{"id":19151,"date":"2011-04-04T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T17:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=19151"},"modified":"2014-02-19T11:04:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T17:04:00","slug":"empty-suit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=19151","title":{"rendered":"Empty Suit Esquire"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Barack Obama was running for and\/or fairly new in office, the left – and others who are impressed with such things – were all dewy-eyed over Barack Obama’s “intelligence” – as measured by the toniness of the diplomas on his wall.<\/p>\n

He was an Ivy Leaguer, of course – ending the long national nightmare of our presidential Ivy League drought.<\/p>\n

But as I pointed out at the time, not only is the toniness of ones’ degree utterly immaterial to ones suitability for the Presidency, there’s a case to be made that an Ivy League degree (other than in, say, medicine, hard sciences or physics) is a liability in the real world.<\/p>\n

P.J. O’Rourke – one of the people who turned me conservative, and a fellow grad of an obscure school (he: Miami of Ohio) – agrees<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Barack Obama went to an Ivy League school, not that he\u2019s doing very well in his career at the moment. Let\u2019s check on the most successful people in America. Sarah Palin went to the University of Idaho. Warren Buffet went to Nebraska. John Boehner went to Xavier. Glenn Beck didn\u2019t go to college at all [to say nothing of Limbaugh – Ed<\/em>.]. And I\u2019m not sure whether Justin Bieber\u2019s mother even finished high school. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did go to Harvard but\u200b…\u200bthey dropped out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

O’Rouke is actually responding to Amy Chua, Ivy League professor and author of Tiger Mom, <\/em>a manifesto on raising children to take up more space in the Ivy League.\u00a0\u00a0 But the larger point – the one that applies to our President – is…:<\/p>\n

Amy Chua, I\u2019ve got bad news. \u201cA\u201d students work for \u201cB\u201d students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. \u201cNo, P.\u2009J.,\u201d he said, \u201c\u2009\u2018B\u2019 students work for \u2018C\u2019 students. \u2018A\u2019 students teach.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that, really, sums up The One.\u00a0 He came; he studied; he punched the tickets one must punch to be a Chicago Democrat.<\/p>\n

And as with an awful lot of Ivy Leaguers whose main stated qualification is that they were Ivy Leaguers, not a whole lot else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Barack Obama was running for and\/or fairly new in office, the left – and others who are impressed with such things – were all dewy-eyed over Barack Obama’s “intelligence” – as measured by the toniness of the diplomas on his wall. He was an Ivy Leaguer, of course – ending the long national nightmare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[282],"class_list":["post-19151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","tag-idiot-elite"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19151"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19180,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19151\/revisions\/19180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}