About 150 Yale men and women gathered yesterday at their club on Vanderbilt Avenue to celebrate the hanging in its hallowed halls of a new portrait of President George W. Bush. Those in attendance included the president’s uncle, Prescott Bush. The portrait hangs on the club’s second floor lounge, to the right of the entrance by the elevator. A portrait of President Clinton, who is a Yale Law School graduate, hangs to the left of the entrance.

The first strokes of Robert Anderson’s painting of Mr. Bush were made on March 20, as the Iraq war began, and after a visit by the painter and a photographer with Mr. Bush at his ranch at Crawford, Texas. Mr. Anderson said it took more than 100 attempts to get Mr. Bush’s mouth right, to get what the artist called,”That Bush thing, like Elvis but not.”

There’s plenty of disdain for our president among the Ivy League elites, both those on campuses today and those who have graduated to private clubs in Midtown Manhattan. It can be detected even in the words of some of the other Yale men in the presidential race, like Senator Kerry and Howard Dean. So it was a nice corrective yesterday to see a fine portrait of the president, seated on a sofa and wearing a red tie, take its place on the wall in the sanctum on Vanderbilt Avenue. It’ll be illuminating to see whether the Harvard Club follows suit in recognition of the president’s status as a graduate of the Harvard Business School.