Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!
Wordsworth’s vision of 1789 is no less true in 2009 as hordes of young uns descend on Washington to begin their jobs in the Obama administration.
JFK brought numbers of younger-than-usual staffers to work for him. And RN continued and considerably expanded that policy; the median age of the Nixon administration was probably the youngest of all until Jimmy Carter’s “children’s crusade” hit town.
Gawker has noticed some parallels between Nadav Kander’s portfolio of “Obama’s People” in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine and the 1993 portfolio of Clintonites by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair: “If power does not corrupt, it certainly ages. The bright young things in the Obama administration will never look as good as they do now. Remember when Clinton’s minions were just as fresh-faced?”
There’s Clinton’s 18 year old Charlie Ledley and Obama’s 24 year old Eugene Kang. (Mr. Ledley had dropped out of Amherst to volunteer as an intern in the Clinton campaign; he ended up running the hotel operation at the Democratic Convention in New York. Today he’s a partner in a Manhattan hedge fund.)
And there’s Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff Patti Solis (27) and Michelle Obama’s COS Jackie Norris (38); Obama’s 27 year old speech writer Jon Favreau and Clinton’s director of communications George Stephanopoulos (31); and Rahm Emanuel, Clinton’s 43 year-old campaign finance director and, er, Obama’s Staff Chief Rahm Emanuel (50). In fact, the most common denominator of the Obama White House staff and the Clinton White House staff seems to be….the Clinton White House staff.