Since we're now all fascinated by Scott Walker, there's been some discussion in the past few days of the fact that Walker would be the first president in many decades who didn't have a college degree. He left Marquette after four years, and though he apparently was quite a few credits short of graduating, most people would regard it as an unwise career move when you've come that far. Nevertheless, Walker did fine for himself, and some conservatives are now holding up his example as a triumphant rebuke to liberal elitism. Anticipating the scorn Walker will receive from those elitists, they rattle off lists of the high-achievers who didn't get a degree, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
From what I can tell, the only liberal who has actually said that Walker's lack of a degree is problematic was Howard Dean, in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe. But Dean's one comment keeps getting cited (see Glenn Reynolds or Deroy Murdock or Charles C.W. Cooke or Chris Cillizza) as evidence that "liberals" are looking down their snooty noses at Walker, and by extension, at the majority of Americans who don't have a college degree.
Which leads me to believe that this is a vein Republicans may be tapping into repeatedly, particularly if Walker becomes the GOP nominee. It wouldn't be anything new, though if he himself indulged in it, Walker could come by resentment of pointy-headed intellectuals a little more honestly than, say, George H.W. Bush, graduate of Phillips Andover and Yale, who sneered in 1988 that Michael Dukakis represented the "Harvard boutique." Walker also recently started battling the University of Wisconsin (beloved within the state, but about which voters in Iowa have no similar feelings, I'm guessing), which should help him portray himself as a crusader against the tenured enemies of real Americans.
Anti-intellectualism has often been an effective way for Republicans to stir up class resentment while distracting from economic issues. It says to voters: Don't think about who has economic power and which party is advocating for their interests. Don't aim your disgruntlement at Wall Street, or corporations that don't pay taxes, or the people who want to keep wages low and make unions a memory. Point it in a different direction, at college professors and intellectuals (and Hollywood, while you're at it). They're the ones keeping you down. You got laid off while the CEO took home $20 million last year? Forget about that: The real person to be angry at is a professor of anthropology somewhere who said something mean about Scott Walker because he doesn't have a degree.
There are going to be more than a few Republicans who see in that argument a handy way to shift the discussion away from economic inequality while still sending the message that they're on the side of ordinary folks. Here, for instance, is Rush Limbaugh yesterday:
The stories are legion of all the great Americans, successful, who have not graduated from college. And of course the two names that come to people's mind right off the bat are me and Steve Jobs. And then some people throw Gates in there. So there are three people who have reached the pinnacle, who have not gone to college, and those two or three names get bandied about all the time in this discussion.
But it doesn't matter. To the elites, that doesn't matter, it doesn't mean that they are qualified to be in the elite group. And the elite group in Washington is what we call the ruling class or the D.C. establishment, both parties, or what have you. And it's especially bad in the Drive-By Media. That is one of the most exclusive and I should say exclusionary groups of people that you can imagine.
If you look at it as a club and look at the admittance requirements, it is one of the most exclusives things to get into. It doesn't matter how successful you are, doesn't matter how much money you make, whether you're more successful than they are, whether you earn more than they do, whether you have a bigger audience than they, doesn't matter, you are not getting in that club.
Something tells me that somewhere at the RNC there's an intern who just got an assignment to monitor every bit of mainstream and social media she can for any moment where a liberal says something condescending about Walker. Then Republicans can wave it about like the bloody shirt of liberal elitism. It's a lot easier than coming up with an economic plan that doesn't involve upper-income tax cuts.
