In the good old days, Democrats would complain about the invasion of Madison Avenue into the sacred precincts of politics (see The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss). But those days are long gone; and, in fact, our Democratic friends have long since mastered the techniques of advertising in the service of partisan warfare.
The Scrapbook was prompted to think along these lines last week after watching what must be an unprecedented four minutes of television: a promotional video, produced by the White House and (presumably) paid for with public funds, to support the nomination of Carla Hayden as the 14th librarian of Congress. To our knowledge, no presidential nominee for any position in government has ever before been the subject of a campaign commercial. This would suggest that the White House is either oblivious about the precedent or nervous about Carla Hayden. Perhaps it’s a little of both.
What is genuinely surprising about the video, however, is its content. Dr. Hayden is a veteran librarian, a product of the Chicago public library system, and, for the past several years, chief of the library system in Baltimore. She communicates her obvious enthusiasm for public libraries, especially inner-city branches; and as President Obama pointedly mentions in his nominating statement, “She’d be the first woman and the first African American to hold the position—both of which are long overdue.”
Of course, the problem is that hardly any of this has anything whatsoever to do with being librarian of Congress. Hayden describes a library as an “opportunity center,” a haven for young people, a neighborhood refuge in times of civil strife, a place to “apply for a job” or, better yet, “get the latest Harry Potter.” All of that describes the modern urban public library; none of it describes the Library of Congress, which (as its name would imply) is the principal source of information for Congress, a scholarly research institution, and archive. Nobody in Washington walks in off the street to the Library of Congress in search of the latest Harry Potter—which in any case, they wouldn’t be allowed to borrow.
As far as The Scrapbook can tell, Hayden seems like a nice person and would probably make a first-rate director of the public library system in any large city. But she’s almost wholly unqualified for a post that, in modern times at least, has been reserved almost exclusively for scholars, not librarians. Her immediate predecessor is James K. Billington, the distinguished Russian scholar from Harvard and Princeton who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Billington, in his turn, had succeeded Daniel J. Boorstin, the famous University of Chicago historian, who had been named by Gerald Ford. Past librarians of Congress include the poet/diplomat Archibald MacLeish. These were not role models for kids, or race/gender “firsts,” or even credentialed specialists in library science.
Indeed, Hayden’s appointment seems to emphasize a philistine streak in Barack Obama. While George W. Bush populated such positions with artists and intellectuals, Obama’s first director of the National Endowment for the Humanities was an ex-Iowa congressman, and his head of the National Endowment for the Arts was a Broadway theater owner and Democratic bundler. Now, for the principal scholarly/cultural post in the federal government, Obama has chosen to highlight Carla Hayden’s gender and race at the expense of her meager scholarly credentials. And produced an embarrassing four-minute promotional video, at taxpayers’ expense, which The Scrapbook hopes will be the first, and last, of its kind.
