Posted on 01/11/2004 1:45:15 AM PST by disturbed
Edited on 01/11/2004 1:55:15 AM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
With family, the public at least gains the implied obligation to be true to personal heritage that comes along with the service.
The truly liberating thing is to understand these powerful offices as the functionary positions they are in reality.
We are so driven by our history of breaking with a monarchy to distrust "hereditary aristocracy" that we fail to understand the "natural aristocracy" and fear all forms of the aristocracy due to that failure.
We will have one in any large society and failure to understand it leads us to an imagined popularism that allows us easy prey to demagogues.
Anyway, everyone always forgets Harrison(9)(Whig) and Harrison(23)(Republican) - grandfather/grandson - some real multi-generational dynastic planning going on there...
dvwjr
The most insidious dynasty of all. Cleveland(22)(Democrat) and Cleveland(24)(Democrat) - self/self. His advisors created a self-succeding dynasty which brilliantly had him succeed himself as President when he let the latter half of the Harrison(23)(Republican) dynasty take its shot.
dvwjr
Nor the fact that the strong majority of Americans pay little attention to poltics, thereby creating a process of brand-name candidates - and that's why you get all kinds of political families at all levels of government - the voters recognize the name and have a rough sense of what that person stands for from that name.
Or perhaps the poster is a returning troll. According to JimRob, he was...
Enron and the Bush family have boosted each other up the ladder of success. But have their ties created a Teapot Dome? By: Kevin Phillips (Published on Sunday, February 10, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times)
*aas note: Enron gave Clinton big bucks in 1995 for his re-election bid, in return for the Clinton White House's intervention in an Enron deal in India.
Walter Olson on Kevin Phillips:
...Author Kevin Phillips is to quote dispensers what Pez is to candy dispensers. Asking Nexis for his recent clips triggers the equivalent of a pinball TILT, warning that more than 500 are forthcoming. Phillips is one of the political commentators who dominate the talk-show circuit and, significantly, one of the few routinely labeled as a conservative...
...Gradually Phillips grew more pessimistic about the prospects of conservative success. His view was that Nixon had ushered in a rightward political trend in 1968 that was due any day to peter out, allowing a cyclical return to liberal-left dominance. What happened instead was that Ronald Reagan got elected. In the years that followed, Phillips relentlessly forecast practical failure and public rejection of conservative leaders and their policies...
...The whole book is like this. The non sequiturs slither in all directions like amoebas on a slide. Several passages have already begun to date hilariously, including one deploring the fortunes being made in Northeastern real estate, and another referring to disgraced former House Speaker Jim Wright as a leading "populist." And in order to portray deregulation as unfairly tilted toward the affluent, Phillips is obliged to ignore the single best-known result of airline deregulation: making family vacations cheaper...
...Bill McGurn, Washington bureau chief of the conservative National Review, chuckles when asked about Phillips. "Liberals love him, because he tells them what they want to hear," said McGurn. "I've never seen a conservative writer quote him, except maybe to disagree."
I have a proposal. I want to be a leftish Democratic pundit. I promise to take the opposite side on every issue from Kevin Phillips, the anointed conservative Republican. I will find nice things to say about Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and Bork. I will call for more tax cuts and deregulation instead of trade wars and industrial policy. I will say that stirring up hatred of business persons is evil in itself and self-defeating as a way of helping low earners. All this, I take it, will qualify me to fill the seat reserved for a left-wing Democrat at TV round tables.
Reporters and talk-show bookers can reach me care of the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Shall I wait by the phone?
Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
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