Trolling for votes late in the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush did what all moderate Republicans in search of conservative support seem to end up doing: He attacked Harvard. Michael Dukakis, Bush explained, possesses a "Harvard boutique" mind-set steeped in "liberalism and elitism." "I don't want somebody from Harvard telling me what I can do and what I can't do," Bush told a crowd of non-Harvard graduates in Modesto, Calif., that year. "There's an elite inside the elite there."
Fast-forward a decade. Last week, the former president addressed those very elites, in a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. How did it go? The folks in Modesto may have trouble believing this, but Bush fit right in. After showering the elite inside the elite -- people "to whom I feel very, very close" -- with paragraphs of enthusiastic praise, Bush gave his take on what is wrong with Washington. It's not that Bill Clinton is corrupt, or inept, or even that he seduced his intern, Bush explained. "I'm not here to assign blame," he said -- at least not to the one man who deserves it. The problem with Washington, according to Bush, is the "innuendo," the "maelstrom of personal attacks and counter-charges" -- indeed, the entire "political climate in our nation's capital." Where did such a climate come from? Well, said Bush, "some of this has to do with the intrusive nature of the national press," a group whose unscrupulous behavior has helped to "poison" the "well of public discourse."
Sound familiar? It should. It's an explanation popular with quite a few Harvard graduates, many of whom now work at the White House. And just when we were tempted to start feeling nostalgic for the Bush administration.