411 speeches, 42 press conferences, 158 interviews, zero healthcare bills, one Kanye diss and a pwn’d housefly later, Barack Hussein Obama (Columbia ‘83, HLS ‘91) has today completed his freshman year in the school of hardest knocks: the American Presidency. Unlike his alma mater, running the free world doesn’t come with the benefits of gold-star-for-effort grade inflation. Obviously not grading on a curve, CNN awarded him a “B,” Fox, a “D+,” ABC a “B,” MSNBC, a surprising “F, maybe F-” for his efforts. In other words, Obama is academically tied with the sweatpants contingent. Suffering from the worst end-of-first-year popularity ratings ever, the unlikely Hawaiian Cantab seems to have angered quite a few of his white, tea-bagging employers.

As fellow African-American Larry Wilmore put it:

Well, we’ve come to the end of the first year for President Obama, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s this: Negroes aren’t magic.

Or as a confused and condescending Yale Daily News op-ed pontificated:

The belief we had in Obama was, ironically, a belief in the elite.

Despite his own cheery self-assessment–”A good, solid B-plus”–an end of year bonus wasn’t quite in the cards. His one-year anniversary present: the supermajority-busting election of non-Ivy grad and nudie model Scott Brown to the US Senate.

That said, his wife is still good looking, his children, preppy and adorable, and his dog, manageably small. He has a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, enjoys an afternoon Bud Light, and is failing to live up to expectations: a quintessential Harvard man if we ever saw one.

Boldly we Ivy Leaguers stride forth into the 2010s, leaving in our dust the dregs of this lame, lame year. Pause, though, to recall all those things that befell the Ivy League that we’re hopefully leaving in 2009 — and some good things, too! But when the fact that Amy Gutmann hasn’t found any time for impromptu photoshoots for the third year running is a good thing, we know we’re in trouble.

Yalies were told to repent for their (sexual, mainly!) sins, but it was the staffers of the Crimson who seemed naughtier to us. Cornell’s fiendish ticklers were the naughtiest of all! Hopefully they learn what “off-the-record GChat” means in 2k10. The raunchy Princetonians—now, you know, having nightly orgies in their dirty mixed-gender rooms—are the Cornelians’ spiritual heirs. Worst of all, their coed rooms are unaffiliated with eating clubs.

After the jump, big celebrity scoops of 2009, whose very “bigness” depends on how much you love Harry Potter films or voting Democratic.

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In an “After the Recession” interview with the New York Times, today, President Obama slammed the quality of education at U.S. colleges in the age of grade inflation, naked parties, and IvyGate.

The somewhat convoluted criticism outlines the difference between the high school education his grandmother used to ascend to corporate vice presidency and the college education most kids are currently using to ascend the stairs of the local unemployment office. And he trashes the letter-writing skills of University of Chicago Law School students!

She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —

Today, you mean?

THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School.

So you’re probably thinking where’s the Ivy? Who needs to know how to write a letter when some can pull in six figures for kissing great ass? Excellent question, Watson! No matter what the name of the school is, the recession is slapping the meaning of employability across its status-obsessed face. And even Obama’s Columbia-Harvard one-two doesn’t mean a thing if you have no real abilities.

After the jump watch some Wharton students wipe their noses on the cuffs of their Thomas Pink shirts.

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By now we know Obama appointed Timothy Geithner (Dartmouth ‘83) Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers (MIT ‘75 and Harvard ‘82) head of the National Economic Council. In fact, David Brooks wrote a column in last Friday’s New York Times about how “even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes.” What other schools are representing in the Obama inner sanctum of rockstar elite East Coast terrorists?

• Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ‘69, Yale Law ‘73)
• Commerce Secretary: Bill Richardson (Tufts ‘70, Tufts ‘71)
• Health and Human Services: Tom Daschle (South Dakota State ‘69)

Under Consideration:

National Security Adviser:

• James Jones (Georgetown School of Foreign Service ‘66, National War College ‘85)
• James Steinberg (Harvard ‘73, Yale Law ‘78)

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It’s election eve, Ivy Leaguers, and we at IvyGate are hoping that you’ll all go out and vote tomorrow for Obama.  But until the polls open, you’ll need something to do with your lives (besides eating half-off Halloween candy from the grocery store), and we humbly suggest that you check out YA For Obama.  YA For Obama is a social networking site created by young adult (YA) novelist Maureen Johnson (Columbia SOA ‘03).  It’s also the website where both Judy Blume and the creator of Gossip Girl officially endorse IvyGate’s favorite candidate.  We sat down with Maureen Johnson to find out how she came up with the idea for a political website that targets, well, people who aren’t old enough to vote (aka next year’s doe-eyed frosh).  Check out the interview after the jump:

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Male chauvinists, stop reading now, or forever mourn the loss of the next minute of your life: Senator Hillary Clinton, presidential unhopeful, gave a press conference at Barnard College today addressing a recent US Government Accountability Office report on pay inequity for women in the workplace.  IvyGate was pleasantly surprised that Barnard let us into the press room, where we proceeded to snap a bunch of shots of HRC from close range.  But, before the photo barrage, let us turn to the topic at hand: the fact that, on average, women earn twenty percent less than men for the same work.  The fact that Hillary earned (we’re ballparking here) twenty percent less votes than Barack Obama was not mentioned.

Although we had our suspicions about this press conference (suspicions involving the barely-departed coattails of one Barack Obama, see Liveblog 9/11/08), Hillary was eloquent, thought-provoking, and (we can’t believe we’re typing this) funny.

Some highlights, after the jump:

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A man who has been likened to Karl Rove if Karl Rove were far less cautious with his private emails, Mark Penn is possibly heading toward the nadir of his political career. But Penn wasn’t always infamous. Back in the early seventies, Penn was just a reporter for the Harvard Crimson.

Rick Perlstein writes that Penn, ‘76, displayed an early interest in public relations in a profile of a traveling encyclopedia salesman. Of the salesman, Penn wrote:

He refused to call selling ‘manipulation,’ preferring the term persuasion. Describing his sales technique as ’showing them the goods and seeing if they’ll buy,’ he compared it ‘to asking a girl out on a date.’

In this excerpt there is a glimpse of the man who told Bill Gates that “Being human is overrated.” This is kind of like what Penn told Hillary when he wasn’t telling her to attack Obama for his lack of “roots to basic American values and culture.”

In addition to writing the usual college news stories (a series of articles on where the JFK Library would be located, an article on the student government running out of beer money, and other such articles), Penn wrote several essays arguing against the impeachment of President Nixon. Like many Republicans at the time, Penn believed the Democrats were angling to install a Democrat in the White House (this was after Agnew’s resignation but before Ford was vice president). According to Penn, JFK, were he then still alive, would side against his party and support his old opponent. Penn writes:

The late President John F. Kennedy ‘40, would have condemned a political impeachment of Nixon just as he abhorred in Profiles in Courage, the attempt to oust Andrew Johnson. Whether the issue is over secret bombings of Cambodia or a militarily imposed reconstruction of the South, the public and Congress should oppose an impeachment which places the opposition party in power.

After the jump, a young Penn’s vision of the future.

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Have you ever been reading a story about Obama in Time or Newsweek and thought, “Ok, this story is good but it would be better if it were much shorter and written from a fratty perspective?” If you have then you should definitely check out Brobama.org, a website put together by bros Lee Cooper and Scott Henning, both Dartmouth ‘09. These bros (who are, in fact, brothers in the Alpha Delta fraternity of “Animal House” fame) were interning in DC this summer and decided there was a need for a site to “translate campaign coverage and political news for people our age who might not otherwise be interested.”

The site breaks a news story down into three elements: “News,” “Context,” and “What This Means for the Common Bro.” For instance:

News: McCain’s age more of an issue than Obama’s race.

Context: 23% of Americans think McCain’s age would make him less effective as a president

What This Means for the Common Bro: Can a dude still be your bro if he’s old enough to be your granddad? The significance of age is debatable, but Obama’s choice of V.P. will be more important now.

Presenting Obama as the bro’s choice for president is arguably something Obama’s campaign could stand to do a better job of. In that sense, Cooper and Henning’s site helps reinvent Obama as a regular guy. And who better to do this than two media-savvy Ivy Leaguers?

Meet them in this interview conducted by Robyn Schneider:

1. Dudes, how’d you come up with the idea for the site?

Young voters and campaign organizers have already made their marks on this election cycle. But there’s still a perception that young voters rally around candidates, particularly Obama, without any real appreciation of their policies and goals. We decided to take it upon ourselves to create a space where the newest generation of voters could be exposed to campaign issues that affect them. We’ve found a lot of voters our age who don’t find popular political media as accessible and appealing to them as it should be. There’s a startling lack of apbropriate brocabulary in the mainstream media today.

Interview continues after the jump.

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Well, we’ve all suspected it for some time, but now we have it directly from the horse’s mouth: IvyGate founding co-editor Chris Beam is a Republican operative intent on destroying the reputation of America’s Greatest Hope for Survival.

Beam, who is a Columbia grad, has a prominently placed item at Slate today in which he claims responsibility for widely circulating the phrase “terrorist fist jab” as a possible interpretation for the fist-bump shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Like so many things in our Internet-crazed lives, it seems that the trouble originated in an anonymous comment on a website:

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a “Trailhead” item that mocked the media’s difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. “Fist-pound,” “knuckle-bump,” and “fist-to-fist thumbs up” were among the funnier examples, but one of them—”Hezbollah-style fist jab”—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn’t explain that the words weren’t Thomas’

A couple miscommunications later and the phrase ended up on Fox News, causing a great deal of hand-wringing about how low the Republicans are willing to go to paint Obama as a the scary “other.”

As usual, the left has proven that the only thing more dangerous than the vast right-wing conspiracy is the vast left-wing ability to fuck itself over unnecessarily. Beam’s confession coincides with day 3 of the mass hysteria provoked by the cover of the latest New Yorker, which depcits Barack in traditional Muslim garb terrorist fist-jabbing a machine-gun toting Michele while an American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover has led to cries of umbrage from Obama’s camp, a great deal of shouting on cable news, and mumblings of “Didn’t New Yorker covers used to be funny?” from sane people.

Meanwhile, real terrorists killed more real people, but I’m not sure how you make that into a cartoon. Oh, right.

Well, we’ve all suspected it for some time, but now we have it directly from the horse’s mouth: IvyGate founding co-editor Chris Beam is a Republican operative intent on destroying the reputation of America’s Greatest Hope for Survival.

Beam, who is a Columbia grad, has a prominently placed item at Slatetoday in which he claims responsibility for widely circulating the phrase “terrorist fist jab” as a possible interpretation for the fist-bump shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Like so many things in our Internet-crazed lives, it seems that the trouble originated in an anonymous comment on a website:

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a “Trailhead” item that mocked the media’s difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. “Fist-pound,” “knuckle-bump,” and “fist-to-fist thumbs up” were among the funnier examples, but one of them—”Hezbollah-style fist jab”—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn’t explain that the words weren’t Thomas’

A couple miscommunications later and the phrase ended up on Fox News, causing a great deal of hand-wringing about how low the Republicans are willing to go to paint Obama as a the scary “other.”

As usual, the left has proven that the only thing more dangerous than the vast right-wing conspiracy is the vast left-wing ability to fuck itself over unnecessarily. Beam’s confession coincides with day 3 of the mass hysteria provoked by the cover of the latest New Yorker, which depcits Barack in traditional Muslim garb terrorist fist-jabbing a machine-gun toting Michele while an American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover has led to cries of umbrage from Obama’s camp, a great deal of shouting on cable news, and mumblings of “Didn’t New Yorker covers used to be funny?” from sane people.

Meanwhile, real terrorists killed more real people, but I’m not sure how you make that into a cartoon. Oh, right.