Perhaps, in the best of all worlds, only the students with the highest grades would enter colleges and universities. But this is not a perfect world, and if that standard were applied, President Bush would not have qualified for that seat he took from someone else when he was admitted into Yale.

He benefited from what Harvard man Ben Bradlee, former editor of The Washington Post, has deemed one of the oldest forms of affirmative action, or preferential treatment, if you will. He was a legatee: Bush’s father and other men in the family had attended Yale before him.

These many years later, Bush doesn’t understand the leg up that people of his kind and others much valued in society — athletes, for instance — attain and how others, unfortunate enough to be denied such privilege, lose.

That is why he, and lawyers working on behalf of the administration, are opposing attempts by the University of Michigan to continue to select students from an expanded pool.

It considers factors that include whether applicants are black, Latino, Native American or poor. But it also includes, mainly, academic performance in high school. And, yes, there are such factors as socioeconomic disadvantage, athletics and — yep! — connection to graduates. That legatee thing.

No, says Bush, such an affirmative-action program is “fundamentally flawed” — as if this society were not.

It is not enough to say, as Bush did on the eve of filing a brief with the Supreme Court asking the Michigan plan to be ruled unconstitutional, that “we should not be satisfied with the current numbers of minorities on American college campuses.”

Bush’s talk is cheap, shallow, disingenuous. Just as the White House’s brief in the Michigan case is.

His talk is of the future, of that shining city on the hill, of that Kingsian time when “all of God’s children, black and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual … ‘we are free at last.”‘

Bush says he wants to “make sure that America’s public schools offer a quality education to every child from every background.” But freedom, as the song goes, ain’t free.

To get from where we are to where he claims to want us to be is a monumental challenge, and one best attacked as it was in New York City last week, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed what in these times amounts to a revolutionary overhaul of the public school system.

But years will pass before results are known. In the meantime, something must be done to ensure that those kids of talent who do emerge from this public school system, despite its deficiencies, can have access to the top schools of the nation. It is they, after all, who are more likely to return home to work as professionals in underserved communities.

Many of those who hate the Michigan plan and, thus, support the Bush position say it’s perfectly fine for colleges to admit some students who are not the top students. So long as they are legatees or athletes or whatever — characterizations that, as my old classmate Ted Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says, are “beyond the reach of the law.”

He adds: “We need affirmative action to offset the effects of those policies.” Race, or, more accurately, the history of how race has worked against people of color in this country, cannot be wiped away with a few empathetic words by Bush.

Love us all you will, but in the meantime, while waiting for federal initiatives to be enacted, and then to kick in, and initiatives such as Bloomberg’s to be enacted and then to kick in, permit the University of Michigan and other public institutions to acknowledge that something must be done. And forthwith.

Once these initiatives have a track record of success, then, and only then, can we retire affirmative action plans.

Short of that, Bush and his cohorts merely offer feel-good words to those left out while protecting the interests of those who know that they will always get in.