Anyone reading the praises and paeans for Obama’s cabinet selections might have noticed that it has veered into credentialism. When the praise is for where someone went to school, as opposed to what they’ve done, you are in trouble.
So, let’s take a look at which of the Bush cabinet officials have Ivy League degrees.
- Elaine Chao – Harvard (MBA)
- Samuel Bodman III – Cornell
- Donald Rumsfeld – Princeton
- Alberto Gonzales – Harvard (law)
- Michael Chertoff – Harvard
- Henry Paulson – Dartmouth and Harvard (MBA)
- George Bush – Yale and Harvard (MBA)
Doesn’t seem to have worked out so well, has it?
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
January 10, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Yeah, this is dumb. Blago, for instance, has an undergraduate degree from Northwestern and a law degree from the very respectable Pepperdine, and he’s an idiot.
I think there’s plenty of sloppy reasoning going on and some seriously unconnected dots in the “at last, an Ivy League cabinet!”, but there was a nugget of truth: GWB appointed the likes of Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown and Alberto “Gonzo” Gonzales, both of whom had records of a relative mediocrity, to serious jobs at least two or three steps above their Peter Principle slots. There was also a substantial push to hire people from relatively dubious schools like Liberty University because they had good credentials. Witness Monica Goodling.
I know enough people who were considered for jobs technically requiring political appointment but which were not political, e.g., heads of research offices, who turned them down because they knew they wouldn’t pass the White House scrutiny.
I don’t know how the incoming administration will behave—as I have said all along, that is an open question—but on the matter of political appointments, it would be hard to be worse than the level of cronyism that went along with the outgoing administration.
Well it wouldn’t—you can see what that was like in Blago.