from david brooks' column in the nytimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/opinion/21brooks.html?th&emc=th
==== quote ===
Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).
The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).
==== unquote ====
and that's not all. larry summers (harvard), paul krugman (mit) are also going to be big names on the economic front. and probably robert riech too
no good can come from such a surfeit of east-coast types. notice the lone west-coast person from stanford. the west-coast guys are pacific-oriented, and they pay attention to china in particular, and are wary of it. east-coast guys think china is one big pussy-cat, the idiots. they obsess about the russians.
btw, i used to know secretary danzig, the navy secretary under clinton. he might be a big gun in this one as well, perhaps in the national security council or something. he wrote to me because he was a fan of o v vijayan (!) and i'd written a detailed review of vijayan's works. he was a rhodes scholar who did his phd in something to do with india -- indian history, perhaps. he even sent me some books, but i didn't keep in touch. anybody know what danzig's chances are of being a big shot? maybe i should look him up again.
6 comments:
Rajeev,
Krugman is a student of Jagdish Bhagwati. And while that may not be much he is still from India's Gujarat school of economics rather than from the ruinous Bengal school. But the East Coast establishment you will agree is certainly better than the Southern dumbocracy of James Baker and Co. - the oil obsessed folks. This is also an urban rooted pragmatic gang. For the first time we have a presidency that isn't cornily trying to play up its faux folksiness. Bill (Southern but Washington+Oxford) and Hillary (Chicago) had to put on folksy airs in the 80s and 90s as they were running against years of dumbing down dictated by the Reagan era. Obama's team has no need of that contrivance. You will agree that outside New England, Mid-Atlantic, Chicago, West Coast and university towns this is still a very conservative land. Things are changing slowly - NoVa and NC triangle flipped this year. But we still have a long way to go.
er, truti, i think this is about as far as it goes re the "long way". not much more flipping, as the demos screw things up.
2008 is the apogee of the left-liberal perspective. if in this year of the great depression part 2, the demos couldn't do any better, then it's just going to be downhill from here on. obama and co will disappoint a lot of the moonies, because the moonies have unreasonable expectations. four years from now, i suspect we'll just be inching out of the depression, just getting rid of the last toxic mortgages, and it is 50-50% that the country will be heartily sick of the demos then, just as they are of repub excess now.
it is a conservative land and will remain so. i don't agree with the bubbas and other inbred rednecks, but i do believe the atlanticist mafia is bad news for the us. they are fighting yesterday's war: it is not russia, but the china-mohammedan axis of evil that they have to be wary about, and they have no clue. absolutely none.
Preposterous - Krugman is NOT a student of Jagdish Bhagwati, who believes in globalization and free trade. Krugman, on the other hand, is anti-globalization, and anti-freetrade.
San,
Are u sure you are arguing about the right thing?
Nizhal,
It is true that the Atlanticist vision is based on controlling the access to oil, and the southern "doctrine" an intellectual response to the classic East Coast doctrine is too mired in oil. But that is changing not because of any fundamental changes in doctrinal goals, but because there is a new oil in town - dispersed sources of energy and the resources to tap them. Of course a dunce like Niall Ferguson doesn't know that and a deracinated Indian brought up on pedestrian Atlanticist rubbish - Fareed Zakaria - has even less of an idea. But if they listened to George Monbiot they might find out what is missing in their thinking. As for this being a center-right country, not too long ago on this very blog (as had many other Indian-Americnas and millions of African-Americans) it was categorically emphasised that only a white man can become POTUS. Which is why I don't much pay attention to that thing about center-right. Things haven't changed so much as an entire new generation haven taken control.
Krugman in one of his articles mentioned that he was a student of Ben Bernanke. He is certainly not a student of Bhagawati.
M.patil
What if both Atlanticists and West-Coaster are right. That is Both Russia and China decide to engage US in trade-wars, political/military standoffs and propaganda campaigns.
US being deeply in debt, does not have any wherewithal to take on China and georgia incident proves that Russia would not be too kind to any misadventure from US or her Eurabian allies.
Between Devil and Deep Blue Sea ?
Post a Comment