If you want your son to grow up to be president, either:
A. Establish a powerful political dynasty; or
B. Abandon your kid’s teenage mother and die drunk.
That’s what Michael Medved explains in the Wall Street Journal today. The odds are against any of my kids making it to the White House, obviously. My idiot cousin’s 2008 defeat spoiled the “dynasty” motif and I’m probably too old to seduce and abandon any teenagers now. But maybe I can still try for the “die drunk” part, huh?
I’d rather my child weren’t that needy.
Medved: “In one sense, these extreme backgrounds now dominate the presidential process because that process itself has become so extreme.”
Nonsense. The process has been extreme forever. It’s only now via New Media that the commoner gets access to that which was hidden and/or protected.
Besides, the sample size is so small as to be meaningless. Sure, legacy hires have an inherent advantage, so a Bush, Kennedy, or Romney candidate has better odds. Politicians beget politicians. News at 11:00. But the odds of a candidate from what might be called dysfunctional families becoming president? Pretty good, too. Welcome to contemporary America where dysfunction is becoming a norm. And none of this has anything to do at all with “extreme” politics.
Hey! My boys are in the running! Yay!
Stacy, you got enough kids to stack the schoolboard in any town you live in, and from there it’s just a short skip to glory! Get ’em running!
If you wanna get started on that “die drunk”, I’ll buy you a beer at CPAC Thursday afternoon.
Any old fool can die drunk. The trick is to die drunk just before the check arrives.
I think the real lesson here is that American don’t want a President with living fathers who are just ordinary dads.
Ronald Reagan’s father predeceased his being elected President by 40 years. Jimmy Carter’s father was 23 years in the ground (his mother Lillian was quite the character). Gerald Ford’s biological father and stepfather were long gone.
Nixon was elected parentless, as was Johnson, and Eisenhower.
Truman and Franklin Roosevelt had only their mothers. Hoover was an orphan.
Kennedy had his patrician bootlegger father of course. You have to go back to Coolidge and Harding to find a U.S. President with anything like a regular father who was then still living.
Joseph Kennedy was not a patrician, he was a nouveau riche mob connected thug.
Given the life expectancies back then, that’s perhaps not so much a choice of the American people.