Snarky!
The Washington Post's Sam Coates snarks out:
The Art of Telling Parties Apart: We have, it appears, a new way of distinguishing Republicans from Democrats, at least in the federal city. It emerged last week... from Tim Goeglein, White House deputy director of public liaison.... Not one [Democratic] parent, [Goeglein] said, gave an answer that would be more typical of Republicans. "Our party, in the way it is constituted, we think of medicine, we think of law, we think of business. We don't think, gee, I hope my son grows up to be a great playwright or painter or poet," he explained.
Whether a future government employee, a bureaucrat, would win the approval of a GOP parent, he did not say.
For Goeglein himself is neither a doctor, nor a lawyer, nor an entrepreneur. He has, since graduating from Indiana University, been a congressional flack, a campaign worker, and a bureaucrat--none of them things any Republican parent would approve of.
What Republican lawyer, doctor, or entrepreneur does Coates turn to next for comment? To none, of course: he turns to Republican litterateur Mark Helprin, who has a child "at Harvard studying classics -- 'not exactly law or medicine' -- while the other," a future bureaucrat, "is studying public health at Johns Hopkins."
And then Helprin says that if you are concerned mainly with the humanities "you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal."
Helprin--of course--doesn't explain his own politics, for he has no understanding of economics, strategy, history, or politics, and yet is a conservative.
Sam Coates gets a +7 on the snarkiness meter.
