Hail Yale, launch pad of political careers.

DINK Stover would be so proud of this presidential election. That is, if he weren't dead--and if he had ever existed in the first place.

>From the early 1900s, as the hero of a series of novels by Owen Johnson (class of 1900), Dink has stood as a centerpiece of Yale University's self-constructed mythology, the fictional embodiment of all the Bulldog virtues. He is wise, open-hearted, egalitarian in outlook, and darn handsome--a Yale man to the core.

The enduring power of the Yale myth is an inescapable mystery in American life, raising profound questions: Who are all these Yalies? Where did they come from? And what are we supposed to do with them all?

The questions arise with renewed urgency as two Yale men, John Kerry (class of 1966) and George W. Bush (class of 1968), vie for the privilege of serving as U.S. president for the next four years. What this means is that, no matter whether the country swings to the right or the left this political season, the U.S. will be led by a man who knows the words to "Boola Boola," a traditional Yale fight song.

Iron grip

It's getting to be an old story. Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor who studies the iron grip that Ivy League schools have on the national imagination, points to this fact: every presidential election in the last 32 years has involved a Yale alumnus running as either a presidential or vice presidential nominee. And most of the time he wins.

Nelson thinks Yale's influence is best understood in contrast to that of its Ivy League competitor, Harvard. In this rivalry, Nelson said, 1972 stands out as the crucial year.

"For the first 11 presidential elections, between 1789 and 1828, Harvard dominated," he said. "A Harvard man was always on the ticket of one party or another. Back then, Princeton was Harvard's great rival, because it was the college favored by the Southern aristocracy. Yale didn't enter the picture."

The first Yalie elected president was William Howard Taft (class of 1878), who in 1908 inherited the White House from Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard alum. But Yalies continued to under-perform until 1972, when Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern (Dakota Wesleyan University, '46) selected Harvard man Thomas Eagleton as his vice president, only to drop him later in favor of Yalie Sargent Shriver (class of 1938).

"That was the symbolic changeover from Harvard's dominance to Yale's," said Nelson.

McGovern and Shriver lost in 1972, of course, as did Yale Law School grad Gerald Ford in 1976. But a Yalie has been on the winning ticket in every election since then: George H.W. Bush (class of 1948) in 1980, 1984, and 1988; Bill Clinton (Yale Law 1973) in 1992 and 1996; and George W. Bush (plus Dick Cheney, who attended Yale for two years) in 2000.

"Yalies are winners," said Nelson. "Compare that to Harvard's record in those first 11 elections: The Harvard candidate won the presidency only three times."

How to account for Yale's sudden dominance of the upper reaches of U.S. politics? According to Nelson--who has a mischievous streak to go along with his unusual field of expertise--the explanation collides with the school's Stover-ish self-conception.

Legacies everywhere

"It's a result of Yale's decision in the 1920s to 'go legacy,'" he said. Yale was the first Ivy League school to explicitly grant preferences to children of alumni as a matter of admissions policy. Harvard, by contrast, began in the 1930s to institute a set of "meritocratic" admission criteria designed to broaden its applicant pool.)

"Legacies are affirmative action for rich people," Nelson said. "By his own admission, Bush wasn't much of a student in high school, but he's a third-generation legacy. Kerry is second-generation. You think Howard Dean (class of 1971), who wasn't much of a student either, would have been admitted under normal conditions? He's another second-generation legacy."

As the children of privilege filled the Yale dorms, college education was becoming a mass phenomenon in the U.S.

"Suddenly you needed more than a college education to be among the elite," Nelson said. "What separated you from the rest was a degree from a brand-name college, and Yale became a brand name." And essential to its brand was a reputation as the training school of U.S. political leaders, drawing a self-selected group of young people who gaze longingly at the levers of government power.

If you want to go into politics, Yale is the place for you to start. That's the school's sales message, and as often happens with carefully crafted images, it's become self-fulfilling.

Yalies will disagree with Nelson's analysis, needless to say, and cite their school's longstanding ethic of selfless public service, paired with rigorous intellectual training, as the reason for its dominance. Nelson understands why his own view might be unpopular.

"It does sort of blow a hole in the Horatio Alger myth, doesn't it?" he said. "But what you end up with is what we have this year: Two Yale graduates, sons of privilege, going toe-to-toe, each accusing the other of being an elitist. It will be a great show."

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.