The End of the Academic Washingtonian Complex?
I have some doubts about what a Biden administration will or can do, but I’d be grateful if Biden delivers on this:
He relishes freewheeling discussion, interrupting aides and chiding them for what he deems overly academic or elitist language. “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me,” he likes to say, according to aides. “If she understands, we can keep talking.” Aides made a point of editing out all abbreviations other than U.N. and NATO.
Politicians have their own jargon, but one of the irritating features of the Obama administration (Professor in Chief?) was the proliferation of academic tropes in everyday political conversation, among leaders, their staffers, organizers, and journalists.
Go to the Twitter profile of some mid-level official from the Obama administration or of a staffer with a Democratic-related nonprofit, and you’ll see in their bio some cloying reference to “Obama alum” or “MMFA alum.” It’s as if, rather than wielding the power of the American state or serving as its propagandist, they spent a year on a college campus, shooting the shit and playing beer bong pong.
That’s why the most common cultural reference among the Obamanauts, after The West Wing, is Harry Potter (set in a school that looks like a college) or St. Elmo’s Fire, where several of the characters are caught up in the college to Capitol pipeline that is life in DC.
If Biden can discourage that self-styled culture of DC, that’d be something.