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David Brooks assured his readers in the New York Times that the incoming [Obama] apparat, its members “twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them,” embodied “the best of the Washington insiders.” “Achievetrons ... who got double 800s on their SATs,” said Brooks, taking pains to list the schools from which they had received diplomas. (Columbia, Harvard, Wellesley, Harvard Law, Stanford, Yale Law, Princeton, etc.) ... Take into account the Ivy League’s contribution to the Bush Administration [Ashcroft Yale, Rumsfeld Princeton, Chertoff Harvard] and I can imagine a doctoral thesis commissioned by the Kennedy School of Government and meant to determine which of the country’s leading institutions of higher learning over the past 50 years has done the most damage to the health and happiness of the American people. ...The high fees charged by the band-name institutions include surer access to the nomenklatura that writes the nation’s laws, operates its government, manages its money, and controls its news media. ... Achievetrons don’t do floors and windows.
Lewis Lapham HARPER’S March 2009 pp. 9f