I don't know about you, but I like my President educated. So when people start throwing the word "elite" around, I always wonder exactly what they mean by "elite."
I think of elite as being the best.
That's not what some people think of as elite, at least in a political sense. The Elite are all the people making all the really stupid decisions over which you have no control. Its an amorphous group, to be sure.
I think some people use the term to describe a group of people who make the most money or have the most power.
As an adult, a person is probably in an elite class if, when they were in grade school, they got made fun of for getting good grades. Not so much in college, although that's where I started to experience it.
You know, your friend walks up after a test and says in a condescending tone:
"I bet you got an A"
and you think to yourself: "is there any other grade?"
There is always some schlep who got to the top by mistake, but in a vast majority of the cases people who made best grades in school end up with the most money and/or the most power. Face it.
And well, a good number of people will grow to hate you because of that. If you're a liberal elite, the unthinking conservative will hate you, and if you are a conservative elite, the unthinking liberal will hate you.
By unthinking I mean people who don't have the ability to think about two sides of an issue and decide which side they think makes the most sense. These unthinking people usually get their opinions from the radio, or from a blog (like this one), or they can take the easy way out and just tow the party line (groupthink at its finest).
Wow. I do digress...sorry.
And now for something completely different:
Here now, the educational backgrounds of the major and minor elites (pick your own definition of elite), in alphabetical order:Hillary ClintonJD, Yale University, 1973
BA, Wellesley College, 1969.
John McCainNational War College, 1973-1974
BS, United States Naval Academy, 1958.
Ralph NaderLLB, Harvard Law School, 1958
AB, East Asian Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University, 1955
Attended, Gilbert School, 1951.
Barack Obama JD, Harvard Law School, 1991
BA, Columbia University, 1983
Attended, Occidental College.
Ron PaulMD, Duke University, 1967
BS, Gettysburg College, 1957.
Labels: Barack Obama, Elite Politics, Hillary Clinton, Presidential Election, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, United+States