degree is mandatory for the President of the United States so long as a candidate has an established and successful track record in a relevant job (governor of a state, for instance).
ReplyDeleteBut I also find it downright weird to see people suggesting that postsecondary education doesn't matter at all in a contest to find the best candidate to become the leader of the world's largest/richest superpower.
I also find it odd to equate a guy who almost finished college with a triple major to one who never went. Clearly, they're not at all the same thing.
I had the oddest discussions about Miers at the time with a super-liberal old school friend. He was horrified that she'd been nominated, because she simply wasn't out of the top drawer. I said I thought her experience managing a well-regarded law firm spoke well for her abilities, but he thought that was crazy. It was a big old case of credentialism.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I'm personally more comfortable with a Supreme Court lawyer in the old-fashioned style of a super-high-IQ academic type. But I also suspect that personal prejudice is a failing; we might do well with more people on the Court with a more regular-folks background, to the extent you can call managing a law firm a regular-folks kind of thing. Miers was not some kind of dope, after all, or someone randomly pulled out of the jury pool. She just wasn't from the ivory tower. I think people were allergic to her because they thought Bush was dumb and because Bush obviously trusted her personally, which made her look like a crony. It probably is best if the president doesn't nominate close friends, for that reason.
I don't even remember that part of the discussion about Miers. I do remember being opposed to her nomination.
ReplyDeleteThe argument as I recall it went something like this: (1) Bush is a man with a tremendous sense of personal loyalty. (2) Unfortunately, though praiseworthy in general, this has caused him to favor many advisers well past the point at which they should be replaced. (3) Miers' chief qualification seems to be that same kind of personal tie to the President, rather than positive accomplishments outside his sphere that we can all see. (4) Therefore, she's likely to be another example of someone the President favors for personal reasons, not because they are objectively qualified. Since SCOTUS nominations are for life, this is not the right way to go.
That said, we had a robust debate about it here. Joel Leggett and I were opposed, but Daniel gave a spirited defense.
To be honest, I'm personally more comfortable with a Supreme Court lawyer in the old-fashioned style of a super-high-IQ academic type. But I also suspect that personal prejudice is a failing; we might do well with more people on the Court with a more regular-folks background, to the extent you can call managing a law firm a regular-folks kind of thing. Miers was not some kind of dope, after all, or someone randomly pulled out of the jury pool. She just wasn't from the ivory tower. I think people were allergic to her because they thought Bush was dumb and because Bush obviously trusted her personally, which made her look like a crony. It probably is best if the president doesn't nominate close friends, for that reason.
ReplyDeleteYanno, that was precisely the kind of thoughtful comment I am continually delighted by from you.
/end shameless (but nonetheless genuine) flattery
I have pretty much the same sense. I think one of the reasons Justice Thomas is my fave justice is that he brings a healthy dose of common sense to the Court. The problem with the high IQ academician type of judge (Posner comes to mind) is that sometimes they over-abstract things.
I also love the way ordinary people can read Thomas's opinions - he has the same sort of clear, simple writing style as Thomas Sowell (whom Harry Reid probably also thinks writes like an 8th grader) :p
I'd never say someone's college record was irrelevant to his prospects for the White House. (Wouldn't it be nice, sometimes, actually to get information about a President's college record!) It's just that a college record is only one way of guessing at someone's abilities. By the time he's in his 40s, we'd hope to have other information to go by--like, say, his sterling record as a governor, or his having voted present a bunch of times as a state and federal senator.
ReplyDeleteI agree about Justice Thomas. I do think it's good for someone on the Supreme Court to have appellate court experience, at least from the practitioner side if not from the bench side. Doing appellate law well takes a special kind of mindset. Someone who's never done it before might turn out to be really good at it, with a fresh approach and so on, but if they've been an appellate judge we have a better basis for evaluation. It's not as easy as people sometimes assume to do a good job resolving specific legal disputes in such a way as to identify broadly applicable principles, and not leave everyone in confusion.
ReplyDeleteGrim, given Miers' record (which I also wrote about several times) it almost passeth this poor human's understanding how anyone could characterize her resume as lacking anything substantive outside her brief time working with Bush :p
ReplyDeleteIt stunned me at the time that so many of my readers who routinely made what I'd call common man/populist arguments (i.e., we need more regular people in high places) couldn't see those arguments embodied in Ms. Miers.
I hadn't made up my mind to support her, but only argued that she deserved the chance to have her nomination go forward. It was killed just as much by the right leaning base as by anyone on the left, and I was so horrified by some of the arguments I heard then (and continue to be so to this day) that the whole thing just made me sick.
The irony is that I generally don't fall into the populist camp :p
And FWIW, I don't recall your position on the matter. Seems to me that anyone who regularly makes the nation's 100 most powerful litigators list has nothing to apologize for in her resume, and has established a pretty strong legal reputation. Unless of course writing abstruse academic papers is more important that a career spent knee deep in the actual legal system :p
I do think it's good for someone on the Supreme Court to have appellate court experience, at least from the practitioner side if not from the bench side. Doing appellate law well takes a special kind of mindset. Someone who's never done it before might turn out to be really good at it, with a fresh approach and so on, but if they've been an appellate judge we have a better basis for evaluation. It's not as easy as people sometimes assume to do a good job resolving specific legal disputes in such a way as to identify broadly applicable principles, and not leave everyone in confusion.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a very solid argument (similar to why I think being a governor of a large/powerful state is the best proxy for relevant executive experience).
It doesn't prove you can handle stepping up to the next level, but certainly shows an ability to handle the previous level.
I don't think most people had any idea what was in Miers's resume; all they knew was "Bush flack." (It's just about all the MSM knew, after all, so how would they find out if they weren't awfully curious?)
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not as though most people had a clue what it takes to be a successful litigator, either, other than whatever they glean from fiction. Miers having had a least a bit of executive experience in a law firm made her pretty interesting to me, though it's true that, as managers go, lawyers are the worst. Still, it's got to be more executive experience than most academics could ever dream of having had. Not that we usually think of "executive experience" as helpful in a Supreme Court justice, but I'm suggesting that it's exactly the sort of flexibility of thought that might do us good. I'm always interested in ensuring that the legal system of a country with a free market is at least in part administered by people who have some notion of what it takes to run a business.
By 2005 there was a pattern of behavior, too, that even Bush supporters (as I usually was) could recognize. I suppose you could say it started in 1999, when Dick Cheney ran the search committee for a vice presidential nominee and determined that the best one was himself! I thought Donald Rumsfeld was a great guy, but he stayed on past when he should have stepped aside. Bush wouldn't ask for resignations: he was very loyal to his friends, which is normally a wonderful quality.
ReplyDeleteWhen he nominated his own counsel, though, it gave every impression that he wasn't looking very far in his search. I am much more of a populist, but you don't get to populism by looking to the President's personal friends! They're generally already the elite; it's almost nepotism when the circle is that tight. She's not family, but she's practically family.
If he'd nominated some state judge instead of a Federal one, or even a practicing lawyer of excellent moral insight and reputation, I'd love that. That would be more populist. And it would be great to have SCOTUS justices who were experienced with the way that state governments experience Federal power, if it increased their commitment to Federalist principles.
I agree with you about Bush being loyal to a fault, but he had tons of associates (many of whom are/were lawyers). So it doesn't seem anywhere like a slam dunk that because he picked someone he knew well and trusted, that's "almost nepotism".
ReplyDeleteWhere I think I disagree is that it was a foregone conclusion that Miers wasn't qualified or the nomination shouldn't go forward "because it looks bad".
To me, that's right up the same alley as the objections to Jeb Bush based on nothing more than his last name or some surface impression that may or may not be accurate. In general, I'm not a fan of surface impressions as a basis for making decisions when there's other information available.
I would have been fine with her not surviving the hearings. It's just that we never got to the part of the process where we get to ask questions and assess qualifications because of appearances.
I have to say that I think it's not just the name! If he were "Jeb Bush, unrelated," the objections wouldn't arise. There's always a question about political dynasties in an egalitarian republic.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but they make very little sense when the only way to get elected is to win votes nationwide.
ReplyDeleteNo one is crowned by divine right, nor are offices handed down from father to son.