ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, october 24, 2010 INSIDE
Bad call Clarence Thomas’s Worst Week. B2
Bringing up the rear In praise of a marathon’s losers. B3
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 L.A. confidential James Ellroy dishes about his lifelong obsession with women. B7
Pakistan’s Kennedys The Bhuttos, from Harvard degrees to untimely deaths. B7 Tale of the teeth Ron Chernow on the strange story of Washington’s dentures. B6
5 new elite? Are you part of the 1
Do you know who Jim- mie Johnson is? (The
really famous one, not the football coach.)
YES NO 2
Can you identify military ranks by uniform insignias?
YES NO stand for? YES NO 3
Do you know what MMA and UFC
4
Do you know what Branson, Mo., is
famous for? YES NO 5
Have you ever attended a meeting
of a Kiwanis or Rotary club?
YES NO 6
Do you know who re- placed Bob Barker
as host of “The Price Is Right?”
YES NO
than 25,000 people? (During college doesn’t count.)
7 YES NO
Have you ever lived in a town with fewer
8
Can you name the authors of the “Left Behind” series?
YES NO 9
Do you live in an area where most people lack college de- grees? (Gentrifying neigh- borhoods don’t count.)
YES NO Turn to B4 for an answer sheet . . . and to find out how elite you are. The tea party is right. The ruling class is out of touch. by Charles Murray
Glenn Beck explained last month, “and the other side, we have the regular peo- ple.” The elites are “no longer in touch with what the country is really think- ing,” Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, “I didn’t go to
T
that killed four young girls at the Six- teenth Street Baptist Church across town. In the paralyzing fear of that mo- ment, no one knew whether other churches were targeted. The episode re- vealed the fragility of the protective en- vironment Rice’s parents sought to cre- ate for her in the South’s most segregat- ed city: They were virtually powerless in the face of what Rice describes as the “homegrown terrorism” directed against Birmingham’s black children. Readers looking for insights into Rice’s thinking and actions as national
O
he tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.
“On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host
Yale,” she could be confident that her supporters would approve. All this has made the New Elite dis-
tinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd’s “Making Ignorance Chic”), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg’s “Elitist Non- sense”) and defensive (see Anne Apple- baum’s “The Rise of the ‘Ordinary’ Elite”). “Elite?” they seem to be saying.
“Who? Us?” Why are the members of the New Elite feeling so put upon? They didn’t object back in 1991, when Robert Reich said we had a new class of symbolic analysts in his book “The Work of Na- tions.” They didn’t raise a fuss in 2000 when David Brooks took an anthropol- ogist’s eye to their exotic tribe and la-
beled them bourgeois bohemians in “Bobos in Paradise.” And they were surely pleased when Richard Florida celebrated their wonderfulness in his 2002 work, “The Rise of the Creative Class.” That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really contro- versial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other ob- servers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are iso- lated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans. Let me propose that those allega- tions have merit.
One of the easiest ways to make the
point is to start with the principal gate- way to membership in the New Elite, the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities. In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peo- pled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work. That idealized view is only half- right. Over the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds. But the skyrocketing test scores of the freshman classes at
elite continued on B4 Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.” of soybeans? YES NO 10
IMAGES: ASSOCIATED PRESS, BIGSTOCK PHOTO, THE WASHINGTON POST
QUIZ BY CHARLES MURRAY Can you identify a field BOOK REVIEW
Where it all started for Condoleezza Rice
by Patricia Sullivan
n Sept. 15, 1963, 8-year-old Condoleezza Rice was in her father’s church in Birming- ham, Ala., when a loud thud echoed from the explosion
EXTRAORDINARY, ORDINARY PEOPLE A Memoir of Family By Condoleezza Rice Crown. 342 pp. $27
security adviser and secretary of state under George W. Bush will not find them in “Extraordinary, Ordinary Peo- ple.” The subtitle, “A Memoir of Family,” describes the focus and scope of this en- gaging book. While the last third pro- vides a cursory account of the academic and professional trajectory that culmi- nates with Rice’s appointment in the Bush administration, the book, at its core, is a coming-of-age story during the final years of segregation and its af- termath. Rice’s account of her parents and her family life in Alabama and later
rice continued on B2 ST. MARY’S ACADEMY, 1969-1970 YEARBOOK
Patricia Sullivan teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of “Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.”
A teenage Condoleezza Rice with friends outside St. Mary’s Academy in Cherry Hills, Colo. Rice spent her early childhood in Birmingham, Ala.
spoof, a multilayered joke-inside-a-joke not only on the politicians and blowhards who hold rallies but on your own audi- ence, which should have known better, and on Oprah and Arianna and even President Obama, who were all so quick to jump on the bandwagon. That would be gutsy — and funny. I hate to write this, because I’m a fan.
P
From those early I’m-taking-over-from- Craig-Kilborn ads with you posing as a terrified war correspondent to your Glenn Beck chalkboard takeoff, I’ve been a faith- ful and demographically predictable 18- to-49-year-old viewer of “The Daily Show” (and, since 2005, a citizen of Colbert Na- tion).
But this rally just doesn’t feel right. When all is well with the universe, you’re the guy mercilessly mocking people who hold political rallies, not the guy organiz- ing them. This “Rally to Restore Sanity” feels just a little too . . . what’s the word . . . earnest for you. I know, I know, it’s a satire, a sendup of
rallies, a rally against rallies, a mockery of the entire concept, a grass-roots-inspired, user-generated parody. I get it — and at first, it worked. Your pre-announcement announcement on Sept. 7 (“I, Jon Stewart,
rally continued on B5
Carlos Lozada is the editor of The Washington Post’s Outlook section.
B DC MD VA B
myths about young voters. B2
Cancel the rally, Jon. For our sanity.
by Carlos Lozada
lease, Jon. There’s still time. Cancel the rally. Call in sick. Say you couldn’t
get a sitter. Even better, say it was all an Andy Kaufman-esque
What the health-care law failed to cure
by Alec MacGillis T
he health-care law of 2010 is, as Vice President Biden put it, a “big [expletive] deal.” It sets us on the road to universal health insurance. It is a favor-
ite target for Republicans gunning to take over Congress. Lawmakers who supported it could lose their jobs. And it will remain a central focus after the mid- terms, as Democrats defend it against le- gal and political challenges through 2014, when it takes full effect. But the Democrats’ effort to sell the
law to the public may be undermined by what even some ardent supporters con- sider its biggest shortfall. The overhaul left virtually untouched one big element of our health-care dilemma: the price problem. Simply put, Americans pay much more for each bit of care — tests, procedures, hospital stays, drugs, devic- es — than people in other rich nations. Health-care providers in the United
States have tremendous power to set prices. There is no government “single payer” on the other side of the table, and consolidation by hospitals and doctors has left insurers and employers in weak negotiating positions. “We spend fewer per capita days in the hospital compared with other advanced countries, we see the doctor less fre- quently, and we swallow fewer pills,”
health care continued on B5
Alec MacGillis covers domestic policy for The Washington Post and is a co-author of “Landmark: The Inside Story of America’s New Health-Care Law and What It Means for Us All.”
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