David Brooks New York Times’ column today documents the super-fancy schools that Barack Obama, his wife, and most of his top advisers attended. Brooks calls it the triumph of high school valedictorians but he also lauds Obama’s team as insiders but really well-qualified insiders that can actually achieve major social change.

Brooks articulates a bit of conventional wisdom that’s emerged from the first two weeks of Obama’s transition: the change Obama hopes to deliver are changes in public policy. To do that he will employ very familiar faces and not search across America for a broader representation of values and perspectives.

After the Bush administration, we should probably be happy to have a cabinet of striving, high achievers. I wonder, though, if there shouldn’t be some acknowledgment along the way of the limits to meritocracy. A cabinet should have the smartest people in the country but there can be different kinds of intelligence. One idea might be for Obama, the former community organizer, to seek out more people from the worlds of organized labor, environmental justice and affordable housing advocacy.

At this point the cabinet will surely be dominated by dispassionate, consensus building elites. And that’s fine. But there should also be some people that have spent the past few years outside the beltway.-MB

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