NRO's Whelan hits Elena Kagan for being a bad driver

National Review's Ed Whelan throws the kitchen sink at Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

In addition to her kicking military recruiters off Harvard's campus during wartime* and being paid for a comfy position on a Goldman Sachs advisory board, this passage (from this article) nicely captures Elena Kagan's remoteness from the lives of most Americans:

Kagan ... is such a product of New York City that she did not learn to drive until her late 20s. According to her friend John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John's University, it is a skill she has not yet mastered.

Now, my first reaction to that was shock that Whelan would actually criticize a woman nominated to the nation's highest court for being a bad driver. I can only assume Whelan is now hard at work on a follow-up post portraying Kagan as bad at math.

But that was quickly followed by annoyance at the silly regional warfare Whelan is trying to provoke by painting Kagan as an out-of-touch New Yorker.  First, as Matt Gertz notes, that's a mindless smear of millions of residents of New York City (and, by the way, the kind of geographic bigotry conservatives would rage about if it were directed at Southerners or Midwesterners.)  

I was also amused by Whelan's linking of not learning to drive with being a subway-riding city-slicker. See, though I (barely) learned to drive when I was 16, I never got around to getting a driver's license and haven't driven a car since my learner's permit expired shortly thereafter. But I didn't grow up in mid-town Manhattan; I grew up in a town of about 300 people -- a town with no gas station, no stop lights, no ... well, no anything. The nearest movie theater, for example, was about 20 miles away. But I didn't have a car, or the money to buy one. Getting a driver's license would have been a largely symbolic exercise. (Since then, I have lived in Washington, DC, where driving is not particularly necessary.)

To be sure, most people I knew growing up -- and most people I know now -- know how to drive. But I'm quite certain that there are plenty of other adults who have negligible driving experience not because they are the embodiment of the conservative caricature of a limo-riding New York City elitist but because they couldn't afford to drive. And I'm quite certain you can find people like that in small cities and towns throughout America. Whelan reveals his own elitist assumptions when he links a lack of driving experience with purported big-city elitism.

* No, Whelan isn't telling the truth: Kagan did not "kick[] military recruiters off Harvard's campus."