-Caveat Lector- The Class President
January 22, 2003 By MAUREEN DOWD 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. In a 1986 interview with George senior and George junior, then still a drifting 40-year-old, The Washington Post's Walt Harrington asked the vice president how his social class shaped his life, noting that families like the Bushes often send their kids to expensive private schools to ensure their leg up. "This sounds, well, un-American to George Jr., and he rages that it is crap from the 60's. Nobody thinks that way anymore!" Mr. Harrington wrote. "But his father cuts him off. . . . He seems genuinely interested. . . . But the amazing thing is that Bush finds these ideas so novel. . . . People who work the hardest - even though some have a head start - will usually get ahead, he says. To see it otherwise is divisive." When journalists on W.'s campaign wrote that he had been admitted to Yale as a legacy, the candidate's Texas advisers pointed out that he had also gotten into Harvard, and no Bush family members had gone there. They seemed genuinely surprised when told that Harvard would certainly have recognized the surname and wagered on the future success of the person with it. If you don't acknowledge that being a wealthy white man with the right ancestors blesses you with the desirable sort of inequality, how can you fix the undesirable sort of inequality? The Bushes seem to believe that the divisive thing in American society is dwelling on social and economic inequities, rather than the inequities themselves. When critics of W.'s tax cuts say they favor the wealthy, the president indignantly accuses them of class warfare. That's designed to intimidate critics by making them seem vaguely pinko. Besides, there's nothing more effective than deploring class warfare while ensuring that your class wins. It is the Bush tax cut that is fomenting class warfare. When the University of Michigan tries to redress a historic racial injustice by giving some advantage based on race, Mr. Bush gets offended by arbitrarily conferred advantages, as if he himself were not an affirmative-action baby. The president's preferred way of promoting diversity in higher education is throwing money at black colleges, which is not exactly a clarion call for integration. For all the talk about how Republicans were morally re-educated by the Trent Lott fiasco, Mr. Bush is still pandering to an unspoken racial elitism. He resubmitted the nomination of a federal judge with a soft spot for cross-burners. And, as Time notes this week, he quietly reinstituted the practice - which lapsed under his father in 1990 - of sending a floral wreath on Memorial Day from the White House to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, where those nostalgic for the Old South celebrate Jefferson Davis. Why on earth would the president of the U.S. in the year 2003 take the trouble to do that? Back in '86, when the Post reporter suggested that class mattered, W. found the contention un-American. But isn't it un-American if the University of Michigan or Yale makes special room for the descendants of alumni but not the descendants of the disadvantaged? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/opinion/22DOWD.html?ex=1044349399&ei=1&en=8b3519df63fad183 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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