At the risk of having my blogger credentials revoked,
At the risk of having my blogger credentials revoked, Bill Kristol makes a few fair points today (and a few unfair ones) in his review of Barack Obama‘s commencement address at Wesleyan University. In listening to his speeches, I too have been annoyed by Obama’s habit of implying that his Chicago community organizer post was his first job out of college. In Dreams from My Father, Obama quite clearly describes the gig he worked for his first two years out of Columbia University, working as an in-house copy-writer for a New York City financial firm. The fact that Obama left that career path to go into organizing is, in a way, an even more heartening element of his biography than had he, all starry-eyed, gone into progressive work straight out of college and then, disillusioned, become a corporate copy writer. Turning your back on a high salary is much harder to do (I imagine) once you’ve actually experienced the perks.
That said, Kristol’s attack on Obama for not mentioning the military as a “way to serve” is straight out of the Nixonian play book of vilifying academia and the young people who occupy it. Yes, it would have been respectful and politically prudent for Obama to recognize young American troops in his speech. Had he done so, my guess is that the Wesleyan crowd would have broken into applause, not, as Kristol so insultingly streotypes, sat back in a “placid atmosphere of easy self-congratulation.”
—Dana Goldstein
