There’s something appealing about rich guys who run for public office
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has the triple advantages of incumbency, money, and being the better candidate in the upcoming mayoral election in New York City. He has his head on his shoulders and he is rich. No matter what Americans say about the rich, especially the self-made rich, they are tantamount to royalty in this country. We like to vote for them because we live in a capitalist culture where, at the end of the day, people are more often than not valued by how much they have, not unlike they are in the game of Monopoly. We are a sort of meritocracy based on the acquisition of wealth. Whether the name is Rockefeller or Golisano, Kennedy, Bloomberg or Spitzer, we seem to like rich guys because of the feeling that they have either earned it, as in the case of a Bloomberg or Golisano, or because they have used their inherited fortunes to assist the public good. We also tend to believe that unlike some other politicians whose names appear in our headlines from time to time, they don’t have to steal in order to fund their political campaigns, or worse, to line their pockets and those of their friends. Ironically, we really like the idea that these rich guys won’t have to incur favors by taking the money of corrupt forces, be they unions who want a fat contract from the state or city, or from any other of the dubious types who are always to be found on the fringes of politics.

Eliot Spitzer took over the insignificant office of Attorney General in New York and turned it into an international powerhouse dedicated to the causes of clean business and clean government. Since then, incredible numbers of denizens of the political world want the job. Spitzer told me early on that he wanted to run the best law firm in the world. To that end, he recruited some of the most talented lawyers in every field and gave them the sense that they should do it right and that he would back them up. He and his little law firm have done exactly that. The only black mark that his opponents have tried to stick on Spitzer is that he took money from his family to run for Attorney General the first time out. When you think about it, that’s a lot cleaner than having your family making deals with labor unions for endorsements that will end up costing the public millions of dollars.

Spitzer’s ability to recruit top talent to the Attorney General’s office is reminiscent of Kennedy and New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller, who were able to do the same thing. They knew that their future success would be incumbent on the people around them. In Rockefeller’s case, people were not only recruited to take relatively low paying jobs but, it turns out, with other incentives including major loans that would be forgiven in the Governor’s will. When you contrast this type of largess with some governors who we need not mention here who are in the pockets of lobbyists and friends of friends and of relatives of relatives, the idea of electing honorable rich guys is not such a terrible one.

The sons of the wealthy, like Harriman, Kennedy and Rockefeller, used their fortunes in appropriate ways so they would not be tarnished with cheap political deals. Of course, you’ve got to remember how their parents gained their fortunes. To put it mildly, it wasn’t pretty but at least their kids have tried to avoid the same stench. And at the end of the day, men like Carnegie and Rockefeller did their best to help out philanthropically by providing in their wills for major organizations.

Some of you who read this will believe I have sold out. There will be those who argue that the last thing we want in this country is an oligarchy of rich men and women who run things like grand patrons, spitting down the hill at the rest of us and telling us what to do. To you, I can only say that I agree but with a single reservation: as long as the system is structured in the way it is, so that in order to win people without resources have to get down in the mud and play with pigs, we will have a system badly in need of repair which offers little incentive to do it right. That is why we like and trust rich guys who give their all to the public good. That is why Bloomberg, a Republican in a Democratic city like New York, who gives his time and large parts of his public fortune to do good, can win an election.
- posted by Aja @ 10/03/2005 09:58:00 AM

 
I, Publius: Shining the light of truth
The movie of the year is "Good Night and Good Luck." I saw it opening night at the 43rd New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. It is the story of every true journalist's hero, Edward R. Murrow, a man whose name is synonymous with guts, talent and courage. Murrow, along with our later Berkshires neighbor, the great Fred Friendly, risked everything to shine the light of truth on the politics of his time.It was the 1950s and I was back at Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) in Manhattan. My mother was the school community coordinator for the West Side. She was a committed liberal, but not a Communist. In fact, she detested the Communists and thought they were as bad as Sen. Joe McCarthy when it came to their commitment, or lack thereof, to people's civil liberties. She used to tell the story of being threatened by members of the old Teachers' Guild who told her, "Come the revolution, Shirley, we're going to put you up against a tree and shoot you." She would proudly recount how she had reminded them that the first people Stalin shot were the revolutionaries who had helped him seize power.

In any case, she adored Ed Murrow, with whom, she said, she had friends in common. When Murrow got around to doing his now-famous "See It Now" program on McCarthy, the tyrannical red-baiter who ruined so many lives, she got a telephone call that told her of the upcoming show and encouraged her to let the people at CBS know how much she appreciated the program. On this live show, Murrow took the senator's own words and hurled them back at him. Every segment had to be timed to the second. What he did then would be unthinkable today.

Fear was the operative word in the '50s. People who were branded as Communists were being blacklisted and losing their jobs. There was a Communist author, Bella Dodd, who wrote a book back in those days. In it, she listed the names of her old school chums, and one of them was my mother's friend. Let's just call her Aunt Esther, who had a top academic job at a New York public university. I came into my mother's room one day and heard her trying to calm down Aunt Esther. When she got off the phone, I asked her what she had been talking about. She told me that Aunt Esther had been "named" in Bella Dodd's book and was worried she might lose her teaching job.

It's all true — just read up on it. If you even had a friend who might have been a Communist, you were in real danger of being blacklisted and losing your livelihood. People who were guilty of nothing went to jail. They lost their occupations and were unemployable for years, or were forced to leave the country to find work.

It was Edward R. Murrow who had the guts to stand up to McCarthy and start the torrent that left the tyrant censured by his own Senate colleagues. We will never know whether things would have turned around without Murrow. Maybe McCarthy had gone too far. All we know is that out of all of them, Murrow was the one who took the chance. When he did, the McCarthyites came after him with everything they had. They called him a Communist and they said that he was a member of the IWW (the Wobblies), but he faced them down. He won.

Murrow was also a fierce critic of the television industry and of the pap it produced then as now. It was his viewer-friendly "Person to Person," in which he interviewed people like Liberace in their homes, that made us watch while it was much harder to absorb and handle the more difficult material on "See It Now" that made people squirm.

I know all about that. You put Scott Ritter, the Republican former U.N. arms inspector, on the radio to tell us that George Bush was lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction and you get the most hateful letters that really send chills through you. They are virtually never signed with a real person's name.

I came out of that theater and saw the parallels that we face now. We have a president who is all too ready to let people believe that he is the real patriot while he threatens our own civil liberties including those associated with something as basic as habeas corpus. We need Ed Murrow now more than ever before.

George Bush is wreaking havoc with our democracy and now is the time for courage. I recommend that everyone get off their duffs and go see this remarkable movie. George Clooney deserves a super Oscar for having the courage to give this magnificent reminder to all of us.

First Published in the Berkshire Eagle October 1, 2005
- posted by Aja @ 10/03/2005 08:17:00 AM