Two pieces in today's Washington Post are worth noting: Dana Milbank's ?A sadder but wiser Axelrod packs his bags,? and Michael Gerson's ?When all else fails, hate Washington.? The columns share a theme: President Obama promised to change Washington, but Washington has proven stubborn. I recall being befuddled in 2008 by the armies of grown-ups who had gone gaga for a certain presidential candidate's mellifluous vapidities about change and hope. I wrote then that that aspirant either believed his own words and was foolish or didn't believe them and was mendacious. Today, Milbank writes, ?Obama's promise of change in Washington was a noble idea, but ultimately either naive?if he really thought he could fix this town?or cynical?if he knew he couldn't but told voters he could.? Odd that Milbank, Washington-watcher extraordinaire, took so long to figure it out.
There is a certain type?young and well-educated, ambitious and idealistic?who comes to Washington to change it and the world, but who has little comprehension of or respect for the entrenched institutions and customs that long preceded him. These relics will crumble, the whippersnapper is sure, when met with the force of his data, his innovation, his transformational ideas. It never works out. Was Obama naive or cynical in his campaigning? Unwise as it is to make guesses at such questions, it seems likely that he was a bit of both?and maybe more the former than the latter.
Lately it is education policy that attracts the young, the gifted and talented, the promising, with their big ideas and nifty charts; I read somewhere that ?education reform? is the new ?end hunger in Africa,? and that seems about right. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee comes to mind. She was doing good things for D.C.'s schools, yes, but her certainty; her absolutism; her disregard for a system and a culture that was intensely flawed but also intensely ingrained; her constant and militant peddling of trite sentiments about all kids summiting mile-high academic heights?all of it was and should have been discomfiting.
The education historian Diane Ravitch, in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, gets at some of this when she impugns the Ivy League crowd with their lustrous Gates grants for foisting any and every sort of innovative whim on public schools and their students. (In Death and Life, it must be said, Ravitch conjures up fantasylands of her own. It is, to be plain, a significantly dishonest and mostly bad book.) They are ignorant of the history they seek to wipe away. And now, Waiting for ?Superman.' I haven't yet seen it, but I've read the quotes from the documentary's many young, ambitious, bright supporters: lots about hope and change.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow