Best not always the "brightest"

You know in yesterdays post I was discussing the value of meritocracies in relation to the soon to be vacated Clinton Senate seat. Shortly thereafter I ran across this article discussing the coming Obama administration and the need for many of those cabinet positions to be filled not on pedigree but on merit. In it Frank Rich uses the source of the now popular term The Best and The Brightest, the study of the JFK administration by David Halberstam, to analyze some of Obamas picks for cabinet members. While I didn’t agree with all of the assumptions made in Halberstams book when I originally read it, and I don’t agree with all of Frank Rich’s conclusions in his article, I do appreciate the fact that someone is at least trying to highlight the fact that a team of Ivy leaguers with little real world success is not what the nation needs at this juncture. And it appears with the appointment of Richardson and Volcker it’s not what we’re going to get. But it’s still nice to hear someone else worry about it aloud.

As Sam Rayburn said, “They may be every bit as intelligent as you say,but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”