Today’s example of the DFL’s exposed intellectual id is Nicholas Dolphin of (where else) Minneapolis, who wrote a letter to the editor in the Strib – featured, naturally, as their “letter of the day” about a week ago.
Mr. Dolphin wrote:
State Rep. Kurt Bills, newly endorsed by the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate race, is quoted as saying “we sent a lawyer, a community organizer and a comedian to Washington, D.C., and we get an economy that looks like it does today.”
The line is cute, “quippy” and closely follows the Republican playbook established years ago by Karl Rove. In football, it is called a misdirection play.
At the risk of saying “I know you are but what is Kurt?” that is, itself, a misdirection. Not only did Rove himself not invent that “play”, Mr. Dolphin would divert the conversation from Mr. Bills’ point, which was “Have the efforts of the lawyer, the community organizer and the comedian made your life better than it was four years ago”?
That’d be a laughable premise, wouldn’t it? Obama, Klobama and A-Frank have presided over an economic debacle!
But that’s apparently not the real subject to Mr. Dolphin::
In politics, it says that when your qualifications are nowhere near those of your opponent, go personal and cute while avoiding actual résumé or accomplishment comparisons.
The avoidance/misdirection here is the omission of the qualifications of that lawyer (Sen. Amy Klobuchar), community organizer (President Obama, who’s actually a lawyer, too) and comedian (Sen. Al Franken).
“Accomplishment comparisons”.
“Qualifications”.
Heh.
We’ll come back to that.
The three possess undergraduate degrees, respectively, from Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Klobuchar’s and Obama’s law degrees come from the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively. And none of these individuals received a legacy admission.
Depending on the source, the lowest-ranked of those five degrees is Harvard Law, at No. 5 nationally. Franken, with his undergraduate degree from the No. 2 undergraduate university in the United States (No. 2 in the world) is really pulling down the average here.
Well, isn’t that special.
Look – the very best thing that an Ivy League or Tier 1 education says about someone is that between the ages of 14 and 25 (give or take a few years either way) they understood the importance of playing the paper chase well enough to punch all the academic, extracurricular and social tickets it took to impress an Ivy League or Tier 1 admissions committee enough to admit them, and to get the scholarships, loans and aid it took to get a shot at spending four to seven years getting sufficient grades (adjusted for Ivy-League grade inflation) to get access to that most coveted benefit of the Ivy League education; the alumni directory. And that is the very, very best thing it says; in most cases, it bespeaks family social connections, generations in the upper-middle class, family wealth, or political correctness. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those, but none of them imply any special merit…
…and that’s just with a brand-new graduate. After one has gotten that precious diploma copy of the alumni directory, the only question any rational person cares about is “what have you done lately?” People who barber on about their Ivy League diplomas after age 25 resemble Andy Bernard from The Office more and more with every passing year.
And those who do it on their behalf? That’s just sad.
Because in this, an election year, the only question that matters is “What have you done for us lately?”
Do Obama’s degrees from Columbia and Harvard make his multiplication of our national debt, turbucharging our spending and embarkIing on a regulatory and tax course that will sooner than later cripple our private sector and send us briskly down the Greek and Spanish path seem like good ideas?
Does A-Klo’s time at Yale and U-Chi make her sotto voce vote for Obama’s medical device tax – which is already hammering Minnesota industry, and we ain’t seen nothing yet – anything but a disaster for the state she “represents?”
Have Franken’s Harvard degree and decades as smug snarksmith evolved him into anything but a reliable legislative ticket-puncher on the road to ruin?
Have all their degrees made your life any better than it was four years ago?
Because that is the only question anyone should care about today.
And it’s Mr. Dolphin that’s doing the misdirecting – because while none of Obama, Klobama or Mr. Smalley’s degrees have helped any of us one iota, they sure do look impressive!
Bills’ alma mater, Winona State University, is a nice local school that doesn’t attract the same caliber of student and whose graduates would be better served not denigrating people whose academic accomplishments dwarf their own.
And leaving aside the misdirection, Mr. Dolphin has done Minnesotans one sterling service here; he’s highlighted as clearly as anyone ever has the smarmy authoritarianism of “progressivism”. You mere peasants with your degrees from state schools should shut up and pay your taxes let your betters do your thinking for you, doncha know.
Mr. Dolphin; Abraham Lincoln was self-taught. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Most of the world’s great achievements (outside of medicine and hard science) came from people who did things, rather than waved their degrees around.
I’ve come to the opinion that an Ivy League degree should be, if not a disqualifier for higher office, at least a hurdle to be overcome with some counterbalancing achievement in life since graduation.
And that’d be a hurdle over which Obama, Klobuchar nor Franken have all stumbled, fallen and face-planted.