Is Political Office Just For The Wealthy? Conservatives Have Always Said So

George Romney moved to the U.S. from his native Mexico and decided to take on Richard Nixon. There wasn't an active birther movement yet, but before Romney admitted he had been brainwashed in Vietnam, sabotaging his own campaign, Nixon was preparing to go after him as someone who didn't qualify to run for president, having been born in one of the polygamist colonies the Mormon Church started in northern Mexico in the 1800s. But George was a more principled and more mainstream Republican-- and one who would have been a more honorable candidate-- than his feckless son Willard.

Now Willard is claiming his father told him that politics is just a game the independently wealthy can play. (Note: Willard has lied frequently about what he claims his father told him, so take this with a grain of salt in terms of George Romney.) “I happened to see my dad run for governor when he was 54 years old,” Willard said at Sunday's NBC debate. “He had good advice to me. He said never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference, and don’t get involved in politics when your kids are still young because it may turn their heads.”

Like we've been mentioning here, our government already has too many millionaires-- way too many... and especially too many worthless inheritors who never did anything to deserve their fortunes to begin with and, like Fred Upton, feel entitled to leadership positions. While not every single one of them should be considered a parasite on politics, it's worth looking askance at the candidacies of anyone who inherited his wealth and position from the hard work of parents and grandparents.

Blue America has come up with an alternative list of candidates-- some of whom, like Alan Grayson and Darcy Burner, for example, have been very successful in the business world and are well off. But none of our candidates are trust-fund babies born on third base who think they hit a homer. The worth of a human being is not, despite conservative dogma (and Mitt Romney's pious baloney), the same as a person's net worth.

I asked two of the most worthwhile public servants I've ever known-- both hard-working, dedicated state legislators who are running for Congress in open seats, and both from working-class families-- how they felt when they heard Romney's pronouncement. Montana progressive Franke Wilmer told me: "It's hard to think of anything more undemocratic than suggesting that personal wealth is a qualifier to run for public office. This is just one more example of how out of touch so many of our political leaders are. So many members of Congress have no idea what it is like to pay a mortgage, or not to be able afford health care, or having to sacrifice just to be able to put your child through college. I was a waitress for 16 years, and I know what hard work and sacrifice mean. I know what it is like not to have health care insurance. We have a representative democracy, but who does it represent? I think it is time we have representatives that represent the middle class, real people who live real lives."

Franke sounds a lot more like the kind of person I'd like to see in public office than Mitt Romney. Ditto for Albuquerque's staunchest defender of working families, Eric Griego. He seemed somewhat shocked that Romney would just blurt something like that out on national TV.

This statement epitomizes how out of touch Romney and the Republican right are with average working Americans. To suggest only those who are independently wealthy should run for higher office perpetuates the elitist idea that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and their corporate backers are worthy of running the country-- never mind that Romney made his money busting unions, laying off hard-working Americans and shipping jobs overseas. I welcome the debate we will have in the general election over his view of the American dream, reserved for the rich and powerful, versus our view of the American dream, built by working hard, investing in our people, and making sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share.

Please consider giving a hand to the blue-collar Blue America candidates like Franke and Eric. I guarantee you Exxon and Goldman Sachs won't be helping them but will be helping their opponents.

Yesterday Paul Krugman devoted a NY Times op-ed to America's unlevel playing field. It makes one wonder if the one percenters Romney represents haven't already fulfilled the Hamiltonian dreams of perverting our democracy and taming it in the name of the propertied classes.

Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals-- and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”

As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?

Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college-- and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school-- than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents-- loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.

Romney's attitude about only the rich running for office disgusts me but doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that the DCCC has an almost identical perspective when recruiting candidates-- pushing out grassroots progressives to make room for wealthy self-funding conservatives with almost as little connection to working families as Romney. It's why the DCCC is stealthily supporting wealthy conservatives against both Franke and Eric in their primaries. All the more reason to support these two fighters for ordinary Americans. Because, just about regardless of Inside the Beltway party, this is the alternative we're facing: