I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.

There is an interesting article at the New York Times today on the Bush Administrations Second Term Cabinet, focusing on Treasury Secretary John Snow. It deals mainly with the President's placing loyalty over other considerations in promoting people.

Whatever the roots of Mr. Bush's overriding devotion to loyalty, it partly stems from his disdain for the concerns of old-style meritocrats, the kind of people who wince when the president places his confidence in someone like Mr. Kerik. Mr. Bush has never been comfortable in America's so-called meritocracy. Undistinguished in college, business school and in the private sector, he spent nearly 30 years sitting in seminar rooms and corporate suites while experts and high achievers held forth.

Now it appears that he's having his revenge - speaking loudly in his wave of second-term cabinet nominations for a kind of anti-meritocracy: the idea that anyone, properly encouraged and supported, can do a thoroughly adequate job, even better than adequate, in almost any endeavor.

It's an empowering, populist idea - especially for those who, for whatever reason, have felt wrongly excluded or disrespected - that is embodied in the story of Mr. Bush himself: a man with virtually no experience in foreign affairs or national domestic policy who has been a uniquely forceful innovator in both realms.

Of course the problem is that the President is going to need a strong and forceful person to push through his plans on Social Security. Mr. Snow might not be the guy, but how many are going to want to take up the project given the strings that come with it?