Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.


Hairstyle by Christophe's $75.

Designer shirts: $250.

Forty-two foot luxury yacht: $1 million.

Four lavish mansions and beachfront estate: Over $30 million.

Another rich, liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he's a man of the people. Priceless.

LMAOROFL! :D

Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

I refuse to believe that he spent more than $8 for that haircut.

I see you saw that commercial. Not as funny as the moveon.org commericals.

Damn, that man just has too much hair.

Re: Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

If he paid $8 for that haircut, it was $8 too much!!

Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

But wait? Isn't his opponent, the President, the guy who owned a baseball team -- among other things?

Playing the "big money family" card ain't gonna work in this election.

Re: Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

I think the point was that neither is, "I'm the man for the working people" when neither was.

What about the botox injections he supposedly had? that should go somewhere in there too.

Kitso
KS 361

Re: Re: Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

Yeah....

It's all a matter of what the "average voter" thinks, and what has influenced them.

Wow DeltAlum... That one flew WAY over your head...

Re: Re: Re: Re: Mass. Senator John Kerry
 

These aren't Canadian elections. Thank you.

-Rudey

On a similar note, I read this article a couple days ago.

Obviously it's a little exaggerated since not every American president has vast swimming pools full of money, but I do think it's sort of ridiculous that either Bush or Kerry thinks he's representative of "the common man."



Clash of Titans
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 6, 2004

We're so full of it. We pretend to be a middle-class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. We love our Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes, Deans and Gores. We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before the New England summer homes. How else can you explain the Bush vs. Kerry matchup that confronts us this year?

In Britain neither of these guys could lead a major party. Their upper-crust pedigrees would be disqualifying. But here in the land of Ralph Lauren wannabes, one all-scion campaign follows another. Here in the land of middle-class self-loathing, we want to make sure that the guy we elect to the White House has lived a life nothing like our own.

So you have one party, the Republican Party, the so-called party of the heartland, which won't nominate a guy unless he has a ranch the size of Oklahoma. Republicans don't think you're fit to govern unless you're on the north 40 every summer clearing brush. And then you have the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, who won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower.

This year's nominee, John Kerry, is almost a parody of the East Coast establishment. He's descended from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his mother is a member of the famously haughty Forbes clan. He spent part of his childhood at a boarding school in Switzerland before his aunt, whose estate included a bowling alley inside the barn, sent him to then-snooty St. Paul's.

In 1962, Kerry sailed with President John Kennedy while visiting the Auchincloss estate. Then it was off to Yale, Skull and Bones, and Vietnam.

When he returned, he testified before Congress, and his accent was still so plummy he sounded like an antiwar version of Thurston Howell III. He went on to marry Julia Thorne, a jet-setting heiress with a family fortune of about $300 million, whose grandfather kept the entire island of Hilton Head, S.C., as a hunting preserve.

Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is worth over $500 million. Between them they have a $4 million mansion in Georgetown, a $6 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in Boston, a $6 million summer home on Nantucket, a $3 million estate in Pittsburgh and a $5 million ski lodge in Idaho, which is a 15th-century English barn that was disassembled and imported to the U.S.

Most Democrats have trouble affording one home, so when they search for a leader who shares their values, of course they nominate a guy who is running for his sixth. Of course they nominate a guy whose 42-foot powerboat, the Scaramouche, sells for upward of $700,000. Of course they choose a guy famous for his Christophe haircuts and his Turnbull & Asser shirts. Of course they choose a couple who paid to have an unsightly fire hydrant moved from the front of their Boston house, and who sought to divert huge amounts of river water to supply their sprawling Idaho lawn.

This is the land of "Masterpiece Theatre" liberals and Town & Country conservatives. Sure, we want our toffs to flatter us, and abase themselves while campaigning at our diners and cheesesteak counters. We want our Republican candidates to embrace the cultural populism of the Bible Belt. We want our Democratic candidates to embrace the economic populism of the working class. The Democrats even have a campaign consultant, Bob Shrum, who has made a large fortune taking multizillionaires like Al Gore, John Kerry and others and making sure that they run for office as born-again proletarians.

But we don't actually want to be governed by people like ourselves. We want the bloodlines.

The anthropologist Lionel Tiger points out that in many primate communities, the offspring of high-status females are immediately accorded membership in the troop's elite.

Tiger points out that politics is a visceral business. It's a tremendous advantage to have been instilled with the habit of self-assertion since infancy. If you can project a physiological comfort with power, others around you will begin to accept your sense of self-worth.

There aren't too many normal people waking up in normal suburban split-levels assuming they should rule the world. But God bless the upper class. They've lost their legitimacy, but they haven't lost their self-confidence.

Yeah, that's the paradox of what Americans want in our President. We want him to be of the people, and above the people, all at the same time.

The NYTimes Op-Ed piece you pulled up is a decent read. Brooks, by the way, went to my school.

-Rudey
--Go Chicago!

Should I assume that he is butt-ugly and lacking in social skills then? ;)