Self Made Men

    Since 1988 we sure have seen the difference between self made men and legacy students with their gentlemen's Cs.  The contrast is so stark it's hard not to notice.  It's hard to imagine an origin less advantaged than a bastard born in a trailer park in Arkansas. It could only be worse if you were the product of an interracial marriage at a time when such a thing was illegal in most of the country.
     It's hard to imagine an origin more advantaged than the scion of a staid New England family. The son of a one term Senator and former head of the PGA who grows up and  marries the heiress to the McCalls publishing fortune.  It could only be better if that scion had become President and you were his son. There seems to be a difference in performance based in origins.
     How do we explain this?  I'm not sure we do using this paradigm. For every Obama you can point to a Roosevelt.  For every Clinton you can point to a Nixon.  Nixon was a self made man.  For every Truman you can point to a Kennedy. The comparison does really fall apart.  But still, there it is.
    Why this disparity in performance in the last 20 years?  Has privilege become that corrosive?  It's been said the corrosive effects of privilege contributed to the end of the British Empire and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The feelings of infallibility associated with unearned rank became a disability in and of themselves. That's the argument anyway.  It is said the Bush Senior people  were fond of saying, " If you're so smart, why aren't you President?"  Events certainly undermined that query. The Bush the Younger people walked with a kind of crude swagger while they failed miserably at nearly everything they touched.  There has been no claim of any success from that camp.  There has been a persistent chorus of "blame Bush" as a sort of defense but no one has claimed Bush has ever been blamed for anything he didn't actually, spectacularly screw up.  It's informative and hilarious, really, that Obama was given a Peace Prize for the simple reason he was not G W Bush.
     It has been said no one ever saw Clinton do anything stupid with his pants zipped. There is a difference between "stupid" and actually "useful" but that's a different debate. He seems to have remembered his lines but he did bump into the furniture a bit.
    Obama?  The guy never seems to have struck a false note but the partisan nonsense is no where near settling.  He did keep us out of war. You can say what you want about the ACA and the AHCA but it's a furtherance of a debate we should be having.
    So, overall, I would have to say the self made men have far exceeded expectations and the legacy people are falling very short.
    I think we should always ignore the rhetoric.  As flawed as this measurement might be it certainly deserves consideration.