Month: September 2010

Panjim, India, 12 pm

by Conor Friedersdorf

An e-mailer writes, "Higher education is the most meritocratic filter we've got to inform decisions about career advancement. Kids who excel at elite colleges are almost all extremely smart and hard working, so what's the problem? These people deserve to make up the ruling class more than anyone else you're going to find."

This statement vastly overestimates the extent to which admissions at elite colleges is a meritocratic process. It's a mindset I encountered a lot during my time on the East Coast, often from people who grew up in homes with two college educated parents and attended high schools where sending students to the Ivy League was a regular occurrence.

I get it. These people worked far harder than their peers in high school, as did I: an academic schedule filled with advanced placement classes, a varsity sport, extracurricular activities like debate or mock trial, countless nights up late finishing an English paper or a calculus problem set, weekend afternoons inside a stuffy room doing SAT practice tests — after all that, it seems galling to suggest that one's spot at a top tier college wasn't deserved.

Despite my closeness to this culture, however, I'm far enough away to appreciate how misleading it is to imagine that America's high school students enjoy true equality of opportunity, especially given how ultra-competitive it's become to matriculate at an elite school (in other words, even the smallest of advantages can be determinative).

It was less difficult back in 1994, when I started high school in Orange County, California. My parents valued good education enough to pay tuition at Catholic schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. My dad has a degree from a four year state school and a mid-career MBA from Pepperdine. My mom did a couple years in interior design school. They both read to me from a young age, helped me with school work, instilled an academic work ethic, and encouraged my early interest in writing. Put another way, I was tremendously blessed relative to 99.9 percent of people in the planet and the vast majority of my fellow Americans.

In hindsight, however, there is all sorts of knowledge that I lacked compared to many of the people I've met who grew up in a household with Ivy League educated parents, or attended a fancy East Coast prep school, or had a parent who worked in academia, or a network of close family friends spanning the elite of every profession. It never occurred to me that I should study for the PSAT because it affected who would get National Merit Scholarships, or that an aspiring writer would do well to consider Princeton in order to study under John McPhee, or Harvard or Yale because they're feeder schools for prestigious publications. I took the SAT once without any prep classes, applied only to schools in California, never knew about a lot of the fellowships some folks applied for upon graduating from college, and felt all the while that I was relatively well-informed.

Please don't mistake this for complaining. I'm tremendously lucky. I chose between Berkeley and Pomona College, got a good education, probably started a rung lower in professional journalism than I would've had I gone east earlier, but likely benefited from the experience. Still, if I had a kid entering high school right now, I could help them game the college admissions system and hasten advancement in the meritocratic elite far more adroitly than my parents could help me — and orders of magnitude more than most families can help their kids. What I take away from my own story is this: If an upper middle class kid from Orange County, CA is removed enough from the northeast rat race to perceive slight but meaningful information disadvantages in hindsight, what's a lower middle class kid from Reno or a first generation college applicant from Topeka to do?

One answer is that no one should gauge success in life by adopting the measures of the northeast professional elite. Unhappiness lies that way! On the other hand, it's desirable that the people running American institutions better reflect our regional diversity, harness the wisdom contained in different kinds of people, and encompass smart, talented climbers who, for whatever reason, didn't get onto the "meritocratic elite track" at age 14 when the GPA calculations began to matter. As the always sharp Megan McArdle put it, "The Ivy League may represent the cream of a very small segment of incredibly affluent Americans. But there's a lot more cream out there, and it's a pity that American institutional structures seem so apt to exclude it from the mix."

Ross Douthat, a Harvard alum, grapples insightfully with many of these questions. One solution he's always touting is for the Ivy League and other elite colleges to do a better job recruiting devout Christians, lower class whites, ROTC kids, and others who are alienated from the meritocratic elite as currently conceived, despite having a lot to offer. I don't object to his project, but I'm coming from a different place. As an undergrad, I went to school with a lot of kids from the northeast who chose Pomona College in order to flee the culture of the Ivies without giving up on good academics. And in graduate school, I chose New York University despite being admitted to its Ivy League competitor partly because I thought that people like Jay Rosen were doing more interesting work.

The exceptional people I met in both places, and the way those institutions shaped them, leads me to believe that similar troves of people are stashed all over this country, and I'd rather that our elite professional institutions did a better job finding those people — relying less heavily on the Ivy League as a filter — as opposed to running a somewhat more diverse group of people through the same old Harvard and Yale acculturation process. Were this the case, a nice secondary effect would be more kids choosing colleges based on the best fit rather than US News and World Report rankings.

by Conor Friedersdorf

An enterprising reporter hands out prepaid cash cards to find out.

by Chris Bodenner

Ugh – to Microsoft no less. Well, at least the double-rainbow dude found a way to get that Internet money, so more power to him.

by Patrick Appel

Jason Mazzone grows impatient:

President Obama vowed to end “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era compromise on gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the military. But Obama’s window of opportunity for ending DADT is quickly closing. At the end of May, the House voted 234-194 to repeal DADT as part of a military spending bill. Just five Republicans supported the repeal and twenty-six Democrats voted in opposition. The Senate Armed Services Committee has also approved the proposed repeal. But the full Senate, which was expected to consider the repeal measure over the summer, has not yet taken it up and Republicans have threatened a filibuster when and if the Senate does.

With the 2010 congressional election two months away, the chances of repealing DADT before the election occurs are fast diminishing.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Todd Purdum writes in Vanity Fair:

Washington is hard to govern, above all, because of the radical growth in the scope of the federal government’s responsibilities—it’s an obvious fact, but it’s where explanations must begin. On the eve of World War II, F.D.R. had six high-level aides who carried the title “administrative assistant to the president.” Harry Truman, after the war, had 12 of them: they met every morning in a semicircle around his desk. There are now upwards of 100 people who have some variation on “assistant to the president” in their titles. The sheer number of things the executive branch is responsible for just keeps expanding; the time available to think about any one of them therefore keeps shrinking. This is not just a management issue, it’s a stakeholder issue: every special interest in the country is working zealously to keep what it has, or to get something better. Emanuel, who was a top White House aide through most of the Clinton years, thought the pace was bad back then. It’s much worse now. “Leon thinks it’s a huge problem,” he says, referring to Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who is now Obama’s C.I.A. director. “He says that this is a highly caffeinated speed.”

This is a concern I've had for a long time. The President of the United States remains a single man or woman. Can he or she possibly preside successfully over a government that has grown orders of magnitude bigger than it was at the Founding? That higher ups in a Democratic administration agree is somewhat puzzling. The status quo strikes them as dysfunctional, but they want to expand the role of the federal government and the scope of executive power even more?

Here's an excerpt from later in the piece:

The sheer size of government makes juggling a fact of life—and, to some extent, an impossibility. Balls are dropping all the time. But even more debilitating is what size gives rise to. The reach of government may touch every cranny of national life, but those in the crannies can also reach back and touch the government, seeking favor and preferment. The Federal Register is published every working day and contains the text of new government regulations, presidential decrees, administrative orders, and proposed rules and public notices. The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you’ll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items. You can think of the Federal Register as the official record of federal activity in all its range. You can also think of it as the daily report card of the lobbying industry, whose interests and resources underlie nearly every line of type. There is hardly a large private company in the country not dependent on some kind of government contract, and hardly a business of any size that is not subject to some kind of government oversight.

Perhaps it would be better if less depended on the federal government — in fact, perhaps if it had less to do, its remaining functions could be carried out more skillfully, with less waste, and to the greater benefit of the citizenry. Given the subject of the article, it's almost astonishing that neither the author nor any source ever suggests that we'd be better off if some matters were removed from the president's consideration.

 

by Chris Bodenner

Dan Savage is unimpressed by the recent wave of gay tolerance among Republican elites backing Mehlman. He directs his ire toward Democrats:

And here's the most hilarious thing about Democratic cowardice where our issues are concerned: voters who hate the gays don't hate Obama and the Democrats in Congress one iota less for breaking their promises to gay and lesbian community. Just going by the action alerts sent out by rightwing Christian groups—I get all their emails—you would think Obama ("the most radically pro-homosexual president in our history") had legalized same-sex marriage, ended DADT, enacted ENDA, and sent federal troops into suburban mega-churches and forced conservative Christian pastors to perform gay weddings at gunpoint.

So here's where we're at: everyone who cares about gay issues is mad at the Democrats. The homophobes are angry because the Democrats suggested that they might do something about gay rights; gays and lesbians are furious with the Democrats for failing to do something—failing to do anything—about gay rights. Since doing nothing pisses off the gay haters just as much as doing something, perhaps the Dems should've have done something and won the enthusiastic support of someone.

Heckuvajob, gang.

by Patrick Appel

Larry Sabato places his bet:

Given what we can see at this moment, Republicans have a good chance to win the House by picking up as many as 47 seats, net. This is a “net” number since the GOP will probably lose several of its own congressional districts in Delaware, Hawaii, and Louisiana. This estimate, which may be raised or lowered by Election Day, is based on a careful district-by-district analysis, plus electoral modeling based on trends in President Obama’s Gallup job approval rating and the Democratic-versus-Republican congressional generic ballot … If anything, we have been conservative in estimating the probable GOP House gains, if the election were being held today.

In the Senate, we now believe the GOP will do a bit better than our long-time prediction of +7 seats. Republicans have an outside shot at winning full control (+10), but are more likely to end up with +8 (or maybe +9, at which point it will be interesting to see how senators such as Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and others react).

by Chris Bodenner

Alaska native Marty Beckerman is bitter about Sarah Palin stealing his thunder:

[A]t college in D.C. I'd get asked every day, as if I were from some exotic fantasy land: "Did you mush dogs instead of driving a car?" "Did your family live in an igloo?" "Did you have a pet polar bear?"

… Did you water ski behind a team of huskies?

No, no, and no, but I loved these asinine, naive, wonderful questions. Saying "I'm from Alaska" was the best conversation starter imaginable, and on countless occasions instantly made me the most interesting person in the room unless there was someone around from, like, Tanzania. (Fun factoid: Jewel used to yodel in the hallways of my high school.)

But it was never the same after August 29, 2008. As soon as John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, suddenly no one asked about months of darkness or snowboarding to school—only about her. Whenever I boasted of my birthplace to new acquaintances, expecting to become the glorious center of attention yet again, I instead became some random guy indistinguishably whining about politics. Nobody cared anymore. And to this day, nobody cares—it's been two years since anyone asked about gearshifts on dogsleds. Like it or not, America's most hideous politician has ruined America's most beautiful state.

Even Republicans in Alaska agree, picking Romney over Palin in a new poll.  And of course Jewel isn't a fan.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Says James Poulos:

There's something about drones that makes me queasy. Maybe it's the whole robots-with-guns thing. We're a long ways away from the day when machines programmed to kill fight wars so human Americans don't have to, but I think the following principle is important to keep in at least the back of our minds going forward: war is something awful, serious, and dangerous enough that real people should have to do the bulk of it. Assassinating evildoers in remote locations is one thing; getting in the habit of outsourcing death and destruction to the bots is another.

And elsewhere at Ricochet, here's Adam Freedman:

I did my usual snorting and scoffing when I heard about the ACLU's latest lawsuit to enjoin the killing of terror suspects abroad. But is it possible that they're on to something?

According to the complaint, the CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Committee) maintain a "kill list" of individuals whom the US can kill anywhere, anytime. The list includes US citizens. The ACLU appears to concede that the US can kill its enemies in war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But what authorizes the government to summarily kill US citizens on suspicion that they're plotting terror activity? Even if the targets are guilty of treason, the Constitution requires the testimony of two witnesses or a confession in open court.

The ACLU also objects to killing foreign nationals outside of war zones; however, that argument is much weaker. But US citizens? Like my fellow Ricocheterians over here, I have my qualms about the ease with which the government can now send a drone to do its dirty work.

I wish the right would do less scoffing at the ACLU. It's often unjustified. But I'll live with scoffing if it's followed by the dawning realization that the Obama Adminstration has imprudently asserted for itself an extraordinary extra-constitutional power, the potential abuse of which ought to terrify any citizen who is half paying attention.

Once that realization has sunk in, I'd encourage this followup thought: whereas the ACLU is standing against this radical expansion of federal power — an executive branch death panel, if you will — conservative instituitions like The Heritage Foundation aren't merely silent, they're hiring a senior staffer who believes that the ability to draw up a list of American citizens to be killed is inherent in the power of the presidency.