Former Newsweek and New York Times writer Matt Bai has a column at Yahoo spinning furiously against anyone suggesting the Clintons are too wealthy to be in touch with those “everyday Americans.” His headline was frank: “Hillary Clinton’s not like the rest of us? Good!”
Bai hotly disputed Sen. Bernie Sanders for attacking Hillary from the populist left:
In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood this week, Sanders assailed the party’s presumed nominee, Hillary Clinton, for having accumulated the kind of wealth that can “isolate you from the reality of the world.”...you get the point: Clinton is out of touch with regular Americans because she doesn’t buy used cars or stockpile CVS coupons or save up for Disneyland like the rest of us do.
To which I would only ask: why on God’s earth would we want a president like us?
Bai wrote the out-of-touch theme has gotten more pronounced as the amount of money in politics has grown. He listed the other multi-millionaires in the race, and then whacked Marco Rubio for not being able to manage his finances without raiding his retirement accounts. (He suggested that made him unworthy of the White House.) Like a disappointed Gore/Kerry voter, he protested:
This is why we have this irritating cliché about the candidate with whom you’d most like to have a beer. It’s why pollsters routinely ask the question about whether their candidate understands “people like me,” then force their clients to go eat at Chipotle or wear a flannel shirt.
The thing is, 20th-century history tells a very different story about what constitutes compassion and what qualifies a president to lead.
He proceeded to note that both President Roosevelts were wealthy but waged war on the plutocrats, and John F. Kennedy “wound up advancing the civil rights movement and inspiring a generation of social activism.” Presidents who grew up poor and insecure – like Nixon and LBJ – were much more worrisome. Bai wrote:
But if you’re asking me to choose between the self-made man or woman with resentments and identity issues, on one hand, and some arrogant oligarch who serves no financial master and is compelled to seek office mostly by some patronizing sense of altruism on the other (Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor, comes to mind), then I’ll take out-of-touch every time, and so should you.
In fact, if there’s anything voters should fear about Clinton, perhaps, it’s not that she’s rich but that she doesn’t seem to regard herself that way. Having come from modest means and devoted most of their lives to public service, the Clintons seem to spend an awful lot of time these days focused on accumulating money, as if they still don’t have very much of it.
The speeches that have recently netted them $30 million, the foundation that sucks up cash from foreign governments, the first-class tickets for a two-hour flight from New Hampshire to Washington — all of it speaks to some underlying need to live in the rarified world they could only hope to glimpse as career politicians.
So worry about Hillary’s feelings of insecurity. But Bernie Sanders should shut up about the “out of touch with the coupon-clippers” line.
