At Yale, the Clintonian’s Den Supports Obama

“It is better to have one from Harvard than to have McCain”

“To be a Yale graduate does not necessarily mean being intelligent”. This sarcastic phrase has been camping under a fixed poster put up next to the post office near Cross Campus, the elite University’s big lawn where the Morse code was invented, as was Frisbee. This campus also represents George Bush Jr’s face born in New Haven, Connecticut and a Yale class of 1968 graduate, following his father’s footsteps. Hillary Clinton graduated here, at the Law school together with her future husband, President Bill. But Hillary has lost the primary elections against Barack Obama, a Harvard graduate of the eternal antagonist university. What do they think about this at Yale?

“I do not want to have Hillary as a vice-president, in fact, at the beginning I wasn’t even supporting Obama, I would have preferred John Edwards. At this point, the important thing is to brush off Republicans” comments Mike Saperstein, 47 years old, who is a Woody Allen style comedian in New York pubs, after having been a third world economist in Wall Street and a 1983 graduate from Yale. “Obama charms when he talks and he makes us want to fight again for something. McCain is a wreck recovered from an old museum. Hillary as vice-President? It would be a changing ticket, and her capability to fight is useful for the cause”, comments Rob Wrubel, who moved to Berkeley after selling for two million dollars Ask Jeeves, the search engine which he funded during the Net Economy times and “Knowledge Adventure”, the major scholar software editor. Like Saperstein, he came to celebrate his 25th graduation anniversary with his college friends.

Some cross-country runners, who work as waiters to save up money for the holidays, are keen on emphasizing that “We have always been in competition with Harvard, but our universities are both Ivy league (an homage to the plant which decorates its walls) and they speak the same language, light years away from the naval Academy of Annapolis, from which McCain barely came out”. At the end of May, like each year, in this neo-Goth cathedral, like in other universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge, the alumni’s have made an appointment to meet after the tenth graduation anniversary or even for the quarter and half a century graduation anniversaries. They brought their families to show their college friends. Some have become company CEOs (such as Rob Glaser, founder of Real Networks, who has been the first to put audio and video up on the Internet, and who is a big Obama fan), others have become famous scientists, artists, actors (such as Jody Foster, an Obama supporter, who landed at Yale in 1980, when John Lennon was killed) and finally, some have become renowned politicians. “If there is a school that has instructed top American leaders in the past 30 years, that is Yale” says The Boston Globe, the Harvard city newspaper.

“It is extraordinary that a nation which 50 years ago was segregated has had the opportunity to elect its first black President” even though the racial issue exists, it will never come out with McCain, and this demonstrates that the United States has taken many steps forward. The fact that Obama has attended Harvard makes him as comfortable within the establishment, as the establishment is comfortable with him”, observes Peter Magyar, a Dewet & Le Boeuf London partner, one of the major law firms in the world. Half Hungarian and half from New England, he is a Yale ‘83 graduate, has three daughters, and is married to Diana Philips, an American movie producer (“Funeral Party”, “Wild Child”). He further adds: “The ticket Obama-Hillary? It is helpful to win the elections against the Republicans, but I do not envision them together at the White House”.

Sara Tucker used to be pro-Hillary. She graduated from Yale with a major in Chinese and spent many years at the Getty Conservation Institute; she then became a mother of three and the director of the Business School at the University of California. “Now that the chosen one is Obama, I will vote for him, and almost all the people I know will vote for him; because a vote for him is a vote for the future, instead a vote for McCain is a vote thrown to fear, and it is time to stop this”. Her college friend Sara Blake, a novel writer who moved to Washington with two children and a husband, who is a theatre professor, adds: “I think that this time we will move ourselves to bring people to vote for Obama, people who will be motivated and who will make a difference”.

“These elections compel Americans to silently look at themselves with their racist hearts and to evolve” adds Wrubel, a yoga lover and proud of his three children, he is a delegate administrator for Aptimus, an advertising company online. Nick Lobenthal, who after having graduated from Yale went on to do Law school at Columbia University, coaches his daughter’s basketball and is a partner in the Teitler & Teitler Law firm in New York: “The important thing is to cast Republicans away from the White House. It has been eight horrible years”.