Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton: Meritocracy or Aristocracy?

   

    At 24 and 21, both my sons are old enough--and well-trained enough--to have already voted in an election. Kyle, my younger son, has voted in Chicago's mayoral election but this Super Tuesday election was his first presidential one.
    We went to the polling booth together, but I resisted advising him who to vote for. Since he is young, intelligent and open-minded, with a reasonable amount of ethnic pride, I'm assuming he voted for Barack Obama; that if anyone might want change, it would be Kyle and his generation.
    This thought crossed my mind after we'd cast our ballots: that for all Kyle's life, there has been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Five years before Kyle was born, George H.W. Bush was Ronald Reagan's vice president. Kyle was a toddler when Bush became the 41st president of the United States. He was six years old when Bill Clinton became number 42 and he 14 years old when George W. Bush became number 43.
    This has occurred in a nation that pretends to value meritocracy and disdain aristocracy. It has been discussed by a writer in a British publication, The Guardian.
    It was well-written, well-reasoned piece. Here's the beginning:

In this great meritocracy,

only one thing matters: who

is your daddy?

To change the political sclerosis gripping their country, Americans need a president distinguished by his lack of pedigree

Gary Younge
Monday February 4, 2008
The Guardian

While running for Congress in West Texas in 1978, a young George W Bush attended a training school for Republican candidates. In a class on fundraising he was struck by inspiration. "I've got the greatest idea of how to raise money for the campaign," he told David Dreier, now a California congressman. "Have your mother send a letter to your family's Christmas card list! I just did, and I got $350,000."

The web of wealth and family connections that has levered Bush to power and has since characterised his administration is an indictment of America's political culture. "George W Bush was named [after] a father who excelled at everything," argued Bush Jr's former speechwriter David Frum. "He tried everything his father tried - and well into his 40s, succeeded at almost nothing."

Therapy could have dealt with this quite effectively. Instead we have been afflicted with one of the most ostentatious and wrong-headed affirmative action programmes known to the western world, in which a man unburdened by imagination inherited - almost literally - a cabinet unburdened by merit.

His father's secretary of state (James Baker) oversaw the Florida recount in 2000 as chief legal adviser and was instrumental in taking the case to the supreme court. Once installed, Bush took his father's joint chief of staff (Colin Powell) and made him secretary of state; his father's defence secretary (Dick Cheney) became vice-president; his father's special assistant on national security affairs (Condoleezza Rice) became national security adviser; and in a fit of oedipal petulance, he took one of his dad's enemies (Donald Rumsfeld) and made him defence secretary.

Not only did such appointments set new lows for cronyism, sleaze, dysfunction and incompetence. But by drawing leadership from such a tiny gene puddle they reflected an aberration of the very democratic impulses and meritocratic culture with which most Americans identify and apparently cherish.

If you'd like to read the rest, click here.