As someone with a 18 year old in the house... trust me when I tell ya... it ain't as far off as you might think. (sigh)

One of the advantages to having kids late in life is that you've got a better sense of time. I've seen, for example, Steven Taylor's oldest go from under 2 years old to 13 and his two youngest go from newborn to school age.

Our daughter is only six months old, so we’re a little ways off from worrying about what college she’ll attend.

James;

As someone with a 18 year old in the house... trust me when I tell ya... it ain't as far off as you might think. (sigh)

And then used that base to accomplish basically nothing for years and years and years...........until he was tapped by the marketing machine.

Being president of the HLR wasn't offered as a rebuttal to the experience issue. But, it is also not relevant to the "he went to X" argument. In fact, the opposite argument can be made. Obama didn't just attend an Ivy League school - he had significant accomplishments there.

“I [blog commentor Harry Hopkins, quoted at link] remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

“The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

“With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ ”

Can they understand what they read? Can they follow a logical argument?

I'm not convinced they can.

R.S. McCain is making a strawman argument, as neither David Brooks nor Andrew Sullivan would argue that an Ivy League degree is a requirement for one who seeks high office. And Sully and Brooks probably represent the snob apex, so there's no reason to suppose that this prejudice exists at all, let alone that it is as widely held as McCain wants us to believe.

There are several overlapping arguments. I would agree that few think an Ivy degree is literally a requirement for the presidency. It has, however, seemingly become a requirement for the Supreme Court.

OTOH, there's a large swath of elite opinion that holds that an Ivy League degree is, a priori, qualification for office and an indication of superb judgment and intellect.

I heard constantly during the campaign that, despite his near total lack of high level leadership experience, that Obama was president of Harvard Law Review and therefore obviously qualified. Or, in the Harriet Miers-Sonia Sotomayor comparison, I saw it pointed out that the former went to SMU while the latter went to Yale.

Now, I thought neither Palin nor Miers were qualified -- or, at least, well qualified -- for the jobs they were nominated to. But the citation of degrees for people in mid-career has long struck me as dubious.

irony of decrying a meritocracy of IQ while engaging in a different form of it

Another irony: I'm sure McCain is just fine with the outcome of the New Haven firefighters' case, at the center of which was success on a written exam. I guess some meritocracies have more merit than others.

McCain fashions this strawman from the fact of the widespread derision of Sarah Palin. But just because Palin was generally deemed not smart or accomplished enough to be the running mate of a 72-year-old cancer survivor, doesn't mean that there's some artificially high standard in place (Jack Cafferty's half-baked thought notwithstanding; one's reluctance to vote for Alec Baldwin, even if one sympathizes with his politics, surely has more to do with his unsettled personal life (note the blatant contrast with Franken in this regard) than where he or anyone he might run against went to college).

"This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them."

I think he also made a comment at one point about there being almost no difference between the decisions of the highly educated and the general public, other than the highly educated have learned to do a better job rationalizing their prejudices.

Baldwin doesn’t so much dismiss the absurdity of that argument as point out he himself went to NYU.

He also points out that Cafferty is throwing stones from a glass house, in a particularly biting way.

Many jobs in media and public policy, for example, require an entry level apprenticeship in DC or New York for little or no pay. It never seriously occurred to me to apply for any internships or to take a job making next to nothing in a big city when a real paycheck was a ready alternative.

I did a politics internship for no pay, but it's definitely rough. The only reason I could do it was because I had savings, and even then, I went into some credit card debt to pay rent.

And that was when I was partially subsidized by student loans, going to college at the same time. Try to do that while living on your own, with no savings, in a highly expensive area to live.

Steve

Rigor in the non-mortis sense.

Does anyone think we've got a government loaded with people who think carefully and precisely about the legislation they craft? Or are they pretty much just cooking up new ways to pander to constituencies? And if pandering is the crux of the job, why not just hire waiters or former personal assistants to celebrities? Or women who've retired after long service at the Mustang Ranch?

Of course then the pandering wouldn't be artfully concealed within hundreds of pages of legalese . . . ah, now I get it. That's why we elect lawyers.

used an ROTC scholorship as an undergrad (as I did also), you were not eligible for post-grad GI Bill.....how does that work?

Not sure but I actually DIDN'T use the ROTC scholarship. In those days, scholarship students couldn't participate in the Army Reserve/ROTC Simultaneous Membership Program. Because JSU's tuition was very low ($400/semester when I started in 1986) I was financially better off taking the $100/month ROTC Advanced Program stipend, $145/month as an E5 in the Reserves, and $135/month for GI Bill.

Ordinarily, I'd have been ineligible to use GI Bill again in grad school. But they (temporarily?) changed the rules during the post-Cold War drawdown and, indeed, allowed me to pay a lump sum $1300 or so to buy 3 years of GI Bill benefits at separation. Considering I was headed to grad school, it was a sweet deal.