Brooks on The Messiah

David Brooks no longer has to pull out his knee pads to worship at the feet of Obamamania; he just keeps them on all the time.

Here's his take on The Messiah's disciples.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.

The fact that they can already leak one big appointee per day is testimony to an awful lot of expert staff work. Unlike past Democratic administrations, they are not just handing out jobs to the hacks approved by the favored interest groups. They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically. As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute notes, it was smart to name Tom Daschle both the head of Health and Human Services and the health czar. Splitting those duties up, as Bill Clinton did, leads to all sorts of conflicts.

Most of all, they are picking Washington insiders. Or to be more precise, they are picking the best of the Washington insiders.

Did it ever occur to one D. Brooks that our current economic crises are a direct result of the Harvard MBA types' management of their respective disciplines? Let me guess, it was a bunch of bubba deer hunters who came up with the idea of credit default swaps?

Let's take a look at some random blue blood....

Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, MBA Harvard.

Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup, PhD from Columbia.

Jeff Immelt, CEO GE, MBA Harvard.

Franklin Raines, CEO Fannie Mae, JD Harvard Law School, Rhodes Scholar.

Forgive me if I'm not impressed with these genius's management of government and companies. As the late William Buckley would say "I'd rather be governed by 2000 random names from the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty".