Cartoon 675: A lie

The “good ole boy” image of President Bush was a carefully calculated political move.  He had much greater political appeal by making him an “every man”.  This also took away the ammunition of opponents about his Yale and Harvard education and privileged background. However this approach did a disservice to the nation in catering to the lowest common denominator and providing a role model of disdain for education. He has been referred to as intellectually lazy by insiders. Go deeper and you find the movers and the shakers in the Administration were “literates”; from Cheney to Rice to Paul Wolfowitz. This was also true of the heads of Agencies.

Republican disdain for intellectuals was because, as a constituency, they were overwhelming liberal. Therefore they were ideology enemies. The Republicans were successful in creating a popular negative connotation to “intellectual”, as they had done with the term “liberal”. They branded the intellectuals as “elites” or privileged. This was despite the fact that the Republicans that were doing the branding where themselves “elites”.

The educational credentials of the Obama Administration indicates there is a relationship to high academic achievement and success. This dispels the lie of the best formal education not being a significant enabler.