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The 2008 Presidential campaign has been underway since 2004, but only now has the list of candiates begun to congeal.  So how to winnow things down?  We’ve griped about the fact that Ronald Reagan was the last President that wasn’t a product of an Ivy League school, either as an undergraduate, a graduate, or both.  So it makes sense that candidates that are have a significant advantage.  Let’s see who these might be.

The Republicans start off at a disadvantage; of the major candidates, only Mitt Romney fits the bill (as one would expect a Governor of Massachusetts to.)  Although we have grave reservations about nominating him, doing otherwise will put the party at a handicap. That includes a "ring knocker" like John McCain.

The Democrats are in a better position with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry.  (So much for the "Breck Girl!")

We need to ask why, in a country as diverse as ours it, this is so.  We believe there are two reasons for this.

The first is that the selective admission process–bolstered by the long line of people to get in–will inevitably include a disproportionate portion of high-achieving people.

The second is that the Ivy League presents to its students–especially those in law and business–a view of the world that is decidedly closed and orderly, and on top of that gives them a chance to view that world from a high perch.  Reprojecting this to the American people is actually comforting to the latter, especially with the daily uncertainties they face.

The problem with this is that the U.S.’ main power challengers–the Muslim Arabs, a "closed circle" of their own–are people who play by an entirely different set of rules.  The Cold War, a relatively set-piece business, for the most part could be managed by people with an Ivy League mentality.  This one can’t, which is why we’re stuck with two unworkable alternatives to solve our problem in Iraq and no Plan C.

Electing Ivy Leaguers is like eating "comfort food:" it tastes good and fills us up, but our health goes downhill all the same.

We hope that Ann Coulter is happy with this state of affairs.  (For a different perspective, click here.)

There are three good reasons why increasing troop strength in Iraq is counterproductive for U.S. interest, to say nothing of anyone else’s.

The first is the current nature of the U.S. military.  After the end of the Cold War, structural changes took place to make the U.S. military more flexible for smaller threats in more places as opposed to the set-piece nature of that conflict.  That’s why we’ve seen so much use of the reserve and National Guard units.  Our military isn’t well set up for long-term occupations to start with; increasing troop strength will only force our brave men and women to play a road game with their weakness against an enemy’s strength.  This is not good.

Second, even if there were an increase, we don’t have the stomach to allow them the rules of engagement to get the job done.  We just saw the execution of someone whose own rules of engagement were too brutal for Western sensibiities.  But his MO was consistent with six millennia of Middle Eastern practice, disgusting as it was.  We’re now seen as power holders, and effectively dealing with the challengers Middle East style is just something we won’t do.

Third, even if we did adopt Middle Eastern methods of power holding, we really don’t know which side to favour or crush.  Heartless at it sounds, for U.S. interests the current state of conflict in Iraq between Sunni and Sh’ia is probaby the best result it can obtain.  The greatest Islamic/Arab weakness is the tendency for them to fight amongst themselves, and given the West’s lack of confidence in its own civilisation and general willingness to fight for it, this is probably as good as it gets.

Americans instinctively always think they have to "do something" about every problem around them.  But Christians–who come from a faith where the most important work was done for us–need to recognise that there are problems that, the more we do, the worse it gets.  This is one of them, in the land not so far from where our Saviour walked.

At last we start a new year. The American voters spoke that they wanted something different; what they got was a Democratically controlled Congress. The left would like for you to believe that this is the greatest thing to happen to this country since Engle vs. Vitale. The rest of us look for analogies in Paris in 1789 and Petrograd in 1917. Back in the days before these revolutions, people in the West received a good classical education with Roman and Greek authors. Their knowledge of Greek and Latin pervaded their use of English, and they could trade quotations from these authors as a form of communication. The impact of classical education is one reason why Americans find nineteenth century prose hard to comprehend; we simply don’t (as a rule) have a high enough calibre education in language to grasp it.

One of those authors was Tacitus, who was one of the harder ones to read. His prose was sharp, biting and terse, and made for many quotable epigrams. (Christianity furnished a rival to him in Tertullian.) One of those concerned the Emperor Galba, who reigned in the “one and long year,” 69 A.D., when Nero was murdered and the Empire went through three emperors before ending up with Vespasian, whose son Titus was the one who ploughed Jerusalem under the following year. According to Tacitus, Galba’s reign was short because he was “capax imperii, nisi imperasset”–able to rule unless he actually did so (Histories, 1,17.) Galba was a hard man in times when troops were looking for a payoff from the man they wanted to lead them. So they shortly dumped him for Otho, then Vitellius…

Rome never quite worked out a regular method of succession after ditching the Republic, and the fact that they had a long run of peaceful transitions was a marvel. But when they dumped an Emperor, they did so without regard to the calendar. In the U.S., we have an organised method of elections and terms, so we only give our people an opportunity at the federal level every two years to express their content or discontent. Although in a fast-moving world two years can seem like an eternity, as long as we hear whining about the terms being too short, we can be assured it’s often enough.

Now we have a new Congress. Will they be able to deliver for the American people? Part of the problem is that they’re not up there delivering for us, but for the special interest groups that put them there. But another part of the problem is that we’re basically choosing between two parts of the same generation of people. Ever since the early 1980’s, American politics have been dominated by Baby Boomers at the polls. The full effect was delayed by Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, but ever since the Great Arkie took office in 1993, we have had Boomers in full power. The Boomers like to refer to their parents as “the greatest generation.” Their performance in the last quarter century or so has borne that out. The Boomers have three trademarks that make them unsuited to leave anything but a mess as a legacy:

1. Boomers are absolutists. They only see things their way. How this plays out depends upon what side of the badly split political and social spectrum. One the left, with relativistic morality as the ostensible lodestar, the result is simple: hypocrisy, of the worst kind. On the right, it leads to the blind optimism and simplistic methodologies that have dogged the Bush administration. The most obvious result of this dichotomy is the dilemma we face with the war on Islamic careerism. It’s like Christian comedian Mark Lowry’s description of the old-time Baptists: not always right, but never in doubt. This leads to another characteristic of Boomers: they’re tyrants, but we take that up elsewhere.
2. Boomers are obsessed with credentials. This is a major reason why we have not had a non-Ivy league educated President since Ronald Reagan. It also explains why, in a country which is supposed to be the trend-setter in upward social mobility, we have bounced the presidency between two families for nearly twenty years now (and that trend doesn’t show a sign of relief either.) Boomers simply cannot bring themselves to select leaders realistically. They are simply too obsessed with the fact that they have more formal education than any American generation before them. The only major exception to this is in business, where the bottom line, widespread deregulation and the advance of technology have insured some degree of real merit.
3. Boomers are profligate. Their sexual profligacy is legendary, but their financial profligacy in some ways exceeds that, if it’s possible. Boomers came from a generation of savers whose experience was moulded by depression and war. They’ve managed to run through that and then proceed to plunge themselves and their government into a deeper hole. Today everyone’s worried about what will happen to Social Security when the Boomers start retiring in 2010. The answer is simple: they can’t afford to retire in 2010 or for many years thereafter! They’re too deep in the hole!

Much of the problem stems from the slide of the Boomer generation that seems to worm its way into prominence and power: products of the upper reaches of society who were educated in its elite schools. It’s no credit to the rest of the generation that they have allowed this group to predominate, but they have. This was driven home recently when I discovered that I went to prep school with Paul Bremer’s cousin. I remember Paul Bremer’s cousin, along with many of his colleagues. No wonder we’re in trouble in Iraq! Will the Republic survive this generation? My optimism has been fading lately. In a country where the rule of law is an obsession, we have forgotten that both law and country are no better than the people who must administer and abide by those rules. Now we face an enemy that many Boomers are too provincial to understand and too triumphalistic to believe can beat them. May God help the United States as we endure the generation that is fit to rule unless it actually does so.