MARTIN F. NOLAN

We elect people, not pedigrees

By Martin F. Nolan, Globe Staff, June 23, 1999

Since the first "log cabin" election in 1840, presidential candidates have tried to insulate themselves from an American suspicion of aristocrats by claiming kinship with the common folk. In 1999, partisan propagandists trying to drag class warfare into the 2000 election might pause to ask: How can class count if Ivy Leaguers flood the field?

On the Democratic side, Al Gore, a Harvard graduate, faces Bill Bradley of Princeton. Among Republicans, George W. Bush of Yale and Harvard Business School is pursued by Elizabeth Dole, with a Harvard master's degree and one from Harvard Law School; Steve Forbes, another Princetonian; and Patrick J. Buchanan, who holds a master's from the Columbia School of Journalism, where, classmates recall, he majored in polemics and minored in diatribes.

This season's log cabin is crawling with ivy, which does not stop the party chairmen from nattering on about inheritance and breeding, once considered hallmarks of an Ivy League education.

"How does this person get to be the top runner? It's his name," Roy Romer, chairman of the National Democratic Committee, said in an interview with David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register. "If he didn't have the name 'Bush,' he would not be in this race. He just wouldn't be in this race. When you are choosing the leader of the free world, you've got to look at it and say name is not enough."

Romer may have forgotten how Al Gore became a congressman, then a senator from Tennessee: because his father had been a congressman, then a senator from Tennessee. If she "didn't have the name," would Hillary Clinton be considered a potential US senator? And how about getting elected governor of Texas, twice? Doesn't that count more than getting elected governor of Arkansas a dozen times?

Romer is the governor of Colorado. His fellow Coloradan, Jim Nicholson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, counterattacks on class and privilege in a way that suggests how much American politics would improve if Romer and Nicholson took the summer off, cracked open a Coors or two, and conducted their feckless debate beside a Rocky Mountain stream.

Nicholson brands Gore, whose childhood was spent more in a Washington hotel than on a Tennessee farm, "the barefoot boy from Embassy Row." The chairman has swiped a line from Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior in 1940, who called Wendell L. Willkie of Indiana, the Republican presidential nominee, "the barefoot boy from Wall Street," where Willkie made his fortune.

Willkie lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most popular and most patrician president in history. In "Freedom From Fear," his marvelous and magisterial history of the United States between 1929 and 1945, David M. Kennedy documents how FDR dominated not with his pedigree or his Harvard education but with "good-natured, head-tossing brio." Kennedy cites the famous observation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who said of the new president in March of 1933, "A second-class intellect, but a first-rate temperament."

Today the Ivy League is largely a meritocracy, and first-rate educations are available elsewhere, as attested by Lamar Alexander of Vanderbilt University; Gary Bauer of Georgetown College (of Kentucky); John Kasich of Ohio State; Dan Quayle of DePauw University; and Bob Smith of Lafayette College.

John McCain aims to be the second graduate of the US Naval Academy elected president. Jimmy Carter was the first, elected as a brainy and folksy outsider. Carter won a bout of intellect over Gerald R. Ford in 1976 but lost the test of temperament to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In a struggle for the presidency of a middle-class nation, poor-mouthing is as obsolete as populist resentment of privilege. For most voters today, SAT scores, IQ tests, and diplomas don't count; character does.