With rare exceptions, such as hissing Franklin Roosevelt as a traitor to his class or helping out a fellow club member like Elliot Richardson, the Truly Elite really ought never get involved in presidential politics.
It makes them look so tacky-as though they actually care who`s president. The proper Truly Elite attitude should be that perhaps best expressed by a haute couture designer the other day, in response to the recent chaos in the stock market.
”Ultimately it`s going to hurt the lower classes,” he said, ”but I can`t see it having any effect on our customers.”
Unfortunately, that dreadful assemblage known as the nation`s political writers-people who wouldn`t know a debenture from an American Express receipt- have seen fit to drag the Truly Elite into the present Truly Tacky presidential campaign involuntarily.
They`ve seized upon a chance remark of George ”Our kind” (Andover `42, Yale `48) Bush, who explained he had a poor showing in one of those Iowa Grange Hall straw polls or something because some of his supporters ”were at their daughters` coming-out parties.”
One Washington columnist began shrieking that Iowans didn`t even know how to spell the word ”debutante.” She otherwise carried on as though the state`s entire population was made up of destitute Joad Family farmers without the money for a Model T in which to escape to California. A Washington political satirist-well known as a house pet of that poor-as-church-mice Kennedy clan-decried Bush as a sneering capitalist ogre whose gaffe exceeded even the criminality of Tom Dewey`s 1948 threat to have a railroad engineer
”shot at sunrise” for making Dewey`s train lurch.
Now realllly. If being of the Elite is a crime, then we should have moved the Executive Mansion up to Sing Sing in 1790. Contrary to the views of the Dreadful Assemblage, being of the Elite ought to be a political plus. As history clearly shows, our Best Presidents have always come from the Best People.
BUCKS AND BUCKLES
Consider George Washington, the Father of Our Country and the inventor of our first federal tax. He went to the grave worth more than $300,000 at a time when an income of $1,500 a year was thought of as rich. Yet no sniveling political correspondent ever carped about the shine on his shoe buckles.
John Adams was a wealthy establishment Boston lawyer who served as defense attorney for the Redcoats after the Boston Massacre and demanded a noble title when he became vice president.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, prime mover in the adoption of the Constitution, were both plantation patroons. In fact, the Elite gave us every one of our presidents until 1832, when the voting franchise was extended to everyone (which is to say, everyone who was free, white, 21 and not a member of NOW). That`s when we started all this absurd nonsense about the Common Man and being born in log cabins.
And we continued to turn to the Elite after that. Abraham Lincoln, revered as our greatest president, may have run as a backwoods rail-splitter in his early political days, but he stood for the presidency as a wealthy corporation lawyer (chief real estate attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad), husband of a Kentucky and Illinois society belle, wearer of expensive frock coats and white gloves and earner of $40,000 a year (a sum beyond the wildest dreams of the yuppies of that era).
Teddy Roosevelt (Harvard `80) was one of the 5th Avenue superrich of his time and might even have been a regular at Cafe Mortimer`s if it had been around then, but he`s celebrated not only for San Juan Hill and the Panama Canal but for waging war on sweatshops and busting up evil corporate trusts.
Cousin Franklin (Harvard `03), a saint to the Dreadful Assemblage, was not only of the Elite himself but married his Elite cousin Eleanor.
Jack Kennedy (Harvard `40), adored by the Dreadful Assemblage (at least when I was part of it in 1960), was not only filthy rich but married to one of the greatest debutantes of all time, Jacqueline Bouvier, who then as now made the likes of Cornelia ”Deb of the Decade” Guest seem pig farmers` castoff daughters in comparison.
And what sort of presidents have we gotten from the Mere Masses?
SUCH A PANIC
The first plebe prez was Andrew Jackson, whose chief contributions were ignoring Supreme Court rulings that forbade the butchering of Indians and bringing on, through his monumental ignorance of money matters, one of the worst financial panics of all time.
That giant of his epoch Warren G. Harding-he of the front-porch campaign, White House poker and whiskey parties and the Teapot Dome scandal-was another Man of the People, as was that failed haberdasher turned political crony Harry Truman, whose decision to withdraw from the 1952 race was greeted by Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas as ”a great day for the Democratic Party!” I`ll be mean. Do you remember Richard Nixon, the California grocery boy?
Or Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer (actually warehouseman), nuclear physicist (actually submarine engineer) and military genius (the Iranian Desert One raid), who will be remembered by posterity for ”the Moral Equivalent of War,” ”the National Malaise” and speed reading at the dinner table?
There`s just one thing wrong with my frankly elitist argument. If you follow it to its logical conclusion, you end up with a 1988 presidential election between Republican Pierre DuPont IV and Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV.
Oh, dear. Well, as George Plimpton is always saying, dreadfully sorry. –
