Class traitor.

Aw, geez. Let's set up a system where only rich people can practically get elected. Then let's say that purporting to care about anyone but a class you belong to makes you a phony hypocrite.

Then let's sit back and admire the entirely fortuitous result that all the candidates who seem 'genuine' are ignoring the poor. You can't argue with it, it's Science.

He's absolutely right. We should have a real man of the people as President. Like the salt-of-the-earth current President who pulled himself up by his own feet because he left his bootstraps in Connecticut.

Sometimes I just want to build a wall around our states and be done with it. It's so depressing.

If the only politicians that can propose policies to improve the lot of the poor are those that give away all their wealth, then there will be no proposals to improve the lot of the poor.

QED.

Dean Barnett believes that he is smart, but makes arguments that would get you laughed out of a special ed class. Just goes to show what a hypocrite he is, I guess.

6 is unfair. I see no tension between Barnett's public persona and his private life, in which he lives under a bridge, in the dark, gnawing on the bones of unlucky passing children, just as you might expect.

Shitty logic, yes. But I will cop to some degree of disgust myself. And such logic isn't limited to the righties.

This part is at least true:

Edwards isn't a dodo. He had to know that building such a house while running a Huey Long-style campaign would be a jarring contradiction. And yet he went ahead and did it anyway.

the one thing you must not do, if you're really rich, is give a fuck about poor people.

No, no, not quite...

And then he builds a house that will serve as a living, breathing example of how the "other half" enjoys lives of a completely different sort than working people. It doesn't add up.

...a Democrat who says he gives a shit about poor people is a rotten elitist hypocrite. A Republican who clearly doesn't give a shit about poor people is exemplar of principle and the highest morality.

Above even that, are the greatest Republican statesmen, those who violently sodomize everybody. With broomsticks!

m, George Bush, patron saint of assrape

This part is at least true:
Edwards is ... running a Huey Long-style campaign

Really?

11. I'm no Huey Long scholar, but he was a populist, against the rich, for the poor (all the while he became more ostentatiously wealthy), so it doesn't strike me as completely off.

I will cop to some degree of disgust myself

I don't want to sound unkind, but I'm not sympathetic to your disgust. Which presidents have done the most for poor people in modern American history? Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, maybe? I count three silver spoons out of five, there.

The quote in 9 says more about the disappearance of communitarianism and obligation from religious rhetoric than anything I've seen from the new Chris Hedges book. When you're talking about someone vocally concerned about the working poor, the first figure that should come to mind should probably not be Huey Long. (Also, isn't Edwards' whole positioning -- "son of a millworker" until it's a joke, etc. -- that he came up by his bootstraps so he knows how hard it is?)

On the other hand, I should probably not spend a moment more thinking about anything on Hugh Hewitt's website.

Edwards's rhetoric is not nearly so inflammatory as Long's. Sounds a lot more like a Kennedy, to me. The choice of Long is as informed as Goldberg comparing Sausagely to Lindbergh.

But you peeps really don't find this a little odd? I don't have a cogent argument; I know we don't buy into Peter Singer around here, but at the same time Singer's not 100% wrong. I mean, nothing wrong with a nice house, but the size of this thing does seem extreme. And it does seem to jar with his campaign. And, I've always felt that extreme wealth is in itself is somewhat wrong.

I've seen that clip in an exhibit!

Sounds a lot more like a Kennedy, to me.

Now that's just mean.

isn't limited to the righties.

Stoller has a long-running grudge against Edwards. I instantly discount anything he has to say about him, as so far none of it has been worth hearing. Look, rich people buy expensive things. If you want to be disgusted about that, well, I certainly won't stand in your way but you're in for a long, long run of disgust.

To be clear, I think I'm actually more bothered by Edwards as so ostentaciously wealthy than I am bothered about the appearance of hypocrisy. Still, I honestly think it's a blockheaded stupid move for a presidential contender.

Anyone richer than me is an exploitive and cruel bastard, Michael, but anyone poorer than me has proven that they have a character defect (and are probably a bit stupid, to boot).

19- Is there any way for a right-thinking person these days to avoid a long, long run of disgust? Might as well get used to it.

13: My disgust doesn't have anything to do with Edwards' wealth, nor do I think that there's any inconsistency between being rich and working to improve things for the poor. But I strongly dislike huge, ostentatious houses and other sorts of really egregious conspicuous consumption.

So if they can hate Edwards for being rich, why don't they hate Bush? Or is the mind-crime being rich and actually trying to do something for other people instead of getting a bunch of Secret Service guys to clear brush for the cameras?

(Woohoo! Only, what, 349 days left until the Iowa caucus?)

Look, rich people buy expensive things. If you want to be disgusted about that, well, I certainly won't stand in your way but you're in for a long, long run of disgust.

True. I'll probably get over it. I knew Edward's wealth, but I guess I didn't know what he was doing with it. When we're not reminded of them making purchases for themselves, perhaps we're more apt to think they're setting up charities. Which Edwards very well may be.

Singer reportedly has a home in New Jersey and an apartment in Manhattan. He probably has a way to justify it by calculating the marginal environmental costs of commuting, but the guy isn't living frugally except by the standards of the very wealthy.

In any case, I don't think there's anything to it. If Edwards were campaigning on the idea that the only reason people were poor was that they spent too much money on frivolous purchases, Barnett'd have a half a point. But Edwards isn't, and while I have no clue what you'd put in a house that big except maybe another house, and it's ostentatious, it doesn't make him a hypocrite.

So if they can hate Edwards for being rich, why don't they hate Bush?

To be fair, I'm not sure it's hate. It's like when we point out Ted Haggard like teh cock, NTTAWWT.

16, 20: The thing is, any viable candidate for President is going to be wealthy. Edwards is well above the minimum, which was probably Bill Clinton. But the Clintons were doing very nicely for themselves in terms of comparison to the average in the country.

In our current system, every candidate is going to be a fatcat. The idea that you should be more disgusted at one rich man than another is pure media manipulation.

Also, if I had as much money as John Edwards, I'd have a swank-ass rapper's mansion and would brush my teeth with 1997 Gaja Barolos, because they're just now becoming ready to drink. And to be perfectly honest, I probably wouldn't found the UNC Center on Poverty or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.

Is Edwards fooling people into thinking he's the second coming of Siddhartha? Bullshit. People respond because he's telling their story. And they're not stupid. They understand his real estate portfolio has nothing to do with their wages and health benefits.

Look, rich people buy expensive things. If you want to be disgusted about that, well, I certainly won't stand in your way but you're in for a long, long run of disgust.

So inequality and conspicuous consumption are just fine as long as the guy's on our side? Would it help if I said that yes, I dislike bazillion-square-foot homes, private jets, etc., regardless of their occupants' political affiliations?

By building a 28k square foot mansion, John Edwards is giving employment to any number of architects, contractors, landscapers, and other construction-workers: plumbers, roofers, plasterers and painters. He is keeping the fires burning at glaziers and timber mills, at iron forgers and ceramic kilns. Maintaining the thing will provide income for gardeners, housekeepers, and all manner of tradesmen. This is redistribution of wealth than any Republican could love. What is wrong with all you people?

If I had Edwards' money, I would live in a small cottage. But I'd have several of them, in various countries.

The idea that you should be more disgusted at one rich man than another is pure media manipulation.

Who said anything about more disgusted?

But I strongly dislike huge, ostentatious houses and other sorts of really egregious conspicuous consumption.

I wonder if this is partially class prejudice? (Not you particularly, but judging Edwards' purchasing.) I could spend as much money as Edwards did on his house (if I had it) on a charmingly shabby brownstone on Gramercy Park, and I bet people wouldn't react the same way. But a huge house in the country surrounded by a lot of land looks different.

It's like when we point out Ted Haggard like teh cock

Really? I don't recall Edwards ever saying how much he hated money. I'm pretty sure he's for more people having more of it.

(Also, isn't Edwards' whole positioning -- "son of a millworker" until it's a joke, etc. -- that he came up by his bootstraps so he knows how hard it is?)

Perhaps this is part of a strategy to deflect criticisms of Edwards' "rhetoric of handouts", as it will inevitably be characterized by Republicans.

Edwards know what it is to put in a hard day's work, but he also knows that sometimes that's just not enough, etc.

28. what about Carter? How much money was in peanuts?

34: If you're not more disgusted at Edwards, then you should agree that Barnett wrote a hit piece, by singling him out as if he was somehow specially despicable. If you're equally disgusted with all of the en masse, talk about them en masse rather than taking shots at the one trying to do something about poverty.

36. ok, but the point I was trying to make is that they're laughing/sneering at what they perceive as hypocrisy, not hating him for being rich.

So inequality and conspicuous consumption are just fine as long as the guy's on our side?

I honestly don't care whether John Edwards or Ted Kennedy or George W. Bush or Mitch McConnell or Richard Mellon Scaife or Paris Hilton or Mick Jagger or Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates or J.K. Rowling live in mansions, no. I also wouldn't be impressed if they lived in two-bedroom brick ranches. It really doesn't affect me in any way whatsoever.

38: I don't know offhand, but I'd guess him as richer than Clinton -- not big-rich, but very comfortable.

what they perceive as hypocrisy

Meet comment 36. Their perceptions are unmoored from anything approaching reality.

"http://www.johnlocke.org/site-docs/images/edwardshouse-low.jpg">This is what Edwards's new house looks like, in case you haven't found it on your own yet.

Damn!

This is a functioning link.

But he isn't being a hypocrite. Ted Haggart was. Edwards has a lot of money, but that's only hypocrisy if you buy into the idea that the only people permitted to care about poverty must themselves be poor.

Is 28,000 sq.ft. the size of the plot, or the house, or the house and red barn?

Can't be the plot, but I'm not sure about the barn.

35: I wouldn't deny that aesthetics are in there somewhere, but I'm reacting more to the scale of the thing than the cost. If nothing else, the environmental impact of 28,000 square feet of new construction out in the sticks is orders of magnitude greater than spending the same amount to buy a much smaller, existing home in a high-priced city.

OT, but if someone doesn't make Chuck Schumer shut up about his imaginary friends from Massapequa I am going to lose my mind.

Damn - how rich is Edwards? For some reason I was under the impression that his lawyering had given him a net worth of around 20 bills. That's a lot, but it's not all that much by the standards of the super rich. And that's a pretty big house.

51 - "given" s/b "earned" -- wasn't trying to downplay it.

51. $60 mil, according to some congressional watch site.

It includes the barn. The actual living sopace is around 10,000 square feet, IIRC.

environmental impact of 28,000 square feet

More to the story than that, brother. If you spend any time in NC, you'll see that green space every which way is disappearing. He's preserving a big plot of forest that won't get covered with townhouses, and the house is built using green construction methods, including fitting for geothermal heat. But you're right that some pine trees got cut down. Luckily, we have some to spare down here.

52. I object to the notion that one can "earn" that much scratch.

Damn. I didn't know that there was this much of a leftist left in me.

It doesn't really matter whether he is a hypocrite, does it? But whether he can be construed as one, and he can, and if he were more politically astute, he wouldn't have bought a house that—I mean, come on—is that ostentatious. It really does matter how presidents spend money—that's the shitty political system we have.

What's that barn doing there anyway?

does he have horsies?

Edwards's financial disclosures.

The backstroke.

Realize, Brock, that land & home anywhere in NC is going to be a whole hell of a lot cheaper than anywhere up north.

Now, I'm not trying to say he's not spending big buckos on it, but I figure it's worth mentioning.

40: OK, and I cannot quibble that they see this as hypocrisy. I just think they're wrong. I imagine they are quite capable of jumping the gun given how eager they must be to find a Haggard of the left.

One can certainly say that having made poverty part of his plank, Edwards should be prepared for the Republicans to abandon arguing that Paris Hilton is overtaxed and morph into thrifty Puritans harking back to the good old days of sumptuary laws.

Having said that, there's absolutely no reason to take what a Townhall columnist thinks of Edwards' purchasing choices with any seriousness at all. It's reminiscent of how wingnuts became instant "feminists" when they were beating their chests about the Taliban; a lot of the people doing this didn't give a tinker's toss about the status of women, particularly, they just needed a "gotcha" argument for the water cooler. The whole "sure Edwards talks like a Marxist, but does he walk like a Marxist?" schtick is the same damn shit. Best ignored.

60 -> 57.

Why does being rich contradict being against poverty? Edwards would be a hypocrite if he was destitute and didn't care, but what's the contradiction between being rich and wanting other people to be rich?

46, 43. Right, I'm not defending the hypcrisy charge, I'm just saying it's a charge made in the spirit of gloating, not a hatred of him for being rich. (the analogy was that we were gloating at Ted being gay, not hating him for it)

What's that barn doing there anyway?

Welcome to North Carolina.

39: See my first comment on this thread. Yes, it's a hit piece, and no, I don't think Edwards is a hypocrite. Nonetheless, I'm disgusted by the conspicuous consumption. I'm sorry if I didn't spell that out clearly enough for everyone's liking, but damn, people, I am surprised at the rally-around-the-flag tone of some of these comments.

41: We differ on that. Resources aren't unlimited, and I'm sympthetic to the idea that extreme inequality would be a bad thing even aside from the environmental/waste issues.

Everyone should be that rich. Shouldn't they?

There was an opinion column on this in the local paper. I enjoyed it:

http://www.newsobserver.com/134/story/537705.html

What's that barn doing there anyway?
Welcome to North Carolina.

Does NC have some tax breaks for "farmers"?

I think we can all agree that Barnett is being a dick, though.

But you're right that some pine trees got cut down.

You think Edwards wants to cut down some more? I've got a bunch in my yard I'd love to give away.

The actual living space is around 10,000 square feet, IIRC.

This is roughly twice the size of the same house I was talking about yesterday, the one that ate lightbulbs.

But whether he can be construed as one, and he can, and if he were more politically astute, he wouldn't have bought a house that--I mean, come on--is that ostentatious.

I don't know if it's politically stupid. Edwards is a happy guy. One of the things that kills leftist candidates who are concerned about poverty is the image of them as grindingly petty and annoying people who want to take everything away from anyone who's having any fun to pay for the communal kibble ration. If Edwards is trying to sell himself on the following terms: "I'm rich, and it's great! We'd all like to be rich! Rich is so much fun I bought myself a TV with a screen measured in acres! And while I'm having fun being rich, I'm going to make sure that everyone has at least the same chance I had to get rich, and the people who aren't rich are doing okay too." I think that could sell. Not to 'us', defined as the kind of people who read Unfogged, maybe, but I think a happy rich guy is appealing.

68. I can think of many people I wish were destitute, cold, and hungry. Many work in the white house.

Dianne Feinstein bought a $16.5 million dollar house in San Francisco last year. Shall we grab our torches and pitchforks? Herb Kohl owns the Milwaukee Bucks and is by far the richest member of the Senate with a net worth around a quarter billion dollars. Oooh, look - Teresa Heinz Kerry!

How many Democrats are we going to condemn for being rich at Hugh Hewitt's request?

It's nothing but a dirty trick. In America you can't be anti-rich, and you couldn't even if it did have anything to do with helping poverty. So this puts Edwards in a damned-if-he-does damned-if-he-doesn't situation: if he's rich then he's crying crocodile tears over the poor, if he's not rich then he's fueling resentful class warfare and is a marxist.

Or, to DaveL on flagrallying, for me the issue is more Barnett's gotcha moment, as if a rich guy having a big house shows that he's a phony or a fraud or insincere. It might be a slightly better world if rich people didn't build big-ass houses, but that has nothing to do with what I see as the central issue, namely, Barnett's toolishness.

73. This will be interesting to watch, but I'm doubtful about voters being that charitable and generous.

But why build a barn the size of your damn house right next to your house, without any farming or pasturing area nearby? Doesn't that just mean you built an extra, uninsulated house with higher ceilings?

Maybe it will be used to house all the ponies that will eventually be promised to us in stump speeches.

Hypocrisy is not the right description. One can be very rich and buy a $6M estate and at the same time care deeply about the poor and about income inequality. But given how eloquent Edwards has been on the the topic of excessive CEO compensation, it's at the very least amusing that he's building himself a North Carolina Xanadu, no?

I wouldn't say "amusing". More like "slightly disappointing".

Once again, there is no irony or hypocrisy involved here.

73 gets it.

He's preserving a big plot of forest that won't get covered with townhouses

"Preserving" a plot of forest by sticking your mansion in the middle of it is part of what's commonly referred to as "sprawl." I don't claim to be any kind of environmental expert, but I don't believe that's commonly seen as an environmentally friendly thing to do. And "green construction methods"? OK, if you're going to build a 28,000 sf house (and that "barn" is a recreation pavillion or some such; it's not a farm structure), green methods make it marginally less bad, but your basic suburban tract house is still going to be one hell of a lot more environmentally friendly.

I'm doubtful about voters being that charitable and generous.

Dude, look around. We glorify rich people like crazy in this country. If Edwards loses, it won't be because he has a big house.

This is stupid on the level of 'Kerry says he supports the troops but he's against the war!' The two things have nothing to do with one another! Edwards is an opponent of income inequality but a beneficiary of it. So what? This is no more hypocritical than being an opponent of racism but also a beneficiary of it, which is a very popular combination among white people these days.

78: I don't know if they'd have to be charitable and generous -- I was thinking more of being fans. People watch MTV Cribs and don't hate the rappers, they're charmed by them. And it's a good emotional answer to 'Liberals want to stop you from having fun; they want to take away your fun and give it to poor people.' So long as Edwards looks like he's having fun, that attack may not work.

80 seems about right. It's not hypocritical or wrong in some way, but it makes for an easy joke.

Or it may work even better if the attack is turned into "Liberals want to stop you from having fun, yet they refuse to stop having fun themselves."

Every minute Dean Barnett spends making fun of Edwards for being distastefully rich is a minute he can't spend queer-baiting Edwards over his girly hair. I'm pretty sure the latter's more damaging. I hope the Dean Barnetts of the world really, really concentrate their smears on how awesome Edwards's house is.

86: People watch MTV Cribs and don't hate the rappers, they're charmed by them.

Maybe not the best example. I think even Americans have an ambivalent love/hate relationship with wealth and celebrity.

Everyone should be that rich. Shouldn't they?

This comment made me do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Given the 2006 household wealth of $93,000 and Edward's wealth of $60 million, and assuming a very optimistic 4% a year of real economic growth, it'll take about 170 years before we can all enjoy that acre-sized big screen.

Now I'm sad (and, along with Michael, mildly untrusting of someone with such an ostentatious home).

excessive CEO compensation

How many employees does John Edwards have?

DaveL in 83: I don't know what to tell you except that plots here are a hell of a lot bigger than they are on a Hawaiin island. He now has a giant house in the middle of a hundred acres of woods. That's not sprawl in any meaningful sense of the word. It's a giant house in the middle of the woods. But the fact that we're arguing about this rather than Bush declaring he doesn't have to follow anything Congress passes, well, I'm sure somebody is happy about that, and they aren't on our side.

Baa, we're so humorless that we'll point out that his income wasn't earned as a CEO. (I hope this is right; I'm too lazy to check.) Here at Edwards Central, we think that things that are funny of Twin Edwards on Twin Earth are not at all funny of actual Edwards on actual Earth.

given how eloquent Edwards has been on the the topic of excessive CEO compensation, it's at the very least amusing that he's building himself a North Carolina Xanadu, no?

No, the analogy doesn't work that way. CEO salaries come out of the same pot that pays workers hundreds of times less. Edwards's fees come from sweet, sweet litigation jackpots; if you really want to tag him as hypocritical, you should compute his salary as a multiple of what he pays his staff.

I saw Jerry Stackhouse's mansion on Cribs and am as big a fan as ever.

The attack isn't really an attack on Edwards, either, it's an attack on the very idea of fighting inequality. Defending Edwards is the knee-jerk response and also the wrong one. It changes the subject from equality to defending the rich, which, surprise, is exactly what the people who have the most to lose from lessening inequality want people to talk about!

92: Except Felix.

Humorlessness, c'est moi.

94: Same shit, different pile. But it's hardly something unique to Edwards.

77: I guess I thought that Barnett's toolishness was so obvious that it was possible to note it and move on to more interesting things, and conspicuous consumption, particularly absurd houses, is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine. And re 73 and 86, happy is good, but I think we be fun without going clear off the more stuff = happiness! deep end. (Maybe even M-fun....)

Defending Edwards is the knee-jerk response and also the wrong one. It changes the subject from equality to defending the rich, which, surprise, is exactly what the people who have the most to lose from lessening inequality want people to talk about!

I don't think so (as an Edwards defender). Power, in our current setup, goes with money. If we don't have some rich people fighting to lessen inequality, we don't have a shot. The point is that an unequal society is a bad thing, not that within that society you're necessarily evil for being on top. (Oh, some of them are, but it isn't necessary.)

it's not me, but whatever.

I'm not sure coupling this with a book tour for "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives" was the brightest idea in the world, but I don't think this ultimately matters all that much.

True, labs, but "CEO compensation is out of control, but lawyers' contingency fees meet the Lockean proviso" is probably not a slogan to go to war with. Also, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the receptionist in Edward's firm took home under $60M. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

conspicuous consumption, particularly absurd houses, is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine

Fair enough. I'd be living in a mansion if I had 60 million dollars in the bank. Also, I'd be banging Jessica Alba on weekends.

What I mean is, defending Edwards moves you from arguing that inequality is bad to arguing that Edwards has the right to be rich, which is close enough to saying 'inequality is OK' that it muddles the message.

suggest that the receptionist in Edward's firm took home under $60M

I'd go out on a limb and suggest that he made most of his money through investments, not legal work.

This thread is making me hungry for wealth. I need a McMansion, and quick.

But the fact that we're arguing about this rather than Bush declaring he doesn't have to follow anything Congress passes, well, I'm sure somebody is happy about that, and they aren't on our side.

Right, but that's rather the point, isn't it? Edwards has made it easy to be drawn into this very conversation, despite the fact that he's done nothing wrong or untoward.

Also, I don't know why slol hates the Long comparison--he's not widely considered odious in popular culture in the way that Lindbergh is.

The heart of the Edwards message is the class warfare sentiment that the working class should envy the rich.

No; the heart of the Edwards message is that the poor should be less poor. Why is this very simple concept so utterly foreign to conservatives? Is it because contemporary conservatism itself has no positive goals, and thus, projecting, assumes that a progressive agenda must be "anti-rich" rather than pro-poor? Or is it because it simply lacks the capacity to empathize with poor people, and therefore concludes that anyone who promises to better the lives of the working class must be doing so in bad faith?

96 nails it, I think. Rich people aren't allowed to be concerned about income inequality and by definition we can ignore anything poor people have to say. Anyone who was a success under the current setup can be ignored whenever they propose changes; anyone who was a failure is just bitter.

For what it's worth, I saw the Costco CEO was out making approving noises about jacking up the minimum wage. Has anyone popped up in the jackassosphere to note that since Costco is one of the best employers in the retail sector, they automatically gain a comparitive advantage when their competitors are forced to pay more? Because I saw parallel yammerings when Warren Buffett was saying that eliminating inheritance taxes was foolish.

I don't know what to tell you except that plots here are a hell of a lot bigger than they are on a Hawaiin island. He now has a giant house in the middle of a hundred acres of woods. That's not sprawl in any meaningful sense of the word. It's a giant house in the middle of the woods.

Believe it or not, I haven't always lived on a Hawaiian island, and I am aware that plots elsewhere are commonly larger. (Yea verily, even I have lived on acreage in the sticks.) Large plots are kind of the point. Houses farther apart = more roads, power lines, cars, delivery trucks = more environmental impact.

But the fact that we're arguing about this rather than Bush declaring he doesn't have to follow anything Congress passes, well, I'm sure somebody is happy about that, and they aren't on our side.

Lame. Shall we spend the next week making a list of all the things we agree about? Don't most political arguments around here start from small points of disagreement about stuff on which we mostly agree?

the receptionist in Edward's firm took home under $60M

You're confusing wealth with income. Bad baa.

>he made most of his money through investments, not legal work

Is that a known fact about Edwards? I say this out of total ignorance -- I just imagined he had made a lot of money as one of the top plaintiffs' lawyers in America.

confusing s/b conflating

111 posted before I saw 104. Apologies for the snark.

I don't know why slol hates the Long comparison--he's not widely considered odious in popular culture in the way that Lindbergh is

I'm pretty sure that "in the popular culture" Lindbergh is not considered odious. (Did you see, e.g., The Rocketeer?) To those people who know he did some odious stuff, e.g. Jonah Goldberg, Long should have a similar, if somewhat less odious, dubious quality, I'd think.

Lindbergh is not considered odious

I think that Philip Roth novel had a big effect on this, at least among the kind of people who know who Philip Roth is. That leaves 50% of Americans who don't know who Lindbergh is anyway, and 40% who have a positive opinion of him.

>You're confusing wealth with income. Bad baa.

Is w-lfs-nism catching? Let me suggest that the disparity between John Edwards and the low guy on the totem pole in his firm (receptionist, janitor, whatever) in either income or wealth is likely to be very large.

among the kind of people who know who Philip Roth is. That leaves 50% of Americans who don't know who Lindbergh is anyway

Dude, fifty percent is a wack estimate. Plot Against sold 260k in paper in one year. Be charitable, double that for total paper sales and double it again to include hardcover, and you get 1.04m. In a country of 300m. That's, like, rounding error.

Let me suggest that the disparity ... is likely to be very large

But it's going to be an order of magnitude, if not two, less than you originally suggested. And this is important if you're checking to see if JE is as inequitable as the CEO's he critiques.

I was estimating it as 10% who know who Philip Roth is. I do, but I definitely haven't bought that particular book (I've never read any of his work, except a couple sexually explicit excerpts from Sabbath's Theater that were in the New Yorker when I was in middle school). There was a lot written about The Plot Against America at the time that made it clear that Lindbergh could have been seen as a menace in his post-heroic career.

The problem with conspicous consumption isn't the super-rich directly. There just aren't enough of them. It's the millions of upper middle class families who wish they could afford a mansion, and are doing their best to fake it in some butt ugly mcmansion suburb. A handful of extra ferrari's doesn't make much of a blip in fuel consumption or pollution. Fifty thousand asshats in suburbans and H3s commuting back and forth for an hour a day does, though.

Looking at the financial disclosure documents linked in 59, it appears that investments form, if not a majority, at least a very large component of Edwards's wealth. He even has stock in Schlumberger.

I was estimating it as 10%

Sorry. My own professional circumstances make it inevitable that I will point out any overestimated impact of book-publishing.

investments form, if not a majority, at least a very large component

Yes: but the mill-worker's son's original capital almost certainly came from legal fees, not from earlier investments, and I expect that even were Johnny (his legal name, btw) ever so prudent a stock-picker, he still made more from the initial trial than he earned in investing the proceeds.

Yeah, baa, Edwards never claimed to be an income egalitarian. There could be a big gap between his earnings and his secretary's without there being a problem. If it's 400x, well, let's talk. See also our humorlessness.

"But baa himself has a pretty-boy haircut! How can he care about Edwards?"

No, no, FL, you're off-message: Edwards is an income egalitarian, not a wealth egalitarian.

125: Could be; it's an empirical question, and I don't care enough to dig deeply into it. Over to you, apo.

122: I'm not sure I buy that completely. Yes, the upper middle class and plain old rich consume a lot because there are more of them, but the level of wealth and consumption at the very top is so astronomical that even that little sliver of the population has to be non-trivial.

Which would you rather, that they spend the money on construction here or invest it in multinationals that outsource jobs overseas?

I freely concede that John Edward's average income as one of the top lawyers in America likely only exceeded that of his receptionist by a factor of 100-200x. It was still enough to get him into that wealthiest 1% I keep hearing about, however.

Sorry for the delay, I would have responded earlier, but I was primping.

Which would you rather, that they spend the money on construction here or invest it in multinationals that outsource jobs overseas?

So now we're refuting those nasty Republicans by embracing conspicuous consumption and trickle-down economics?

baa, I wouldn't have mentioned it except I thought Republicans were all supposed to know about accounting identities, stocks and flows, that sort of thing.

o now we're refuting those nasty Republicans by embracing conspicuous consumption and trickle-down economics?

No, it's a serious question. Johnny R. Edwards is a rich man. What, by you, should he do with the money to achieve what you consider morally acceptable ends?

#38: Carter may have made a fortune in peanuts; I don't know. But however wealthy he may have been, he made shows of solidarity with the common folk, such as when he insisted on carrying his own luggage off of Air Force One instead of having some lackey do it for him. Hard to imagine Kerry or Edwards doing that.

OK, admittedly I'm mostly just being an asshole now, but when you're that far beyond having more money than you'll ever need, is it really so hard to think of anything to do with it other than conspicuous consumption or investment in multinational corporations? What about spending it on his own campaign, just f'rinstance.

Living on unearned increment as we do, this whole concept of 'income' is confusing. Is that what great grand-dad did?

You win.

135: Imagine harder, GB.

What about spending it on his own campaign, just f'rinstance.

Or founding one of these maybe.

I'm kind of bummed this argument has gone this way, because "how much is too much?" really is an interesting question. I'm pretty sure I can recognize some instances that are over the line--hence my comments on this thread--but that doesn't mean I think I'm anywhere close to knowing where the line is, and I recognize that I'm no more immune to self-serving moral reasoning than anybody else. OTOH I think it's easy to lose track of how thoroughly American culture has adopted a Reaganite view of the virtue of wealth--the Clinton years did a lot for equal-opportunity greed--and I believe that thinking about that and changing it would make our country a better place. But possibly a crappy Republican hit piece isn't the best springboard for that discussion.

141- "how much is too much?" really is an interesting question

Think about the world's many starving children before every purchase. Carry around a few gripping photographs if they help get you in the mood. In that frame of mind, if you still feel comfortable making the purchase, go ahead. If instead it feels excessive or selfish, it probably is.

142 isn't what I'm talking about, but whatever.

If I ever have a bunch of money, my luxurious abode has to be big enough for: a greenhouse, a garden big enough for kids to play kick-the-can, a study, and a kitchen big enough for lots of people to hang around companionably. That's quite a lot to ask for, but if I get that, I'll say "well enough!"

142: Think about the world's many starving children before every purchase.

You mean you don't? Heartless bastard.

Wait, 142 was serious. Overly moralistic, but serious.

...

Goldberg comparing Sausagely to Lindbergh

This happened?

Yes.

Hey, that's FL's area. Quick, FL, if I go out tonight and have a beer, am I doing something morally wrong because I didn't donate that money?

#139: All I see is a photo op designed to show that Edwards Cares About America's Energy Crisis. And I still say Kerry would rather have bamboo shoots stuck under his fingernails than carry his own luggage off a plane.

To be more clear, candidates do all kinds of wacky common-man stuff while they're runnning for President. How many of them keep it up after they've been elected?

Oh, and if I become fabulously wealthy, I also want a mosaic in my bathroom tilings.

As long as we're talking about John Edwards, I see that Amanda Marcotte has joined his campaign.

150: Worse than Mussolini, better than Stalin.

What if it's really good beer?

Of course you can have beers, but you can't drink them out of either solid gold challises or the skulls of dead peasants. And as long as you would be theoretically willing to share your beer with the starving african children.

This isn't rocket science.

You know what though? Weatherproofing somebody's house actually accomplishes something for somebody, even if there are cameras there. Carrying your own luggage, not so much. So I'm not really grasping the point of your example.

And then.

I hope apostropher's mansion won't be so fugly.

My mansion will be superfly, ben.

#159:

First link: He's carrying it, but he sure doesn't look happy about it. Plus, it's an old picture, before he married a billionaire.

Second link: That's a briefcase.

That damned elitist, checking his luggage...

I don't understand the idea that carrying your own garment bag is one of the chores that once you become rich you will be happy to never do again. I mean...it would complicate my life MORE if I had to have someone following me around carrying my garment bag. And it wouldn't save me any time, unless the person carried me on a bier as well. We aren't talking about 150-pound steamer trunks here.

Now dusting and sweeping, I would be glad to pay someone to do that. But I don't even know if I'd respect a person worth $60,000,000 who does his own sweeping and dusting. Where are his priorities, his zest for life?

I am particularly proud of that comment, by the way. "Steamer trunk", "bier" and "zest" are all in my top echelon of underrated words.

I'm betting "echelon" is as well.

What is wrong with you people? The man bought a hundred acres, and build himself a large house and a barn. So he's outdoorsy, and his kids have horses. And being as he doesn't live in a city, and is a freaking politician, presumably part of the living space is actually work space, probably with a few staff members. Part of the property probably includes guest housing with actual private bathrooms, too--I don't see people who are wealthy lining up and banging on the door when they have to use the john.

That house is not going to offend the people he's appealing too--hell, most middle American blue-collar workers would fucking *love* some version of that. My horsey sister would. And like LB says, it's no more wasteful than a nice brownstone in Brooklyn, or for that matter a cute Victorian in San Francisco or a nice Spanish colonial with a courtyard and an ocean view down in LA. It only looks more wasteful to us because, despite our own income disparities, we're of the educated professional class that likes to look down its nose at what people from middle- or blue-collar backgrounds (or people from the South) like to do when they have money.

Most of the commenters in this thread have been defending Edwards.

It only looks more wasteful to us because, despite our own income disparities, we're of the educated professional class that likes to look down its nose at what people from middle- or blue-collar backgrounds (or people from the South) like to do when they have money.

I think you're badly reading the other side. I'm not sure it's been explicitly said, but the charge is "limousine liberalism." It always comes up when Democrats talk about doing more for people with less. And the claim is that it is very easy for rich people to be in favor of giving a substantial part of their money to the government--they've got so much of it. Recall that there was a recent article discussed in the blogosphere that suggested that people worried about Dem do-gooderism b/c (a) they thought of themselves as well-off (around 65K and up), (b) they thought the Dems were going tax the well-off, and (c) they were still having trouble making ends meet. (I may be hashing that article a bit, but I believe that's the gist of it.)

Bill Clinton deals with this pretty skillfully by acknowledging he's rich even as he calls for higher taxes. "People like me should be paying more," etc.

Yeah, but I think Edwards is pretty well insulated from the limousine liberal charge b/c of his background. In any case, I'm with the folks who are saying that limousine liberals are better than limousine Republicans. (Although they're more annoying than the dirty hippies we prefer to bitch about.)

Yeah, but I think Edwards is pretty well insulated from the limousine liberal charge b/c of his background.

I think he could insulate himself pretty easily if he just stole from Clinton and said, "I'm rich, and I think I should pay more in taxes." If it's good enough for Bill, it's good enough for Edwards; whatever up-hard story Edwards has, Clinton can beat him. And I bet so can some of the people (usually movie folk, and the like) who are the traditional targets of the limousine liberal charge. (Or so VH-1 would have me believe....)

I don't think most people mind if someone's rich; just admit it, and don't explicitly lean too heavily on the "son of a mill worker" story. Have Clinton's light touch.

(I just read the Clinton interview to which Ezra linked. I'm not sure how trustworthy he is, but, damn, do I love him.)

Yeah. I suspect Bill's (and probably Edwards') ability to handle that issue easily has a lot to do with their not having been rich to start with. The real problem with limousine liberals is the rich white person guilt bullshit that makes them try to pretend they're down with the gente.

By, for example, using words like "gente."

Actually, I got the "down with the gente" thing from my Puerto Rican girlfriend, but you have a point.

To me, this is not a moral issue so much as a signal that Edwards lacks sensitivity around political positioning and "branding". Because? Because people understandably are watching for people who are "genuine" (Feingold comes to mind) and dismissing people who are "phony". They've been burned once too often, so they're going to be watching the clues, the record, the actions, not just listening to the words. "Compassionate conservative" kind of put us on notice that what you say is not necessarily indicative of who you really are.

I have reservations about JE based on his ability/readiness to do what I think an incoming president will need to do. But here I am making a completely different point: when you choose a theme as your "calling card", your brand, your "promise", then you had better make sure that theme is hammered home in every conceivable way. It's marketing. This act of conspicuous consumption is mind-numbingly misguided, in my opinion.

Be honest now, don't you think Edwards should have come up with a different strategy? Should he not have downsized his housing, and given the profit to some cause that looks after homeless (like the one Gregory Peck's son heads, for example)? Shouldn't he be saying, "I have a very nice house, but I don't need a palace, and I want more people to have SOME place to call home." Then, just to make light of it, he would add, "This is actually no hardship on me, considering I plan to be living in Government housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue anyway. But if you want me to have a larger home, then let people know Elizabeth and I should be in the White House."

We're wasting a lot of words debating whether he has some "right" to build a mansion (of course he does), or whether as a wealthy person he could still be a genuine advocate for those who are in a bad way (of course he can), or whether what he is doing is any more egregious than some other politicians have done (of course it's not). The only thing that's "wrong" is that he is opening the door to doubt about his sincerity, his "genuineness".

If you lose the election, John, go buy the Taj Mahal, or build a house that an NBA star would be happy to show off as his crib. But until then, can you not at least PRETEND you will bring a truly different value system than we are used to seeing?

So, JE seems either significantly tone deaf and ignorant of the importance of symbols and conflicting messages --- or he is already acknowledging that he won't get the nomination regardless and figures, "so what's the difference what people think". I am now very confused by this man. He just put a lot of static in the air that interferes with his desired image.

Kerry did the same kind of thing, I believe. He chose to make military heroics his calling card, or a key one, and then he was forced to deal with military records that he wouldn't release, with assertions that he played the system to get himself stationed stateside in a staff job, with images of himself calling out his "teammates" in VietNam for all to see on TV. As he stumbled into this, on someone's advice no doubt, I was thinking "HUH? Might he be overlooking how this can backfire on him?" I think Edwards is about to fall badly in the "credibility contest" by virtue of not being able to keep his wallet in his pants for the time being. He might, in fact, now be the candidate Republicans WANT to face; even I could do the negative ads on this one. You know, the "Which is the REAL John Edwards?" stuff. That's just so EASY and it got easier all of a sudden.

Bill Clinton deals with this pretty skillfully by acknowledging he's rich even as he calls for higher taxes. "People like me should be paying more," etc.

Talk is cheap. Nothing stops Bill Clinton from voluntarily paying as much of his income and wealth to the government as he would like. But my guess is he pays what the law requires, and probably hires a tax preparer to make that amount as small as possible.

Talk is cheap. Nothing stops Bill Clinton from voluntarily paying as much of his income and wealth to the government as he would like..

Or, instead of largely useless symbolic gestures, he could try and influence policy, or sign a tax bill that increases the income tax for his bracket. Oh wait...

This reminds me of Edwards saying "I'm sure Dick Cheney loves his gay daughter." Yeah sure, some people will be outraged; and no, nobody who really cares about the supposed underlying issue will be upset by the supposed hypocrisy. And yeah, there will be angst about whether the Virtuous Democratic Candidate will be undone by The Vicious Republican Smear Machine, aided by His Own Boneheaded Stupidity and Lack of Political Instincts.

176 is the same old thing you always get -- convert a political issue into a personal issue, and pretend that you've said something.

No one should ever blame the Democrat when the slime machine attacks.

If you say "He shouldn't have done that, even though it's really OK, because it doesn't look good", you're wrong three ways.

First, if you do that you're not pushing back -- you're really helping the meme along. Second, you're letting the cynical image game define politics, and allowing Democrats to be seen as shallow and cynical fakes. The image game is something that has to be dealt with, but you can't let it be dominant. Third, you're assuming that if the Democrat had just not done that one embarassing thing, they wouldn't have been attacked. But the other side will always find something to attack, and if there's nothing there, they'll make something up.

Half the stuff Gore got slimed with was completely imaginary. Half the stuff that Clinton was slimed with never happened at all. I really wish that Clinton had kept it in his pants, but as far as I know he's within the normal range of American Presidents and powerful American men (albeit toward the horny end of the scale). If you spent any time thinking about where the cigar went, you were playing the smear-artist game, even though that story was one of the true ones.

180 gets it exactly right.

Right. A nice illustration of that was Clinton. There was an organized effort to defame him from day one, and lots of people on the left figured there must be something to it, no smoke without fire, and his politics aren't great anyway -- there were plenty of real liberals and leftists making TravelGate and Whitewater cracks. And now, ten years later, Ogged is sincerely asking if the press was really out to get Clinton before the Monica thing happened -- he just doesn't remember that pretty much all the rest of it was unfounded bullshit, and there had been 6 years of bullshit attacks before the Monica story broke.

It doesn't matter if Clinton was your personal political hero (he certainly wasn't mine). The attacks on him were organized sliming, and they worked like a charm because we didn't fight back.

I'm not talking about lockstep irrational support of every Democrat -- if you know that someone has done something actually wrong, there's nothing wrong with talking about it. But if you blame a Democrat because they should have been able to avoid getting attacked when they haven't actually done anything wrong, you're getting played.

Anything can serve as a smokescreen, to be sure; but I am not sure it is always, or even often, objectionable to (in John Emerson's words) convert a political issue into personal one. It seems that if a person advances the argument that the government should force everyone to X, it is at least interesting if that same person does not X absent government coercion and given the means to do so.

There are of course usual answers to this. Free-rider problems are one (you don't want to pay for a highway unless everyone pays), weakness of the will is another (you want the government to ban smoking even though you can't stop yourself).

Consider, however, a hypothetical case. Mr. Smith advocates a law forcing all Americans earning over $100,000 a year to give 10% of their income to charities benefiting the poor. Smith is then found to make $500,000 a year and give 2% of his income to charity. While it is of course true that Mr. Smith's proposal should be evaluated on the merits, surely there is something noteworthy about his behavior, right?

(Hypothetical case warning: giving money to charity is not the same as paying taxes. Whether it is so different as to make the hypothetical irrelevant, is I think dubious)

I now anxiously await the announcement GB and baa's endorsement of the chickenhawk argument.

Note that the amount of money raised by Mr. Smith's proposal is mindbogglingly greater than could be raised by Mr. Smith's volunteerism.

Say there are 100 people, each of which happens to have a quart of blue paint, which they might have their own private uses for. Mr Smith says: "Hey, we need to get the side of that building painted -- if everyone paints two square feet, it'll get done." If no one else listens to him on the need for communal effort, the fact that he doesn't go ahead and put a two-foot patch of paint on the wall doesn't make him a hypocrite.

It's too late to remind you all of the ban on analogies, isn't it?

The ban on analogies was like a ban on high tide, Ogged.

One predicts that in future biographies of Ogged, his banning of analogies will be interpreted as an ironic gesture, because nobody will be able to imagine how it could have been intended earnestly. Much like Canute's banning of high tide, in fact.

Apo: I guess I'd say that there are versions of the chickenhawk argument that have more validity than others. An 18 year old who argues for the draft but is not signing up himself would be, I think, a more perplexing case than a 45 year old who has never served, thinks there should be a volunteer military, but also thinks the US should intervene militarily in Darfur.

LB: indeed it would. And it would make sense for that person to want more money going to charity rather than less. The question is, wouldn't the amount of money that he himself could provide absent a law be helpful? If so, why isn't he doing it?

In all seriousness, although we haven't quite achieved zero tolerance, I think that ban has been very successful--I'm seeing fewer acrimonious arguments. Analogies are the devil, I tell you!

But Emerson, how could one not think about where the cigar went? That was a very vivid detail.

If Edwards raises taxes on the rich, and he is rich, he'll be raising taxes on himself! Instead of criticized for hypocrisy, he'll be admired for his consistency by right-wingers, right? Right? Right?

Is a hypothetical the same as an analogy? If so, consider it retracted. I do think it's not irrelevant to see how a person's policy prescriptions comport with their personal behavior. That's an evaluation of the person, however, not of the position.

JM, you perv.

Baa, that's silly. It would be one thing if it were a criminal law and we found that the guy proposing an anti-date-rape law was a date-rapist.

But if you propose a change in the tax structure, there's no sense in volunteering to pay the new rate you propose. Silly to the extent that almost no one ever does it. I think that it's rightly assumed that everyone lives according to his interests under the tax structure in place.

In some cases it would actually be dangerous, like proposing a 55 mile speed limit and starting yourself unilaterally.

This is a liberal-conservative divide, because many or most most liberals actual prefer formalized government safety nets to private charity, whereas many or most conservative prfer private charity.

JM, you perv.

It's a Mormon thing.

But if you propose a change in the tax structure, there's no sense in volunteering to pay the new rate you propose.

Agree with Emerson. That specific line of attack always strikes me as slightly bizarre.

The policy prescription starts from the premise that everyone should pay their fair share of the costs of promoting the common weal. "Fair share" is determined through the democratic political process.

The prescription is that we should change the definition of fair share. However, until that's changed, asking him to pay more than the law requires is asking him to pay *more* than his fair share. Isn't that unfair?

The only thing that's "wrong" is that he is opening the door to doubt about his sincerity, his "genuineness".

Eh. So in order to insulate himself from charges of "insincerity," Edwards should learn to brand and market himself better? Tricksy. Very tricksy.

The only thing wrong with Edwards' house is that it's butt-ugly.

Paul wins.

198 above: "..in order to insulate himself from charges of 'insincerity,' Edwards should learn to brand and market himself better?"

Your rhetorical question deserves to be broken apart.

re: "...Edwards should... brand and market himself better?" Answer is "yes", because in what amounts to a popularity contest it is VERY important that people form a clear impression of who you are. How can you expect them to "like you best" if they are confused about your values and perplexed by your actions versus your words?

re: "in order to insulate himself from charges of insincerity"... Reply to that part is: You cannot PREVENT charges of insincerity, that's been ongoing in JE's case for a while. What you CAN do is demonstrate those inevitable charges are unfounded. It that's what you mean by "insulate", then I think the answer is, "Correct". I gave an example of how Edwards might have done that.

Once your hat is in the ring, nothing you do is neutral. Bush decides not to speak to the NAACP, that says something. Never mind whether he is a bigot or not a bigot, or whether he has "counterarguments", or "his own reasons" to defend against the charge. It stands as an action that will be interpreted by voters. So it is with Edwards' decision to spend a large fortune on a mansion, as opposed to doing something else. I and others will puy that with pieces to the puzzle that ultimately define whether we like this guy. Maybe it's a big piece or a small piece; in my case, it will be a big piece, because it tells me very clearly that his value system is WAY out of whack with mine. Warren Buffet is richer than rich, and HE doesn't need a mansion. Joe Paterno lives in the same house decades later, but he is very rich too.

If you decide to own a 28,000 square foot house, chances are very good you have some values that don't resonate with the "rest of us". You just put a brush stroke on your image that I have serious questions about. It smacks of "aristocracy", as it always has, or of "immaturity" as it is with celebrities and pro athletes. It says, "I'm just so important (or have suddenly become so rich) that I will build a monument to myself". Do you like people who do that?

So, this decision by Edwards has two consequences immediately: (1) It tells me he either doesn't appreciate the kind of dissonance it will create in his "Two Americas" theme, i.e., he is not as smart as he should be; and (2) It tells me he thinks like the aristocracy or nuevo riche, to whom such symbols are important.

Remember a line Edwards used to good effect, along the lines of: "Don't wait until I am elected to change things, start now; make it happen today". Powerful. Take your own advice, John. Act like you mean some of that stuff that rolls off your tongue. Buy 100,000 coats for those freezing girls in the street. Take a few million and do the Habitat for Humanity thing. Put your money alongside Buffet's and Gates' and get people to see THAT's what you care about. And if you have more than 3.5 bathrooms in your house, that's nonsense for a guy who is allegedly worried about poverty and who wants to be elected by Joe and Jane Sixpack. Just nonsense.

Seriously, Terry, if you're going to decide amongst presidential candidates based on the houses they live in, you're being profoundly unserious.

And if you have more than 3.5 bathrooms in your house, that's nonsense

Curious cutoff...

Mr. Smith advocates a law forcing all Americans earning over $100,000 a year to give 10% of their income to charities benefiting the poor. Smith is then found to make $500,000 a year and give 2% of his income to charity. While it is of course true that Mr. Smith's proposal should be evaluated on the merits, surely there is something noteworthy about his behavior, right?

It seems to me that he's likely to be *more* persuasive if he's proposing a law that will actually affect his behavior, rather than trying to use the law to make everyone else follow his example.

As to Terry's arguments about how populist candidates should give money to charity and make statements about everyone else having homes, too: that's precisely the kind of holier-than-thou crap that makes people think conservatism is better than liberalism. There's not a goddamn thing wrong with wanting to live well, and pretending that there is just comes across as assholishness. We can debate about the balance between wanting to live well and being cognizant of how one's actions affect others, but that's a separate question from the foolish argument that politicians should be Morally Pure.

holier-than-thou crap that makes people think conservatism is better than liberalism

Yep. I suspect Dean Barnett knows it and is laughing his ass off.

176 plays nicely with 110.

I promised myself I was going to stay away from this thread and here I am again. But the strawmanning of Terry's argument in 201 and 203 is a little thick (again). There's a big difference between saying that building a huge, ostentatious house suggests things about a candidate's values that you find uncongenial and therefore makes you marginally more likely to support a different candidate and "decid[ing] amongst presidential candidates based on the houses they live in." And B, there's a hell of a difference between living well and consuming conspicuously, or at least there ought to be. And Apo, again, WTF with the "don't say anything that might encourage the righties" stuff? I expect that at DKos, not here. Keeping stuff in perspective is well and good, but do we have to pretend we agree with everything our guys say and do?

Who'd you vote for in 2000, Terry? I'm curious.

Anyway, John Edwards worked hard, studied hard, had some setbacks, became rich along the way, then turned to public service. He acknowledges that poverty is problem and that everyone isn't as lucky as he. That sounds like an American success story to me. Someone I'll consider voting for. He isn't Mother Teresa, but neither are Gates or Buffett or Bono, and Mother Teresa was always a little creepy anyway. His new house looks like an architectural tragedy but he's running for President, fortunately, not trying to win Top Design. And the Sixpacks, that lovely couple, well, they've voted for richer and worse men.

Also, it's "nouveau riche" or "nuevo rico."

there's a hell of a difference between living well and consuming conspicuously, or at least there ought to be.

Right, but that's the discussion about how to balance desire with responsibility. All I'm saying is that we, like every other living thing on earth, are going to do our damn level best to maximize our power/comfort/whatever. Judging basic human drives as "wrong" is dumb, whether it's the right getting all morally upright about sex or the left getting all morally upright about not being materialistic. We can, and certainly should, restrain self-interest. But it's silly, imho, to argue that someone who is actively interested in equalizing opportunities is required to be a saint before they can be taken seriously.

If you decide to own a 28,000 square foot house, chances are very good you have some values that don't resonate with the "rest of us".

If someone has any chance at all of being elected President, there's a 100% chance that has some values that don't resonate with the "rest of us".

If someone's values resonate with mine, there's a 0% chance that he will ever be nominated for President, and if the Democrats did nominate him (a hypothetical, like the brain in a bottle at the wheel of a streetcar), the Party would suffer perhaps-irreversible damage.

I really believe thateven the more centrist people here would find most of the big-time party leaders alien if they actually knew them. Only a certain kind of person rises that high.

I'm not even sure that that's a bad thing. I haven't lived my life as a preparation for taking on responsibility and never have wanted to play in the big time. If I had, I'd be a far different person than I am now. It's really just a different world up there.

Functionally, big-time people in certain businesses need big-time house. E.G., the big university presidents have to entertain heavily, so mansions come with their contracts.

A lot of this would be different if I were in power, of course, but no one needs to worry about that happening.

Apostropher, you're not tracking with me... my fault probably. Too long winded.

Aside: I plan to support Bill Richardson, and already have my heart set on Elliot Spitzer down the road, if I live that long (mid-60's now), knowing/caring nothing about their homes. My only reason for caring about peripheral things is if peoples' rhetoric and actions don't square. After that happens, it matters not what they say; words are cheap.

I offer up Feingold as an example of walking the talk. I'd not support him for President, because I and those who know him best, his inner circle, think he's better suited to a more "intellectual" and "philosophical" and legislative role. And he's never managed/run anything (similar to Edwards), which is very important given what the executive branch has become in recent terms.

I vote mostly on issues for Congress, but mostly on what seems to be a combination of values, leadership style, trust level, and competence for POTUS. (No wonder my choices never make it out of the primaries!). I suppose that's my analytical way of saying, I vote for Presidential candidates based on some intangibles. My guess is that lots of people (though not the "hard core" types who frequent political blogs) vote that way.

I don't expect Edwards, or someone like him, to give his money away to charity. But if he decides he can waste the best part of $6 million on a rock star crib, when he is a candidate preaching about poverty, I think he'd be smarter to do something else with it, something less off-putting to people who are struggling.

I take it there is an analogy ban around here, so I won't use this one ("wouldn't be prudent"): Vince Lombardi was a great leader, who preached discipline, teamwork, hard work, etc. If he were to go out on binges, come late to meetings, and make up game plans on the fly, would he have had any chance of getting players to buy into his hard-nosed style? Nope. No chance he'd be "the guy they would model and walk through walls for". That's not enough to get engagement from the troops. Leaders lead by example first. That gives them the standing to influence through others. (See, more recently, Tony Dungy).

But it's silly, imho, to argue that someone who is actively interested in equalizing opportunities is required to be a saint before they can be taken seriously.

Absolutely agreed. I just don't think that's what's been happening on this thread. The Barnett piece is another matter, of course.

"Desire versus responsibility" is part of the topic, but it's not really what I've been trying to get at in my comments (others, I think, have been more in that line). What I'm concerned about goes back to how our desires get shaped to the needs of a highly-competitive, over-consuming economy. Other things being equal, I'd prefer a presidential candidate who'd worked through that bullshit over one who saw 28,000 square feet of schmaltz as the prize for success. But other things aren't equal, and the kind of life that leads one to become a presidential candidate doesn't necessarily leave a lot of time for reflecting on issues outside of one's primary focus, so the house doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. OTOH, community organizer/constitutional law prof. vs. plaintiffs' lawyer/builder of monument to self? The nomination will be decided long before I get a chance to vote, but that sort of thing isn't completely out of the picture in figuring out who I'm rooting for. (I don't mean to ignore Hillary Clinton in that list, but she's tough to put a thumbnail background on.)

Someone asked about my voting in 2000. I was very invested/involved in Bradley's candidacy, and turned off by Gore. I wrote in Bradley, and I wrote in McCain for VP mostly because I thought Bush/Rove were out of line in their slimy attacks and somehow I wanted to register that disgust . I don't know if I'd do that again but you wanted to know ... so there it is.

If you decide to own a 28,000 square foot house, chances are very good you have some values that don't resonate with the "rest of us".

See, I actively deny that this is true. I'm willing to bet that most of the rest of us, if we had Edwards' money, would be thrilled to fucking death to build a big house in the woods, buy a NY brownstone, live in a clean modern place with an ocean view, etc. I know that I thoroughly enjoy my koi pond and not having to mow my own lawn. If I had to pay for it myself, I'd probably have a less well-kept yard, but that's largely because I don't have millions of dollars, rather than because I'm Morally Opposed to paying people (well) to do manual labor.

how our desires get shaped to the needs of a highly-competitive, over-consuming economy. Other things being equal, I'd prefer a presidential candidate who'd worked through that bullshit over one who saw 28,000 square feet of schmaltz as the prize for success.

But do we know, in fact, that Edwards sees his house as "the prize for success?" As opposed to, say, having kids who love to ride, having a fairly large staff, etc.? I understand what you're saying, but I'm saying I'm not sure I really agree; I think that virtually all of us (who can) choose our careers based more on personal inclinations than on Moral Imperatives. I'd wager that most community organizers would simply *prefer* their jobs to being a plaintiff's lawyer--I know I would--for reasons apart from it being The Right Thing to Do.

I think what I'm saying is that I'm not comfortable passing moral judgment on people's aesthetic or psychological *preferences*. And I see the house in the picture as being more an expression of taste--JE prefers living in the woods and having horses to living in Manhattan and having a view of Central Park--than of entitlement. The latter would *look* less conspicuous to us, but it would be equally about having the money and ability to live well according to one's own preferences.

I don't think preferences exist in a vacuum. I think we're relentlessly conditioned to believe that more money and more stuff will make us happier, that who we are is defined by what we consume. I think we have to change that, both because we end up spending too much of our energy trying to accumulate stuff and because the production and consumption of stuff on our current scale is environmentally unsustainable. So I think it's important to examine why we want what we want and to identify the ways that our culture is pushing us to live in ways that really aren't good for us. That's not to say that John Edwards is a bad person for building a huge house (and it's the scale, not the cost, that bothers me), but it does suggest that he's not a guy who's going to lead change on this particular set of issues.

Oh, I totally agree. But I don't think that the President's job is to be an ideological leader; rather, it's to be a political leader. You have to leave *something* for us thinky types to do.

OK, maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to favor the local guy.

And I still hate, hate, hate huge ugly fucking houses. And don't get me started on whatever Hollywood bobblehead it was that I saw going on about being environmentally conscious because he (she?) had added a Prius to the fleet of 20+ cars.

I'm going to lunch now. Maybe I should have a beer.

Nah, better go with two.

Oh, and if I become fabulously wealthy, I also want a mosaic in my bathroom tilings.

Why do you need to be wealthy? Broken tiles are cheaper than whole tiles. Many building suppliers will give them to you for free.

bitchphd: I'm not sure where the line is, where it becomes essentially a monument to oneself, but "living in the woods" (comfortably, even in luxury in a very big and very new and very nice house) and having a house several times as large as any one of us has ever ventured into --- two different things. We're not talking about Manhattan here, that's a whole different thing --- we are talking about the South where land and construction is relatively cheaper. Heck, if he built that thing in the Chicago burbs, it would probably be $15-20 million.

You know, maybe it just comes down to this (my wife's reaction, a Phd and former social worker --- and a straight down the line Democrat): She thinks it is a stupid thing to have done because it's so out of keeping with his message that having "Two Americas" (privilege and poverty) is wrong; it is so obviously more of a handicap to his candidacy than it is a help.

You can say that people shouldn't care, you can say that people should see him as "right on the issues", you can say it is a sign of HIS OWN ability to succeed in a financial way (which is good, assuming it was done on the up-and-up)....
and yet I will continue to think it is not politically smart. Like I said, maybe he sees his candidacy as a longshot anyway, in which case, no harm done. But if he is the one carrying the Democratic Party flag at the end of the day, he's gonna hear about this, fair or not, in an attempt to portray him as a "me first" kind of guy. Some of that will stick, like it or not.

If the gripe is just that it's politically stupid, not that it's substantively important, I think suspending your judgment might be appropriate. There's a real problem for people like you or me (I have the impression that we're fairly politically similar) in gauging what's going to be appealing or unappealing to the bulk of voters. On matters of substance, you go ahead and do what's right anyway, but on matters of appearance, I think it makes sense to wait and see.

having a house several times as large as any one of us has ever ventured into

None of us are senators who are running a presidential campaign. I'm quite willing to believe that people who are doing that require a great deal of space for work-related activity, just as I'm not going to apologize for insisting that one of the bedrooms in our house be appointed for my own personal study (and fuck it, I'd like to have my study actually be a separate outbuilding with a bathroom and small kitchen, if I could afford it).

You can say that people shouldn't care, you can say that people should see him as "right on the issues", you can say it is a sign of HIS OWN ability to succeed in a financial way

I'm not saying any of those things. I'm saying that I think most people, unlike you, will see the house as a testament to his being more in line with Joe Sixpack than you and I are, because Joe Sixpack doesn't want--and shouldn't be made--to feel guilty for wanting his own version of that house, whether it be suburban three bedroom with a big yard for the kids, a detatched house in the city near a park, a cute apartment with a balcony, or whatever. Passing judgment on Edwards for building his own house implicitly passes judgment on all the people who, if they could, would *love* to do the same thing. I think that's a far more self-defeating strategy than having a nice place and refusing to apologize for it.

Why do I need to be wealthy for my mosaic? Well, first I'd have to own the bathroom I was going to install the mosaic in. That much already seems like fabulous wealth to me. And then, I'd really like to hire an artist who could make something I'd enjoy gazing at.

Ok, maybe fabulous wealth wouldn't be required--but a lot more than I've got right now.

bitchphd: you say "I don't think that the President's job is to be an ideological leader; rather, it's to be a political leader."

That's a very key point. I think differently on this. I think it is to be at the same time an inspirational leader (articulates a compelling vision for the country) and an excellent executive responsible for the performance of the biggest and most influential organization on the face of the earth --- which is not what the founders envisioned but that's where we are. I want a President to be "above politics" while working for the overall good (safety, security/defense, justice, foreign policy, asset stewardship, health and welfare, economics) of the general populace.

Pollyanna? Oh, yeah. Guilty as charged... but that's what I can HOPE for, anyway.

I wholeheartedly endorse the mosaicing of bathrooms, because it is so easy to make it look good (and I can't draw to save my life). And you could always do the mosaic on boards and non-permanently mount them to the walls in order to preserve your security deposit.

</mosaic>

What do you use to affix the tiles to the boards?

I want a President to be "above politics" while working for the overall good

Isn't that the current president's claim? That he answers to God and his conscience rather than to polls? I'll stick with democracy.

I took a class on mosaics once. First, you should use glass, not ceramic tile. Much better colors and it lets you make free-form shapes. What you do is arrange the glass in the pattern you want and then cover the pattern with clear tape (like packing tape) to hold all the pieces into the correct pattern once you get it looking like you want. You then flip the taped tiles over, spread grout or glue on the board, and then flip the tiles back onto the board, into the glue/grout. When the glue/grout has dried, you peel off the tape and all of the pieces are where you wanted. You then grout it to seal up the gaps and mount the board with the mosaic on it. (Be sure to use something that will resist mold if going in a bathroom.)

I have all the tools and some spare glass, actually. We could totally mosaic your bathroom sometime.

Wow. I'll go find some boards and grout and give you a call.

The only downside with this board-mosaic plan is that I'm imagining that it would probably be heavy. Mounting it on the wall would probably require reinforced screws, which I've always found to be a pain in the ass.

Yes, yes, ATM.

Indeed -- the final result is going to be very heavy.

This sounds like fun! I haven't done a mosaic in years.

It might take me a little while to assemble the materials and plan the assault. But yeah, let's do this! My bathroom is a scary mold-pit, so anything I can do to embellish it would be good.

live in a clean modern place with an ocean view

I don't think I'd care for it. I don't really like most buildings designed after 1935.

I'd be down with an ocean viewthough.

38: A friend of mine who is from Georgia and went to law school with Carter's grandson said that he didn't know how well off the Carters were when they went to the White House, but that they were broke when they got out. I guess that all of the money had been put in a blind trust, and it was very poorly managed. Inflation didn't help of course.

I think that they're fine now. He's done well off of teh sale of his books.

Again, bitchphd (and I promise this is the last one -- really):

You favor "democracy" and so do I (stunning, huh?). But earlier on you said you thought the Presidency is about "political" leadership. So aren't you intermixing terms here?

Bush is precisely the example of what's WRONG with President acting as a political leader, is he not? Being a political leader implies partisanship, and suggests loyalty to those who made it possible for him/her to be elected (those lobbying and finance-providing "interests") at LEAST as much as to the general electorate, which is much more fragmented. Isn't that much of the "case against Bush" --- that he isn't everyone's President at all. He's not a statesman, in other words; he's been an undaunted battler for those interests he is obligated to, with a dose of religiosity thrown in because the religious right is also a sponsor. Now, conservatives complain that he's not been solidly enough "one of them" in terms of his policy preferences. Oyyy.

No student of history here, but isn't it true that a number of our revered Presidents took actions that made them unpopular (didn't listen to the polls) and as a result of those tough decisions did the right things for the long term (civil rights, preserving the Union, World War II strategies come to mind).

My ideal is that a President "uses" the political process to get elected (democracy) and then acts as if he were the nominee of BOTH parties and ALL the people, collectively. If we had a six pack to share, I would outline the reasons why I think we should have (1) public financing of campaigns for POTUS, (2) a five-year term with no reelection, (3) a process for recall after the third year of a five-year term, short of impeachment., and a few other things we don't have now.

But, we don't, so I won't. But the one thing I would reiterate out of all this is that I don't want a President acting as if he is the head of a political party. When you get the call to be the big cheese, that other stuff should be put away.

And Apo, again, WTF with the "don't say anything that might encourage the righties" stuff?

I'm not saying that, yo. You can go to any thread about Hillary Clinton and confirm that I don't believe it. What I'm saying is don't fall for the obvious righty head fake. I'm relatively certain that Dean Barnett doesn't give a shit himself whether John Edwards has an enormous house. But he made the post for a reason.

Terry, I can't tell whether you're a leftist like me or whether you're just letting yourself be sucked into the image game. You certainly seem to be blind to Bartlett's transparent malice -- Bartlett's normally one of those people whom preaches most fanatically against "the politics of envy".

At the moment the political domination of wealth is absolute, regardless of appearances. In the world of today, family practice doctors, for example, are just another kind of peasant -- even more so the average schoolteacher, college professor, or lawyer.

During the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries well-organized mass movements existed which had the goal of reducing the power of money, and they had some success, but since 1970 these movements have gradually almost disappeared.

I'd like to see their revival, but that's a very long-term project. For now we take what we can get, and choosing between candidates on basis of which kind of wealthy lifestyle they have chosen is pretty silly.

There have recently been a few examples of the old-style citizen-statesman -- Senators Paul Wellstone and Russell Feingold, for example, neither of whom had much net worth to speak of. But they were going against trend; America has effectively rejected their style in favor of the Schwarzenegger type. Both of them were Presidential candidates at one time or another, but they were just trying to keep the others honest -- neither one of them ever had a chance.

235: OK. My comments certainly weren't meant to indicate agreement with Barnett, and I've tried to make that clear. I was just more interested in talking about huge houses than another righty making an asshole of himself.