The polls are barely open. I can’t tell you who will win the Presidential Election. But I can tell you one thing about him: he’ll be a Yale graduate.*
No, Yale is not the problem.
Yale is not exactly State University. It has high standards and even higher tuition. You know the mortgage company ad where the guy is selling everything he owns because his kid got into an “Ivy League” school? That’s the kind of place we are talking about. But George Herbert Walker Bush didn’t have to take out a second mortgage to send little Dubya. And even though John Kerry married a fabulously wealthy woman, he was by no means poor as a young man.
Even my favorite politician, Eliot Spitzer, is a Harvard graduate and hedge fund investor. You have to have a cool million in net worth before hedgies are allowed to let you invest. Slate describes him as having “the classic New York rich kid résumé.”
The bottom line is that you have to be wealthy to play in the game of politics. Contributions aside, how else can you afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to earn a job that pays $400,000 per year that you only get to keep 4 years?
It gets even worse at the state level. While a United States Senator makes a nice six figure salary, with which he must effectively maintain two residences, State Senators earn a pittance. In Texas, for example, the salary is $7200 per year. In North Carolina, a State Senator earns $13,951. These numbers are not unusual. And they can’t vote themselves an increase that would make the job anything less than a financial drain, because the headline would read something like “State Senate votes 300% pay increase.” Let the angry letters begin.
Oh, but those are part time jobs. Few states have full time legislatures. They are only supposed to be in session something like 3 months a year, depending on the state. Let me ask you something: How would your boss feel about letting you have 3 months off every year? Oh, and another 3 months off for campaign season every other year. Even if you offered to take the time off without pay, I think many employers would seriously look at replacing an employee who was gone that often. I am guessing most people can’t afford to do run for office, much less fulfill that office if elected.
And I haven’t even touched on what a political campaign can do to one’s personal life.
The fact that politicians are wealthy is not bad all by itself. But a man who has grown up with a trust fund has never had to carefully consider whether he can afford genuine Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. He has never worried about next month’s rent/mortgage. He has never wondered where he will come up with the money for necessities. He has never had to pawn anything, never considered a “payday loan.” In short, no matter how much he sympathizes with those among us who struggle, he will never completely understand what it is like. He may well feel a great duty to the poor, but in all likelihood he has no frame of reference for what things can truly help them.
Remember to vote today, alright?
*What, you don’t think Nader has a chance, do you?
I remember way back in grade school when we were first taught about how the government worked, and learning about how I could be president when I turned 35. I couldn’t wait to get old enough to be president. Since then I’ve been the average middle class American – been laid off a few times, worked the crappy jobs just to make ends meet, got hte wife and the kids and the house and the dog, never been “financially independant” like the big-time political gamers.
Now that I’m old enough to run (I was legal this summer, so I could have run for these elections technically), I’m not sure I want to put myself through it – not so much the actually being president bit, as much as the scrutiny and the campaigning and the having every tiny aspect of my life put under an electron microscope. There’s a few bits from my past that would come back to haunt me; your typical youthful indiscretions that *just won’t do* if you’re gonna be President. Then there’s the fact that my wife doesn’t want to be first lady, and doesn’t want our kids stuck in the public eye… It’s nice to know she thinks I could make it as president, tho 🙂