A CLARION CALL FOR MORE NIXONS :

DYNASTIES! (KEVIN PHILLIPS, July 8, 2002 , The Nation)

Maybe it's time for a new set of Fourth of July orations. Only at first blush is there silliness to the idea of the United States--the nation of the Minutemen, John and Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson--becoming a hereditary economic aristocracy. When you think about it, there is evidence for serious concern.

Perhaps we should consider the following, before disdaining the dynastic tradition too quickly. Over the last forty years we've had several presidents who were born to the manor : JFK, Bush I & Bush II. For all their other faults, none of these men was guilty of avarice and greed and all managed to avoid the taint of personal corruption of the financial sort. We had two presidents who actually had careers outside of politics first--Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan--and they came to office wealthy enough to remain relatively honest. Ford doesn't count. That leaves us with LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton--all born poor; all made politics a career early; all ended up rich.

If we ignore the politics and the achievements of all these men and look only at the likelihood of corruption as a function of socio-economic birth status, it seems fair to say that nothing is a better predictor of personal corruption in office than having been born poor and chosen politics as a career. On the other hand, there's no better predictor of honesty than hereditary wealth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2002 9:34 PM