| 摘要 | Increasingly over the last few decades, presidents, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices have filled the top ranks of their staff with men and women who have spent most of their lives since turning 18 in elite institutions. Those institutions include exclusive universities and graduate schools; top law, consulting and Wall Street firms; and government institutions like the judiciary and executive branches.
Don’t get me wrong. Many of these individuals are good people with high IQs and great schooling. Perhaps that is the problem. Our leaders are geniuses who can debate the nuances of Keynesian economic theory, why a footnote in a 100-year-old Supreme Court case will determine the outcome of a constitutional issue today, or how a Westphalian foreign policy approach can calm the Middle East. They, however, miss the forest for the trees. As a result, they use their God-given brainpower to devise policy that theoretically sounds good, but fails to work in the real world.
As a result, our government is run by people so thoroughly disconnected from the common sense of Main Street America that they utterly fail to understand why, as Peggy Noonan noted, the “unprotected” are now rebelling. We have not had a president who hailed from a non-Ivy league school since Ronald Reagan (Eureka College ’32), arguably one of the best presidents in the modern era. The last non-elite school Supreme Court justice was Warren Burger (Minnesota (night school) ’29, William Mitchell Law ’31), appointed 47 years ago in 1969.
Take the four people who have served as secretaries of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They are all good people. I worked with two of them during my nearly two and a half years at DHS. Tom Ridge (Harvard, ’67) comes the closest to an average American, as he came from a modest background and fought with distinction in Vietnam after being drafted. Ridge served as an elected official from 1980 until becoming DHS secretary. Michael Chertoff (Harvard ’75, Law ’78) may be the smartest person I’ve ever known, and he surrounded himself with amazingly smart people, as well. Chertoff spent the bulk of his career working for government as a prosecutor.
Janet Napolitano (Virginia Law ’83) spent most of her career in government as a prosecutor and elected official, too. Jeh Johnson (Columbia Law ’82) largely practiced law in New York City. At least Ridge and Napolitano served as governors, so had some experience running large, complex organizations before their DHS tenure – though neither is known for having highly rated gubernatorial tenures. The other two became secretaries without ever having run a complex organization. All four are lawyers (because we don’t have enough lawyers in Washington) who have lived and worked among the nation’s elite since shortly after high school.
Their disconnect, as with other top leaders, from Main Street America stems from their lack of non-legal, non-government experience and leads to policy inefficiency and outright failure. At DHS, we referred to it as the crisis-de-jour environment inherent in working for a sprawling entity with so many components prone to making mistakes.
In my limited time, we had to deal with crises on the allocation of counterterrorism funds, border security, what TSA was doing to secure travel, cargo security concerns, President George W. Bush’s proposed comprehensive immigration reform package, and responding to hundreds of congressional hearings, thousands of congressional reporting requirements, and tens of thousands of congressional questions for the record. We also had to manage through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Keep in mind, our primary job was dealing with terrorist attacks. Beyond what made the news, we had to process terrorist threats on a daily basis.
All too often the responses to these crises formulated by the elites, despite all their education, appeased political bosses (see turning terrorism funding into pork barrel spending; focusing on right-wing extremism instead of radical Islamic terrorism), failed when executed (see securing the border; visa screening), or imposed burdens on Americans and businesses without an increase in security (see TSA passenger screening;100 percent cargo screening mandate). Not surprisingly, DHS has the lowest employee morale in the federal government and still has much to do to come close to fulfilling its mission.
The simplest answer to a complex problem is usually the right answer. Simple, unfortunately, isn’t synonymous with superior academic achievement. Simple often requires a large dose of common sense and a base understanding how an action will impact the real world. People who haven’t lived in the non-elite real world since high school, no matter how well-intentioned and smart, struggle with those two vital elements.
Perhaps our government doesn’t work well because those running it aren’t tethered to how the rest of America lives and works. Government simply has gotten too clever by half.
No matter who wins the presidential election, the Ivy League will maintain its streak of producing America’s top leader (Hillary Clinton, Yale Law ’73; Donald Trump, Penn ’68). However unlikely, it would be nice if the winner injected some fresh blood from Main Street America into their administration. With a little more common sense and practical experience in Washington, our government might just start getting a few things right. |
