William Kristol has an interesting column in the New York Times today on Barack Obama's commencement speech from last week.
The topic was "service," and what's interesting is what Obama leaves in and what he leaves out. First, he discusses his own "service."
college, he explains, “I began to notice a world beyond myself.” So while his friends were seeking jobs on Wall Street, he applied for jobs as a grass-roots activist. And one day, a group of churches in Chicago offered him a job as a community organizer for “$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.”
“And I said yes.”
Those four words form their own paragraph in the prepared text. Obama wants us to be impressed by the drama of his spurning the big bucks, by his bold acceptance of such a pittance of money in order that he could do good.
Leave aside the fact that two years elapsed between Obama’s graduation from Columbia in 1983 and his heading off to Chicago in 1985. Dramatic foreshortening is, after all, sometimes necessary. And leave aside whether $14,000 in 1985 was really such a shockingly low salary for someone recently out of college — in inflation-adjusted dollars, it’s about what we pay entry-level editorial assistants today at The Weekly Standard.
One of the great things about being roughly Obama's age is that my bullshit meter goes off when he's exaggerating things. Specifically, it's a load of manure whenever Obama tries to speak as though he was poverty-stricken coming out of college. As Kristol points out, $14,000 a year for a college graduate was not terrible in 1985. I know because I was making about the same thing two years later when I graduated from college, got an apartment, and lived alone. In fact, $14k was a respectable salary for a liberal arts major, much better than some of my friends. The ones making much better money were engineering and computer science majors.
But beyond Obama's "I sacrificed money for my principles" bullshit, is his definition of service, which included all the usual liberal ideas: Peace Corps, becoming a teacher, and so on.
As Kristol points out, he left out the most important service young people can perform: military duty. In honesty, the reason Obama doesn't discuss military service is that like most liberals, it probably never entered his mind as an option. Bill Clinton was honest enough when he said he "loathed" the military, and Obama isn't that honest. He is smart enough to recognize that graduates of Ivy League schools don't expect to go into military service, especially not during war time. Sadly, this man who says he wants to be Commander in Chief doesn't consider being in the military to be service like the Peace Corps; soldiers are just one more constituency to pander to with promises of more benefits. But don't either promise to help them win in Iraq or admire their work as service. That might sound too patriotic.
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