Gaming the System

[paft.livejournal.com]

David Asman, Fox Business News: There’s no doubt that Obama himself used education to become successful. He gamed the educational system for years using scholarships and various connections to rise up in his field.

Yeah, that slick Barack Obama, “gaming the system” by making good enough grades to get into Harvard. So unfair.



“Gaming the system” is an expression typically used to describe someone using the rules of a system to either undermine that system, or manipulate it for an outcome other than what the system intends. I’d love to know how Asman imagines Obama going to college on a scholarship qualifies as somehow undermining higher education. I’d love to know how Obama succeeding academically through study and hard work somehow results in an outcome other than what our educational system is meant to produce.

This would be trivial if Asman were not reflecting an attitude that seems to have become ingrained on the American right. GOP leadership has either actually embraced or is exploiting the Tea Party notion that if an outcome is not to right-wing liking (like a black man getting into Harvard, or a black Democrat winning an election), the system itself has been undermined -- even if the outcome was not due to cheating or malfeasance.

Hence, the current GOP attack on voting rights, one that Bill Clinton accurately described recently as reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.. The Republicans know that students, minorities, the disabled, the poor, and the unemployed are unlikely to embrace an agenda that includes massive cuts in the social safety net. Their solution? Sell the notion that these voters are less deserving of the vote than the wealthy interests supporting the Republican political agenda. Make it as difficult as possible for these legal voters to cast a ballot. After all, if voters vote in favor of certain social services, then those voters are incompetent, and if enough of these “incompetents” vote to affect the outcome of an election, they are “gaming the system." Legal steps must be taken to prevent another such “abuse” of the vote.

It’s a worldview that dovetails beautifully with the right wing libertarian notion of the inherent superiority of the rich – who, in a well-run society, always, always get what they want.

Anything else is “gaming the system.”

Comments

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Hell, let's take that a step further: during the obituary coverage of Betty Ford, they showed clips of her marching in NOW parades around the country, and both Gerald Ford and Betty were big supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment. A Republican President and First Lady talking about such things! You almost had to rub your eyes. And that wasn't that long ago.