Yes, I know that we're a nation of equals, the only difference being that some of us are more equal than others. Of course, some of those who are "more equal" come to see that as the natural order of things. Some even become President- and that's where the fun begins.
No one with an ounce of sense would ever categorize Shrub as "a man of the people". The road before him has been smoothed and paved his entire life. He is the patrician son of a patrician father who makes no pretence about his knowledge of where he falls in the social order of things. Maureen Dowd offers a look into a class warrior's view of the world as it ought to be:
WASHINGTON — Once when I was covering the first President Bush, I took one of his top political strategists out to dinner.
After a couple of martinis, he blurted out that the president was having a hard time with the idea that I was the White House reporter for The New York Times.
Dumbfounded, I asked why.
"We just picture you someplace else — at The Chicago Tribune maybe," he said.
Growing up in a Victorian mansion in Greenwich, the son of a Connecticut senator and Wall Street banker, the president had conjured up a certain image of what the Times White House reporter would be like. Someone less ethnic and working-class, with a byline like Chatsworth Farnsworth III.
Poppy Bush was always gracious to me, even though he hated getting tweaked about being a patrician and complained that journalists cared more about class than he did.
The Bushes see the world through the prism of class, while denying that class matters. They think as long as they don't act "snotty" or swan around with a lot of fancy possessions, that class is irrelevant.
They make themselves happily oblivious to the difference between thinking you are self-made and being self-made, between liking to clear brush and having to clear brush.
Perhaps this accounts for Shrub's apparent disdain for domestic affairs. Here is a man who has had all of the benefits that being well-born and well-connected can bring. He cannot speak with any degree of credibility to the middle and lower socioeconomic classes, because he has had no experience with that sort of life. When he talks about race-base admissions policies, he conveniently forgets that he was admitted to Yale as a legacy. He has never had to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, because someone has always done it for him.
If I were the cynical sort, I'd be wondering if Shrub's desire for war against Iraq stems from his desire to be taken seriously. If you've never earned anything, if everything you've achieved has essentially been given to you, I could understand that desire. And that, dear reader, is our President. Yes, he was elected (depending on your point of view, I suppose), but it's just too bad that the man can't begin to relate to most of us.
