Smart Power
posted by Chimene Keitner
Back in November, David Brooks published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he dubbed the incoming Obama Administration a “valedictocracy,” citing the advanced degrees of many of Obama’s advisers and expected appointees. This approach of embracing educational qualifications stands in stark contrast to the attitude conveyed in George W. Bush’s 2001 commencement address at Yale, in which the then-President reassured “the C students” that “you, too, can be President of the United States,” and added that “if you drop out [like Dick Cheney], you get to be Vice President.”
Ivy League credentials are certainly no guarantee of effective leadership, sound judgment, or wise policy, let alone ability (or inclination) accurately to complete one’s tax returns. But there is a sense in which this Administration is re-valuing the skills of sophisticated and nuanced reflection that higher education, at its best, is designed to promote.
Here, as many of you know, are some folks to keep an eye on, to see how they manage the transition (or re-transition) from academic analyst to government advisor and decision-maker:
To head the State Department Policy Planning Staff: Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
To the Solicitor General’s Office: Elena Kagan, Dean of Harvard Law School, and Neal Katyal, Professor of Law at Georgetown
To the Office of Legal Counsel: Dawn Johnsen, Professor of Law at Indiana University—Bloomington, David Barron, Professor of Law at Harvard, and Marty Lederman, Professor of Law at Georgetown
To the Office of Counsel to the President, a/k/a the White House Counsel’s Office: Daniel Meltzer, Professor of Law at Harvard, and Trevor Morrison, Professor of Law at Columbia
Many of Obama’s appointees are noteworthy not only for their academic credentials, but also for having promoted approaches to issues of foreign policy and executive power that diverge sharply in many instances from those of their predecessors. As the new Administration balances the politics of repudiation (signaling a sharp break with the prior Administration’s values and priorities) with the repudiation of politics (promoting a unified vision of the national interest and the collective efforts required to pursue it), it will be interesting to monitor the extent to which some of these sharp differences in theory translate into palpable differences in practice.
February 2, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Politics
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Responses (4)
Orin Kerr - February 3, 2009 at 12:36 am
I certainly understand where you’re coming from — many Obama nominees are indeed highly accomplished academically — but are the appointees and nominee to the Obama OLC, SG’s Office, and White House Counsel’s Office actually more accomplished than those of the Bush Administration? Those jobs generally go to academic bigwigs in every administration, I believe. (For example, in the outgoing Bush Administration, you had Scalia clerk SG Clement with his principal and Rehnquist clerk Garre, acting OLC head and former Thomas clerk Steven bradbury with principal deputy and Kennedy clerk Elwood, etc. )
Dave - February 3, 2009 at 6:07 am
Orin-
Perhaps only you could conflate being a member of the Elect to the level of academic accomplishment of the Dean of Harvard Law.
I think Chimene was fairly clear in her point that the shift is to appointing career academics to prominent roles. Of the four names you mentioned, all had private practices before appointment to posts in the Bush administration; as far as I can tell, only one had taught at all (Clement was an adjunct at Gtown). Though, I should note that I can’t tell whether Elwood was in private practice or an academic, because I can’t even find a biography of him. But that seems to cut against him having any pre-OLC prominence whatsoever.
In contrast, all of the people nominated to the positions those four hold (Kagan, Katyal, Johnsen, Barron) are either full professors or the aforementioned Dean of HLS.
Now, one might have argued that there is no room in academia for conservatives, and that the outgoing folks achieved similar prominence in private practice. I’d disagree strongly with that argument, but at least it’s plausible. But that’s not the argument you made; rather, you implied that the four outgoing folks’ clerkships equaled prominent tenured faculty positions in terms of academic achievement.
Wow. Nice try.
Dave - February 3, 2009 at 6:10 am
A minor error: Garre’s bio indicates that he has been an adjunct at GW.
Maryland Conservatarian - February 4, 2009 at 11:46 am
Well the Bushies may not have had the so-called academic achievements of, say, Elena Kagan, Dean of Harvard Law School…but academic achievement was probably the only thing FAIR brought to its pathetic effort in Rumsfeld v. FAIR – a smackdown so complete and so predictable the Court could have assigned the opinion to a 1L from a school where all these academic achievers would never even deign to be seen…
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