Another of Newsweek?s frequent offenders, Jonathan Alter, makes some good points with his latest piece. He?s no fan of government run by ?whiz kids.?
So why such faith in the fruit of the meritocracy? Obamaworld is loaded with the exact types [author Walter] Kirn excoriates, policy wonks who have experienced little in life but sound unfailingly articulate and confident about their elegant economic models?whiz kids with Wharton, instead of world war, on their r?sum?s. One senior Obama official says he feels a bit inferior. He went to Harvard Law School, but his undergraduate degree is merely from Georgetown. The horror!
Alter hurts his case, though, when residual Bush hatred skews the following paragraph. Obama might be relying too much on brainiacs, Alter tells us, but at least those brains make up for the ?second-raters? from the Bush years. Plus ?replacing an ideology-driven White House with a data-driven one is a big improvement.?
One could contest the notion that data drives Obama?s crowd to any greater extent than it drove the Bush administration. (Wasn?t one major criticism of Bush his apparent preoccupation with the number of enemy deaths inflicted in Iraq?)
Rather than engage in that debate, though, I would point to the simple fact that a government driven by data is driven by ideology, an ideology that places statistics ahead of respect for individual freedom and reliance on tradition and common sense.
