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Jewish World Review
April 6, 2006
/ 8 Nissan, 5766
The Stature Gap
By
Bob Tyrrell
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Reportedly, following the replacement of Andy Card
as White House Chief of Staff by Joshua Bolten more changes of
Administration personnel are expected. Also there are the sudden openings at
the White House, namely the vacancy Bolten leaves at the Office of
Management and Budget and the need to replace Claude Allen as domestic
policy adviser. The problem the president and his staff have is finding
replacements with "stature." That is the word used in the media, "stature."
Well I shall admit that finding men and women of stature to take
positions in American public life is a problem. I suppose Britney Spears has
stature, but having as White House domestic policy adviser a woman with an
exposed belly button would be inappropriate, even ridiculous. In the past a
president's chief domestic policy adviser arrived at the position with
stature, as Allen did not. The most famous was, probably, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, who held that position in the Nixon administration early in what
was to be Moynihan's long career in public life. Yet, though he was
relatively young when he came to the Nixon administration, he was not
without stature. He had already served with distinction in the Johnson
administration. Before that, as an academic and writer, he was already
famous for his learned observations about poverty, the black family, welfare
reform and other domestic conditions. When Moynihan moved on the United
Nations and then to the Senate, other intellectuals of unquestioned stature
were suggested for the office, most notably, Irving Kristol, who was then
known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism.
There were in the 1960s and 1970s a lot of relatively young
people arriving in government abounding with stature, for instance, Henry
Kissinger, George Shultz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Outside of public service,
in the realm of public thought, there were plenty of intellectuals of
stature. Recall if you will William F. Buckley, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith
or Gore Vidal — my old pal. Who are their equivalents today? Well, yes,
there is Spears and, I guess, Paris Hilton.
I can think of no time in the history of the country when public
life was so full of people without stature. The statureless condition exists
for Democrats, too. Who were the public figures of stature that came in with
the Clinton Administration? True, eventually there was a young woman about
the age of Spears and Hilton, but she actually gained
her stature in the administration. When she arrived she was no Pat Moynihan
or Henry Kissinger.
Usually when I raise a problem in this column I arrive with the
answer in hand. On this matter of stature, however, I am pretty much at a
loss. Certainly the intellectual credentials of the people whom either a
Republican or a Democratic president might appoint to a government post are
as impressive as ever. Yet for some reason even highly credentialed
candidates for public service have no stature.
The other day, I put this question to Henry Manne, an
accomplished economist now in retirement who has been a major figure in
economic study for several decades. He too was at a loss. Yet he did venture
this thought. The economists who gained stature in the past, for instance
Milton Friedman and George Stigler, gained their eminence because they
solved big problems. There do not seem to be many such big problems to solve
nowadays. This might also explain the lack of stature among Moynihan's
successors in the social sciences. The serious problems that social
scientists tangled with from the 1930s through the 1970s are now
sufficiently ameliorated; for instance what was once called "urban decay,"
for instance racism and extreme poverty.
That leaves us with the question of why yesteryear's public
thinkers of stature have not been replaced. I am sure that amongst the
liberal brethren there are many who are perfectly content that Michael Moore
and Al Franken are liberal intellectuals comparable to Galbraith and Vidal,
and possibly in some ways, they are. Yet who from the right is the
equivalent in terms of stature of Buckley? Is it one of our radio talk
hosts? Not even Rush Limbaugh would make such a claim. I would welcome your
thoughts. Why do public servants and public thinkers not attract the esteem
they had in earlier eras?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.
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