Nice work if you can get it

May 27, 2006

If you’ve ever seen NBC’s “The [tag]West Wing[/tag],” you may be familiar with [tag]Charlie[/tag], the character who served as the president’s personal aide for the first several seasons. [tag]Bush[/tag] has a Charlie — his name is [tag]Blake Gottesman[/tag].

National Journal’s Alexis Simendinger had an interesting report on Gottesman yesterday, explaining that, in White House lingo, Gottesman is known as Bush’s “body man” or, more colloquially, his “[tag]butt boy[/tag],” sticking close behind the president for 14 to 18 hours a day. Now, Gottesman is escaping to [tag]Harvard Business School[/tag].

And that is where the story gets interesting: Harvard plans to welcome the 26-year-old Texas native as a graduate student in business this fall, despite the fact that Gottesman left California’s Claremont McKenna College after his freshman year to join the Bush campaign.

Of course, the leader of the free world — who snagged his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1975 — helped out with a written endorsement. As an alum, the president also made a friendly call to Harvard on his aide’s behalf, as did former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Gottesman’s first boss in the [tag]White House[/tag], who counts a number of Harvard officials among his home-state friends.

Gottesman briefly dated Jenna Bush when he was a high school junior in Austin and she was a freshman, and her dad was governor. When Bush decided to run for president, Gottesman put college on pause. What he thought might be a brief interlude turned into a seven-year hitch. The president’s nicknames for his $95,000-a-year special assistant have evolved from “Mini-Me,” to “Soldier” and “Private” and “Peanut,” to the more recent “Johnny Harvard,” eventually simplified to “Harvard.”

First of all, the Harvard Business School application instructions state that an M.B.A. candidate must have completed a four-year undergraduate degree “or its equivalent in another country.” Bush’s letter for Gottesman must have been pretty good.

And second, the real-life Charlie makes 95k?

I really don’t begrudge Charlie his acceptance. Harvard is full of people who shouldn’t be there and/or got in by some kind of favoritism. Charlie is probably smart enough to do the work. Heck, Karl Rove doesn’t have a degree, and I’m sure he could teach even HBS a thing or two about lying and conniving and not getting caught.

  • Who knew that kissing ass could pay so well? I guess this isn’t such a surprise; after all, the DC. punditocricy does very well financially indeed — not to mention all of the top corporatists — by sucking off Bush’s front side so lovingly and thoroughly!

    As to the need for a 4-year degree or its “equivalent in another country,” I’d say that there are two possible answers to this seeming contradiction of such an august educational institution’s requirements:

    First, America IS now a different country than before BushCo was annointed.

    Second, IOKIYAR is still the order of the day for Bush’s base of the haves and the have-mores.

  • I know a friend of mine (and right winger) who would blow a complete an utter head valve. He applied for HBS twice and failed to get in. A bunch of us pitched in and made him a T-shirt that said “I applied to Harvard Business School and all I got was a Lousy T-shirt” for his birthday. Let’s see, my friend graduated in the top 5 of our engineering class, the top of his graduate studies class, spent four years working in China and was active in many things outside school whereas Charlie was a gofer for the Prez.

    Nice to see that class is nonexistent in the US.

    On a similar note, Tony Blair’s kid got a complete scholarship into Yale. Must not pay well to be a British PM these days.

  • A third alternative – having been through grad school – is that all that academic bullshit really IS just plain old everyday bull shit. That has to be even more true at a business school, where the best that arrive are the thoroughly fifth-rate (though all are “legends in their own mind”). Remember, Ph.D. stands for “Piled Higher and Deeper.”

  • So Bush has a “butt boy?” …If only Linda Tripp can talk him into revealing the location of that stained blue blazer …

  • Let’s see.

    White House aide Brett M. Kavanaugh won Senate confirmation as an appeals judge yesterday after a three-year wait, a new victory for President Bush in a drive to place a more conservative stamp on the courts.[…],br/>
    Critics said the White House staff secretary’s record spoke of loyalty to Bush but was thin on courtroom experience.

    This is the way a political machine works. You put in your time doing the machines bidding and you receive a reward. Remember this the next time some Country Club Republican is bitching about unions and the their seniority system doesn’t reward individual initiative.

    As far as B-schools go, I’m not familiar with Harvard but I know several people on the faculty of B-school in a Big Ten University. Many of the are better at screwing people over and getting underlings to do their work than they are at anything else. No I take that back, they’re pretty good at getting drunk.

  • Harvard plans to welcome the 26-year-old Texas native as a graduate student in business this fall, despite the fact that Gottesman left California’s Claremont McKenna College after his freshman year to join the Bush campaign.

    Whoa.

    Well, I gues we won;t be hearing any complaints about affirmative action anymore.

  • How come Elizabeth Bumiller hasn’t profiled him, the way she did John Kerry’s campaign aide? Oh wait, that was to make Kerry look elitist, having a personal servant and all; making peanut butter sandwiches for Bush is authentic in a way doing the same for Kerry could never be.

  • Looking at this through the eyes of someone who went to school later in life, this looks like a formula for failure. As I’m closing in on my undergraduate degree I realize I needed every basic course I took in order to have the knowledge and understanding for the more advanced coursework. It could be interesting seeing how Gottesman fares academically pursing a graduate degree without the benefit of undergraduate coursework.

  • Gottesman will do fine as long as he completes HBS before Bush is out of office. Otherwise, he’ll be out on his ass. Just think how much the young man has to un-learn after watching Bush for years.

  • Well, you know the kind of people Bush hangs out with- this kid will probably commit his own Enron some day and get thrown in prison, anyway.

  • Google (images) “Blake Gottesman“. About the only thing that shows up is Blake taking the Scottie Scottie dog from the Regal Moron and Blake bending over to pick up a baseball hat, a gift from the Regal Moron. Sounds qualified for HBS to me.

    Just for comparison (an unfair one, I’ll grant), Google (images) “Charlie Young west wing”and you get 16 dignified images of the fictional character. Google (images) Dulé Hill, the actor who plays Charlie, and you get a dozen pages full of pictures. His IMDb listing shows much more achievement, in a really competitive field, than Gottesman is likely to achieve with his MBA.

  • For whatever it’s worth, $95,000 per year divided by 16 hours a day divided by 365 days a year is $16 an hour. Truck drivers for UPS make over $20 an hour.

  • Do UPS truck drivers regularly work 16 hour shifts?
    Does this twerp?

    I doubt it. Truly I doubt it.

    I didn’t know UPS didn’t offer 8 hour shifts to their workers. Sounds pretty unusual (i.e., not true) to me.

  • And who works 365 days a year? Not Bush, at least.

    Clinton was hard working- Bush ain’t. I doubt Bush’s underlings are much better than he is.

    You probably find the kid drinking some hooch under a desk when he’s supposed to be on the job at least some of the time, I’d figure. Heh.

  • Ah, wait, I see comment #13 meant that as “You’d have to work 365 days a year including Christmas, New Years and the Eight Crazy Nights of Hannukah for 16 hours each and every day driving UPS trcuks at $16/hour to make as much as this prick makes for schlepping around the White House all day, hitting up the sauce, and he doesn’t even have more than one year of college. That’s called corruption.“

  • I have absolutely no problem with this. Graduate/Professional school acceptance is largely a joke anyway. I say this having gone to a very highly regarded law school.

    I do have a problem with him making $95,000.

  • Grant first that this batman is not an hourly employee, but is (unless paid for directly by the Bush Family) a salaried government employee.

    If you computed the salary/hours as an hourly worker would – 52 40 hour weeks equals 2080 hours a year. That becomes $45.67 per hour PLUS his government benefits – health benefits, retirement, life insurance, Thrift savings plan.

    Throw in the incidentals of working for the White House – overseas trips, local travel, entertainment, etc, and it becomes clear that his total compensation is not too shabby for a gofer and way more than the annual compensation of that UPS driver… It must be nice

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