Michael Kinsley says: W got into Yale based on a sort of affirmative action as well
If our President had the slightest sense of irony, he might have paused to ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?" It wasn't because of any academic achievement: his high school record was ordinary. It wasn't because of his life experience - prosperous family, fancy prep school - which was all too familiar at Yale. It wasn't his SAT scores: 566 verbal and 640 math.George W. Bush, in fact, may be the most spectacular affirmative-action success story of all time. Until 1994, when he was 48 years old and got elected Governor of Texas, his life was almost empty of accomplishments. Yet bloodlines and connections had put him into Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, and even finally provided him with a fortune after years of business disappointments. Intelligence, hard work and the other qualities associated with the concept of merit had almost nothing to do with Bush's life and success up to that point. And yet seven years later he was President of the U.S.
| George W. Bush | Affirmative Action | Legacies |
I don't know how you do intentations in your blog software, but in html it's easy. You put a "blockquote" tag before and after the section. It's the "less than" sign, blockquote, and the "greater than" sign -- the one after the section has a slash in it, just like when you end an italics section.
Comment #1 :: link :: January 31, 2003 09:00 AMTrue enough, but it’s semantically better to use the syntax. The drawback with that one is that user agents (read: browsers) tend to put the ugly versions of quotation marks before and after the text quoted. If you don’s like them, as I don’t, you can also use the syntax. Even better, add a class attribute to the CITE opening tag and ask Mike to style the class so that it indents.
Like so: Now is the winter of our discontent.
(Last I checked, the comments system was keeping HTML other than the subset listed below the comments entry box as entered, so the above should show exacly what I’ve input.)
Jim’s a tax wonk, I get paid to know this stuff.
Without getting into the affirmative action thing, I'll mention I saw a report last week saying SAT scores are predictors of a student's college performance in less than 10% of admissions.
Your post seems to equate SAT scores and intelligence, at best an extremely dubious linkage. My SATs suggested I was borderline retard, but I made dean's list as a college junior - in spite of some tough-ass professors and absolutely zero grade inflation where I went to school.
There's also what some refer to as "social intelligence", and while Bush may not be able to find Kathmandu on a map, he's credited with being extremely good at working with people. We forget that pre-9/11, his administration had a string of legislative successes almost unparalleled by a 1st-year prez since FDR.
I would not doubt it if, after 40-something years of underachievment and privilige, some guys went to Bush and said, "We want to you to run for governor, so we can run you for president after that." Heck, the entire history of guys running for president is generally extremely tawdry almost always involves big-time privilige.
What matters to most people now is, has W's intelligence served the nation since he was... selected?
somewhere (unfortunately, i can't remember where) i read that bush's credentials were kind of pathetic even by yale's then evidently laxer standards, and that he may have been admitted at least in part because he was "from" texas. to add a little flavor to the class, you see.
i'm not sure i was convinced, but it would still make for even more irony if he were admitted not as a legacy but in the interest of diversity.
