{"id":9305,"date":"2016-05-19T12:45:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9305"},"modified":"2016-05-19T12:45:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:45:35","slug":"the-pajama-boy-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-pajama-boy-white-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pajama Boy White House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meet the 30-somethings who are running our federal government. <\/span><\/p>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCleverness is not wisdom.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014 Euripides, Bacchae<\/em><\/p>\n

\"From<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy \u2014 our overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe?<\/p>\n

Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance of life outside the Boston\u2013New York\u2013Washington corridor? Political correctness as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place to learn?<\/p>\n

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as \u201cPajama Boy.\u201d It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children\u2019s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: \u201cWear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.
\n<\/p>\n

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described \u201cliberal f***.\u201d \u201cA liberal f***\u00a0is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,\u201d\u00a0he explains. \u201cI won every argument but one.\u201d I suspect that when Krupp boasts about \u201cmaking opponents feel terrible about themselves,\u201d he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.<\/p>\n

The ad was no right-wing caricature of an urban twerp. Through photo, text, and commentary, Krupp confirmed the self-portrait of an in-your-face adolescent who somehow ended up with his 15 minutes of notoriety.<\/p>\n

Krupp is emblematic of an entire class of young smart-asses found in Silicon Valley, on campuses across the nation, and in Hollywood, and now ensconced at the highest levels of American government and journalism. Do we remember Jonathan Gruber, the conceited MIT professor and architect of Obamacare, who bragged that he had hoodwinked a supposedly far dumber America in order to ram the Affordable Care Act down its collective throat \u2014 while he was paid nearly $300,000 to talk the bill through Congress as a contract analyst for the Department of Health and Human Services? After President Obama had assured the American people that they could keep their doctors and their health plans, while seeing their premium costs decrease, Gruber high-fived that voters were too stupid to figure out how they had been misled:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,\u201d\u00a0Gruber crowed. \u201cIf CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.\u00a0Okay, so it\u2019s written to do that.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical for the thing to pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note Gruber\u2019s disdain for the public. Like Pajama Boy, he exhibits a visceral contempt for the supposedly less educated whom he helped to deceive. Were supposedly stupid voters who lost their health coverage to this government-run con to feel, in the words of Pajama Boy, \u201cterrible about themselves\u201d once they heard Gruber\u2019s boast?<\/p>\n

For the Pajama Boys, rhetoric is everything, reality nothing. Fooling the lower middle classes is the stuff of sarcastic comedy, as in the joshing of two young former Obama speechwriters on a recent Charlie Rose show:<\/p>\n

Jon Lovett<\/span>: I really like, I was very \u2014 the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I\u2019m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.<\/p>\n

Jon Favreau<\/span>: Lovett wrote the line about \u201cIf you like your insurance, you can keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lovett<\/span>: How dare you!<\/p>\n

Millions losing their health insurance ends up with Pajama Boy banter \u2014 \u201cHow dare you!\u201d \u2014 with Charlie Rose.<\/p>\n

In 2013, a few years after Lovett wrote, \u201cIf you like your insurance, you can keep it,\u201d he gave a Pajama Boy graduation address at Pitzer College, in which the 30-year-old sage unknowingly seemed to be warning graduates about people like himself: \u201cOne of the greatest threats we face, simply put, is bullshit. We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research, in social media\u2019s imitation of human connection, in legalese and corporate double-speak; it infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, and making it harder to achieve anything.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0Know that being honest, both about what you do know and what you don\u2019t, can and will pay off. Up until recently I would have said that the only proper response to our culture of B.S. is cynicism, that it would just get worse and worse. But I don\u2019t believe that any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

We see the Pajama Boy adding of insult to injury in now-multimillionaire former Wall Street intern Chelsea Clinton \u2014 whose husband\u2019s Greek hedge fund just collapsed, and who is the heir to the $100 million Clinton shakedown fortune \u2014 sighing that \u201cI tried to care about money but I couldn\u2019t.\u201d Perhaps those who invested in her husband\u2019s disastrous fund still can care about the money they lost. Or note amnesty and open-borders advocate Mark Zuckerberg, who sends his security forces to expropriate parking spaces around his San Francisco digs and buys up neighboring homes around his Palo Alto estate to create his own private border zone.<\/p>\n

Recently Ben Rhodes \u2014 \u201cAssistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting,\u201d and author of the president\u2019s Cairo speech and the Benghazi talking points \u2014 confessed to the New York Times<\/em> that he salted bogus talking points about the Iran deal among the field of novice wannabe Washington\u2013New York foreign-policy \u201cexperts,\u201d on the expectation that Pajama Boy journalists on the make (\u201cThe average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That\u2019s a sea change. They literally know nothing\u201d) would lazily draw on these pseudo-experts to complete the circular con (\u201cWe created an echo chamber.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say\u201d). Because the postmodernist Rhodes (who says he drives a \u201cBeamer\u201d) is cynical and contemptuous of the value of traditional first-hand experience and classical education, he feels he can construct almost any reality he wishes, such as a manufactured reformist Iranian wing reaching out to the U.S. to offer concessions on a nuclear deal:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,\u201d he says. \u201cWe had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0We drove them crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben Rhodes gloats over misleading the American people about the conditions that led to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and how the Obama administration sold the \u201cWe drove them crazy\u201d deal as a non-treaty that could be rerouted around Senate approval. But after Rhodes follows other 30-something Obama speechwriters to Hollywood, who cleans up the mess of an Iran blackmailing the Middle East with nuclear-tipped missiles?<\/p>\n

Who hires and promotes Pajama Boys? Why, of course, Barack Obama, the Pajama Boy in Chief.<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy arrogance?<\/em> \u201cI think that I\u2019m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I\u2019ll tell you right now that I\u2019m gonna think I\u2019m a better political director than my political director.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy condescension?<\/em> \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising then they get bitter \u2014 they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.\u201d Or the prep-school graduate talking down to the elite-forces combat veteran: \u201cBibi, you have to understand something.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0I\u2019m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don\u2019t understand what you\u2019re talking about, but I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy cynicism?<\/em> From the Jeffrey Goldberg interview: \u201cSarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure\u201d for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to \u201cpurchase France\u2019s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.\u201d The president gloats to the obsequious press that the French president is reduced to a clueless glory hog, bought off by the cynical U.S?<\/p>\n

Or maybe this is a better example of cynical dissimulation: \u201cIf you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or maybe the locus classicus of Pajama Boy cynicism was the president supposedly ruling out amnesties and open borders: \u201cAgain, I just want to repeat,\u00a0I\u2019m president, I\u2019m not king.\u00a0If Congress has laws on the books that say that people who are here who are not documented have to be deported, then I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources, to focus on people who are really causing problems as opposed to families who are just trying to work and support themselves.\u00a0But there\u2019s a limit to the discretion that I can show because I am obliged to execute the law.\u00a0That\u2019s what the Executive Branch means.\u00a0I can\u2019t just make the laws up by myself.\u00a0So the most important thing that we can do is focus on changing the underlying laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note the Pajama Boy phrase \u201cI can\u2019t just make the laws up by myself,\u201d which is of course precisely what Obama planned to do and did.<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy pop-psychoanalyzing?<\/em> Of Putin: \u201cMy sense is that\u2019s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.\u201d He has \u201cgot that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy arrested-development references?<\/em> \u201cI\u2019m LeBron, baby.\u201d Or of ISIS: \u201cThe analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn\u2019t make them Kobe Bryant.\u201d Or of Michael Jordan: \u201cThere is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course, if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pajama Boy ignorance?<\/em> If you forget that the politically correct version of the Falklands\u2019 name is \u201cMalvinas,\u201d then just plug in \u201cMaldives,\u201d another non-Western-sounding, exotic-M island group somewhere or another \u2014 and assume that journalists \u201cknow nothing.\u201d Don\u2019t worry who speaks what language in Austria, or where the death camps were or who liberated them, or whether \u201ccorpsmen\u201d is pronounced as if the Marines in question were zombies. There is no need to worry about such things \u2014 when hip, cool, sarcastic, and cynical all trump intelligence, experience, and humility every time.<\/p>\n

When Euripides in his Bacchae <\/em>unleashed the reaction to the young Panama Boy prig Pentheus, it was not something measured and rational, but rather the wild maenads. So too is the growing pushback today to the Pajama Boy aristocracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet the 30-somethings who are running our federal government. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online \u201cCleverness is not wisdom.\u201d \u2014 Euripides, Bacchae   What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy \u2014 our overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe? Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[18,375,124,846,23,187,46,536],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2q5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6876,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/pajama-boy-nation\/","url_meta":{"origin":9305,"position":0},"title":"Pajama Boy Nation","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Will Kane of\u00a0High Noon\u00a0Pajama Boy wasn\u2019t. 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