aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Bush: The downside of dynasty

For all the recent talk of “Bush-Clinton fatigue” - The AP’s Nancy Benac says, “The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented.” - Hendrik Hertzberg takes us on a Dynastic Voyage through America’s past that suggest it’s just not so.

But, he concludes, for Hillary there still may be a downside:

Senator Clinton is different, obviously. She is indisputably a wife-of, but it was she, not he, whom Life selected as an icon of their generation when she graduated from college. It was she, not he, who, as a young lawyer, got the coveted job with the House Watergate investigation. She would have gone far, maybe even this far, without him. However much she benefits from the dynasty factor, though, the Economist is right: there’s a downside. The downside’s name is Bush. If, as the voters in 2000 wished, Al Gore, son of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., had been granted the White House, things might be a bit easier-not just for Hillary Clinton but also for her main Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama. George W. Bush has been as poor an advertisement for “inexperience” as for dynasticism. It’s not fair, of course. Bush’s failure to learn much of anything for the past six years suggests a deficit of character, not of experience; his unwillingness to employ his father’s skills and advice on behalf of the nation shows a disrespectful disregard for a dynast’s biggest advantage. He has given both freshness and family a bad name.

Via Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith at Veracifier, where she mourns that there were no Smiths among the American dynasties, “my parents did a lousy job of marrying into the six ruling families that dominate American politics… In fact, the only legitimate dynastic claims my family could hedge would be at the Piggly-Wiggly...”