Heh. Speaking today at a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire:

I was asked, I’m supposedly an expert on foreign policy. Well, you know, an expert from where I come from is anyone from out of town with a briefcase. I do not have a briefcase with me today. But here, I was speaking at a conference… our allies from around the world. …I was asked a simple question: What is the single most important object… that American most complete in order to maintain its dominance physically as well as economic ascendancy in the world? What is it? And the answer I gave them I think surprised them, but the president and I shared this view together. We have to be the single best-educated nation in the world in order to be able… that is not hyperbole. We must be the single best-educated nation in the world.

Self-aware? Self-deprecating? Tongue-in-cheek? As the right-hand ambassador of our august president‘s foreign policy decisions, I’ll let you decide.

But, you know I’m going to take umbrage with the rest of that statement. Ahh yes, education — one of those politically-unassailable items in which the Obama administration just loves to “invest” on our behalf. Really? Maybe fostering a free, robust, prosperous economy and letting the productive jobs follow suit isn’t the number-one priority? Rather, ensuring that every American has easy access to a liberal arts degree (a.k.a., using government policy/taxpayer dollars to drive up student-loan as well as tuition prices and getting kids to invest huge sums in educations that they don’t necessarily want or need) is your number one goal? I know that he’s trying to imply that you can’t stay at the military/technological/energy/etcetera forefront without top-notch, competitive engineers/scientists/businesspeople/doctors/etcetera, but come on — the government does not need to ensure that, and what this government has done more than anything else is get in the way of that, because there are no jobs for these graduates. A feel-good, you’re-so-important pander to the college contingent much?