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Shining CLand of opportunity, Bush-style.

By Michael KinsleyPosted Friday, July 6, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

The most interesting patriotic sentiment of the season was expressed by President Bush last month at Yale's graduation: "And to the C students, I say, you, too can be president of the United States." This was intended as a bit of charming self-deprecation: a rhetorical device Bush is quite good at—possibly because he means it. Modesty is one of his better qualities: He seems genuinely comfortable about acknowledging his own limitations. He doesn't evoke a desire to retort, with Golda Meir, "Don't be so humble, you're not that great." Of course, it requires a pretty powerful sense of entitlement to pull this off. There's a real smugness underlying the self-deprecation: Hey, I'm mediocre, and I'm president anyway. (So there, Bill Clinton and Al Gore—study-butts both.)

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Sure, a C student can become president. It helps if his father was president first and his grandfather was a senator and he was born into a family that straddles the Northeast WASP aristocracy and the Sun Belt business establishment. And a C student at prep school can get into Yale by adopting a similar action plan of strategic birth control. (That is, controlling whom you're born to.)

By appropriating for himself the magnificent cliché that anyone can become president of the United States, Bush gives it a whole new dimension. Sure, we all know that with gumption and hard work, in this land of opportunity, you can overcome a mountain of life's disadvantages to reach the pinnacle of success. That's one option. But as Bush subtly reminded the Yale graduates, there is another option: With a mountain of life's advantages, you can overcome a disposition against working hard and a cultural distaste for vulgar striving and reach those same pinnacles anyway! Our current president opted for the second strategy, and you cannot begrudge him a splash of smugness in noting that it worked.

What lesson will the Nation's Youth draw from this inspiring tale? It would be tragic if they got the impression that being a lousy student is all it takes. It's a good foundation to build on, but only that. One must also be young and irresponsible until it is time to become old and censorious. "When I was young and irresponsible," Bush has noted, "I was young and irresponsible." And now that he's good, he is very, very good. Bush says he stopped being young and irresponsible on his 40^th birthday. Perfect timing! That happens to be almost exactly when ruining other people's fun starts to be more satisfying—and less exhausting—than having fun of your own. This is another strategy imitators of the Bush Way to Greatness overlook at their peril.

At the Harvard admissions office, they used to have an alleged philosophy they called "the happy bottom quarter." The idea was that Harvard could fill each class, if it wanted to, with nothing but the very top high-school students but that this might be traumatic to those who didn't make it to the top at Harvard. So, the admissions office supposedly reserved about 25 percent of each class for those who could handle the notion of not being a star student.

In practice, this did not mean searching for young folks with a Zenlike acceptance of life's fate, or a profound sense of universal human equality, or enough mathematical wit to appreciate the joke that even at Harvard—unlike Lake Wobegon—everyone cannot be above average. No, "the happy bottom quarter" was a fancy way to make room for alumni sons and athletes and rich kids whose families might give money. These were people who didn't need top grades in order to feel above average. They would be happy with a "Gentleman's C"—meaning both that gentlemen were entitled to no less and that gentlemen strove for no more.

Nicholas Lemann's book The Big Test describes how the cozy elite of the Gentleman's C was replaced, in universities and society, by a more rigorous meritocracy of grades and test scores. By the time George W. was in college, that transformation was almost over. "The happy bottom quarter" was just a way to preserve some room for the old America in the new one. Today we like to think we live in an even newer America, where entrepreneurial hustle has replaced test scores and Ivy League degrees as the path to success (and the country's richest person is a Harvard dropout). But George W. Bush's life story of how a C student at Yale became president of the United States illustrates that even the America-before-last hasn't completely lost its grip.

The other day I got a brochure from Harvard, apparently sent to every graduate, inviting me to pay $25 to join a computerized mentoring network of Harvard people helping one another to make connections and find jobs. This struck me as a fairly shocking reification of the notion of Harvard as cog in the machinery of a self-perpetuating elite. I'm not sure whether the brazen crudeness indicates self-confidence or a desperate conspiracy of the two older elites against the new one.

President Bush, though, seems to have found a wilier way to protect the older elites from challenge. Let's hope the president's words and example inspire more young Americans to buckle down, get mediocre grades, and party until they're middle-aged.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for the Washington Post and the founding editor of Slate.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Glen Davidson had a lot to say, but the best bit was this: "Oh, everybody cares about opportunities for the have-nots. The bourgeoisie in their gated communities, the socialists with servants, the petty-bourgeois professors yammering away at the illegitimacy of all of the working-class belief… why, all of these in their protected turfs care deeply about inequality." Michael Murray started a good discussion on background here. Roy Fouinon defended networking here. But we liked the nuns best…]

I don't know--the Harvard scheme sounds like a secular version of a growing U.S. fad (according to the 6/22 Irish Independent) of adopting a nun: "For a donation of $100 or more, an 'Adopt-A-Sister' service, being offered by the Salesian Sisters of St. John, provides personalised prayers for a full year.... Most ... requests come from people looking for health and success." Sounds just as practical as a Harvard mentor, depending upon one's needs. After all, Horatio Alger never did it entirely on his own.

--Ellie C.

(To reply, click here.)

Kinsley is far too optimistic. He seems to think that there is some kind of "new elite" in the colleges and universities of America, one where privilege is not enough to get you by and the social standing of parents has less influence on success than personal merit. That's exactly what most students think. Almost every one of them thinks they are the sole authors of their destiny, that they are members of the solid middle class and have dragged themselves up by the sweat of their brow. And they do work hard. But Kinsley needs to look at the demographics just a little bit harder. Who goes to the best universities (which are still the fastest route to economic and professional success, as Kinsley's Harvard newsletter attests)? The students of privilege.

The difference is that the group with access to this privilege is slightly larger: it's the children not of the "old money" but of the rich. The top 20% of the income bracket is far overrepresented at the elite institutions in the U.S. Why? They have the money needed to gain access to the best test preparation, the best college information, the exciting programs that make them seem more "well-rounded" (going abroad, etc), the college application consultants, etc. More importantly, they live in families and neighborhoods where success and education are expectations rather than oddities. These students are generally very well prepared and will do well in their lives. But they are not "average" kids.

The problem, as I see it, is that they don't know they aren't average. A kid from a home with, say, a $90k family income almost never interacts with kids who aren't also from rich families, so they think they are average. And since they see people making $500k a year (and there are enough in such a large population as ours to seem like a numerous group), they think $90k is middle class. The result? A group of privileged children perpetuating that privilege in the name of merit, never knowing their own advantages.

At least Dubya knows where his opportunity came from.

--Ed Wingenbach

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