Thursday, January 08, 2004
Reading the Howard Dean profile in this week's New Yorker I was stuck by the fact that, although much is made of the notion that Dean and Bush share similarly "patrician" backgrounds, very little is ever said about how really different the two men actually are. Indeed, the stuff about the similar backgrounds seems to come down to the fact that they both came from families with money (a pretty relative thing, by the way), and they both went to Yale. Thinking about the lives they led after leaving New Haven pretty conclusively demonstrates that the two men couldn't be much more different: Bush became a sort of business man, parlaying his family connections into a series of deals that made him a pile of dough; Dean went to med school (not even a very fancy med school), then started a rural medical practice. Maybe I'm just being dense, but this does not seem to me to suggest that they both have a lot in common, and I question where that comparison comes from.
// posted by Bill @ 11:24 AM 
Post a Comment