A Little Research

I’ve noticed that with a few exceptions there is little difference in the governing philosophies of US Presidents, at least those that have ruled in my lifetime. It seems that we have steadily moved from individual accountability and freedom towards central planning and restriction. For example: there is little, if any, noticeable difference in Bush the Elder, Bill Clinton and GWB, in terms of key philosophy or values, when it comes to their actions in the White House.

I decided to look for similarities in the backgrounds of the presidents from 1900 to today. The official White House website provided some interesting information, on the educational background of the presidents.

President	College	President	College
George W. Bush	Yale, Harvard	Harry S Truman	None listed
William Jefferson Clinton	Georgetown, Oxford, Yale	Franklin D. Roosevelt	Harvard, Columbia
George Bush	Yale	Herbert Clark Hoover	Stanford
Ronald Reagan	Eureka College	Calvin Coolidge	Amherst
Jimmy Carter	Naval Academy	Warren G. Harding	None Listed
Gerald R. Ford	U of MI, Yale	Woodrow Wilson	Princeton, Johns Hopkins
Richard M. Nixon	Whittier College, Duke	William Howard Taft	Yale,
Lyndon B. Johnson	Texas State University-San Marcos	Theodore Roosevelt	None Listed
John F Kennedy	Harvard	William McKinley	Allegheny College,
Dwight D. Eisenhower	West Point

For the 20th century Yale is the leader for turning out presidents, followed by Harvard. With the exception of a handful of schools (Eureka, Texas State,) most of the schools are Ivy or Ivy wanabies. The military academies are interesting contributors having produced men of remarkably different levels of leadership.

I notice that these schools tend to be left leaning in their philosophy and at least for the last 50years or so liberal. In the last handful of presidential elections the candidates for president had similar educational backgrounds.

Kerry: Yale; Gore: Harvard; Dole: Washburn Municipal University; Dukakis: Swarthmore and Harvard.

I intentionally didn’t put a (R) or (D) next to the names of the presidents. Take a minute and go thru the list and mentally put your own (L) or (C) next to their name. Which men deserve that “C” for conservative, which ones best preserved a tradition of American constitutional values? I think you might be surprised at how the “L” and the “C” don’t always line up the way you’d think with the “R” and the “D”, especially post WWII.

Conclusion: most of this “evidence” is anecdotal at best, however; we can’t expect to keep electing people with nearly identical educational background to office and think that they will suddenly embrace a worldview or governing philosophy that is radically different than the one they’ve been taught.