—Karl Rove, arguing that Obama';s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor may "not necessarily" be smart.
DIA notes:
Mr Rove is most famous for managing the two gubernatorial and two presidential campaigns of George W Bush, who graduated from Yale University (1968) and Harvard Business School (1975).
It's important to remember the temporal context in which Bush attended Yale.
ReplyDeleteFrom Zengerle / http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/05/27/more-miers.aspx :
Bush went to "those schools" during an era (actually, at the tail end of an era) when admission to those schools wasn't necessarily a sign of towering intellect, at least if you hailed from the right family, as Bush did. As Nicholas Lemann explained it in his 2000 New Yorker profile of Bush:
After Bush's class was admitted, Yale's new president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., a liberal-reformist New England patrician, brought in an insurrectionary new director of admissions, only twenty-nine years old, named R. Inslee Clark, Jr. Clark set about making Yale more of a national institution dominated by public-school graduates who were picked for their academic abilities. He made so many people mad that he lasted only five years in the job, but by that time the revolution was substantially complete. A good way of encapsulating the abrupt change from Old Yale to New Yale is this: George H. W. Bush is the eldest of four brothers. All four went to Yale. George W. Bush is the eldest of four brothers, too. He is the only one who went to Yale.