Meritocracy vs. a Bully Pulpit
November 3, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Will an Obama Presidency herald in a new era of Bully Pulpit activity on favored left-wing causes such as affirmative action and will he fill his administration with minorities and other disenfranchised appointments? I don’t think so.
Russ Daggat has a post up today descibing Barack Obama’s time as President of the Harvard Law Review. The Harvard Law school at that time was strongly polarized along political lines and when Obama was made President of the Law Review, many left-wingers thought they had finally gotten their turn; expecting him to use the modest powers of the President to further their causes, appoint minorities to positions on the Review, etc. Instead, Obama refrained from such activities. Bradford Berenson (Harvard Law, class of ‘91; associate White House counsel, 2001-2003) said of Obama:
He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review. …
This gibes with everything I’ve seen of Obama so far and I am hopeful that President Obama will work to restore one of the foundations of our country: the professional cadres of career government workers and mliitary officers that the Bush administration has done so much damage to over the past eight years.
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