"Meet the New Elite, Not Like The Old"

Check out Helene Cooper's piece in the New York Times on what she calls "the children of 1969--the year that America's most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses,"and her argument that today "America is being led, to a striking extent, by a new elite, a cohort of the best and the brightest whose advancement was formed, at least in part, by affirmative action policies." (Every time I see the phrase "the best and brightest" I think about what David Halberstam really meant when he placed that label on those in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations who formulated and implemented the policies resulting in the nation's involvement in the Vietnam War.)