Congresspeople are richer than the average American. Fifty of them have a net worth north of $10 million. Many of the rest can count on at least $1 million in assets. But this doesn’t stop many of them from masquerading as ‘common folk’ and slapping on the ‘populist’ label. Interestingly, the Democratic voter rarely pays attention to the financial circumstances of their representatives. No one begrudged the Kennedys their wealth. FDR was from ‘old money’, but there is no bigger hero to liberals. And both the Clinton’s and the Obamas are now safely ensconced in the top 1%.
Republican politicians, on the other hand, no matter their wealth and background, love to portray themselves as men and women of the people, solidly grounded in middle-America’s, fly-over country — uninfected by the moral rot and cultural pretensions of the ‘coastal elite’.
Take Joshua David Hawley. In campaigning for a Senate seat in Missouri in 2018 he offered this:
“The political class doesn’t even pretend to listen. The liberal elites who call themselves our leaders, to them, we’re flyover country. They mean it when they say it. To them we are just empty squares out the window of a jet flying from New York to L.A. at 30,000 feet.
He went on to say that Hollywood, Wall Street, and the Washington political establishment have rigged “a system that favors them, the wealthy and the well-connected.” However, despite this political sanctimony, as soon as he was ensconced in his Senate seat he voted for a $1.9 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly favored the same wealthy and well-connected.
He also had the gall to make this criticism at a fundraiser the day before he campaigned with Donald Trump, then President and always the product of wealth and privilege — and a member of the coastal elite — who doesn’t own a golf course anywhere near Missouri or any part of flyover country.
Hawley’s pretensions to ‘average Joe’ status are ludicrous. His father was a banker. He was sent to private schools before attending Stanford U. (West Coast) and Yale Law (East Coast). In between, he taught at the exclusive and very expensive ($55,000 a year) St Paul’s private high school in London. There are no Bubbas or Ella-Maes on those hallowed grounds.
He was a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts and then-Attorney General of Missouri. He was considered a brilliant student, deeply religious, and aggressively ambitious — while not one aspect of his education and career could be considered less than ‘elite’.
Now let’s review his opponent — then-incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill. She was also a college graduate with a law degree. But she is an alumna of the University of Missouri with a JD from the University of Missouri law school. Is there a less elite, more flyover-country academic record? Her career was spent entirely in county and state politics before beating Todd ‘legitimate rape’ Akins in 2008 to win her Senate seat. But Josh painted her as ‘out of touch’.
But Republican politicians will continue to rail against the elites because they talk to people who think there is a guy in the sky who votes Republican. That Democrats in DC are making common cause with Hollywood A-listers to sell kids for sex in cannibalistic cabals run out of the basements of pizza parlors. And that Republican politicians are just like them.
It’s absurd.
Honorable mention: Sen John Kennedy (R-LA). Listen to this man speak and you’ll conjure up a good ole boy, shooting the shit, in bib-overalls, down at the mercantile in an insect-buzzing, humid, moss-covered, backwoods town. And you would be fooled.
John Neally Kennedy graduated Magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where he was elected president of his senior class and named to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a JD from the University of Virginia Law School, where he was executive editor of the Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. (Not an organization for people who wear John Deere caps). He rounded out his academic career with a first-class honours degree in Civil law from Magdalen College, Oxford.
So when you hear this man say things like “There’s been a lot of chopping, but I don’t see any chips flying”. Or “If they think it's such a swell place, well, carry your happy ass there.” Or "We've got … some hogs who have all four feet and their snout in the trough.” Let’s remember this hokum rube actual knows how to speak the Queen’s English.