Anyone Can Be President, But It Helps to Be Rich

First there was Ross Perot, then Steve Forbes and Michael Huffington. Now corporate takeover artist Al Checchi, who is running for governor of California, has joined the ranks of megamillionaires with designs on major political office. Critics cry that the acquisitive and mercenary 1990s have corrupted our democracy, selling state and national offices to the highest bidders. But the conjunction of power and riches, and a parallel tradition of hand-wringing about it, reaches far back into U.S. history. The wealthy have always occupied the command posts of American government.

The controversy over Checchi’s candidacy taps into a long-standing ambivalence about wealth and power. Americans have long harbored suspicion of great riches in their leaders. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, the itinerant preacher Gilbert Tennant cautioned against the smugness and decadence of rich men in power. “Men grow in wickedness,” Tennant thundered from pulpits across the Eastern seaboard, “in proportion to the increase in their wealth.” The luxury and idleness of the English court had horrified leaders of the American revolution, people whose republican faith stressed the virtues of honest labor and simple living.

Resentment against Forbes, Huffington and Checchi--public bristling at the impudence of the rich who expect wealth to buy them power--descends from these traditions. From Abraham Lincoln the rail-splitter to Harry S. Truman the haberdasher to Bill Clinton the fatherless child, Americans cherish images of leaders with modest beginnings.

But at the same time, Americans have usually installed rulers of substantial means. We want our presidents to be born in log cabins, as long as they move to mansions by adulthood, places with servants quarters and ample acreage.

Why does a country dedicated to the belief that all men are created equal, almost always choose its leaders from the top of the economic pyramid? How do Americans square their democratic faith with their taste for rich rulers?

First, the truly affluent, the politicians to the manner born, have displayed noblesse oblige. Aristocrats among the modern presidents--Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy--have tilted toward the left side of the political spectrum. They have proved their own good fortune threatened no hardheartedness toward the poor. Even George Bush, a country-club Republican, offered the country a “kinder, gentler” brand of conservatism than his parvenu predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Second, great wealth inoculates candidates against charges of corruption. In West Virginia, a state with a long history of petty corruption that has sent more than its share of office holders to jail, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV campaigned as a politician immune to the blandishments of lobbyists and special interests. Everyone may have their price, but who could afford a Rockefeller’s? In an age of White House coffees and shakedowns at Buddhist temples, Checchi’s candidacy taps this same faith in the incorruptibility of the super-rich. With a cool $550 million in the bank, he does not need to sell access.

Third, Americans have generally regarded poverty as a personal moral failing rather than a social injustice. To be born poor is no one’s fault; to remain poor is a sign of sloth, feeble-mindedness, vulgarity. From the earliest days of the republic, Americans have found the indigent and unrefined unfit to rule.

The nation’s first president, George Washington, renounced kingly pomp and circumstance, but remained a home-grown aristocrat, well-possessed of lands and slaves. As a young man, Washington carefully emulated the manners of English noblemen, copying into his notebook 110 rules of civility from an etiquette book. Washington’s substantial means and polished manners were essential to his appeal; his Federalist Party embraced the widely held view that “the many do not think at all,” that the passions of the people should be restrained by the rule of the best men. Colonial Americans believed that wealth, judgment and power naturally flowed together, that political leadership should rest securely in the hands of the upper class.

The Jacksonian Democrats lowered the bar to participation in American politics. They gave the ballot to ordinary working folk--immigrants, wage laborers, men without property--and ushered into public life a new class of men, of sturdy fortunes to be sure, but without the social standing of a Washington.

Andrew Jackson himself emerged in legend as the first true commoner to hold the nation’s highest office, a soldier without ancestors or property. But Jackson, whose father died before he was born, grew up in the household of his maternal uncle, a well-off slaveholder who owned a fine home, a grist mill and a profitable whiskey still. Jackson attended a private academy, and grew up among the best people the Carolina back country had to offer--”the owners of slaves, the breeders of horses, the holders of local offices and titles.”

Most Jacksonian Democrats disdained the idea of an ordinary man, without money, property and accomplishment, ascending to high office. Indeed, in the 1840 election, it was a Jacksonian newspaperman who cast aspersions on the opposition candidate, William Henry Harrison, describing the Whig Party standard-bearer as a man happy to retire to a log cabin with a jug of hard cider. For 19th-century Americans, the primitive log cabin marked the divide between respectability and vulgarity, between sturdy and substantial yeomen fit for public service and the base masses below.

In the ensuing election, the first great media campaign in U.S. presidential politics, Harrison and the Whigs turned the insult to their advantage. Long burdened by charges of elitism, the Whigs seemed particularly vulnerable to the wrath of ordinary voters in 1840: Harrison, the scion of one of colonial Virginia’s foremost families, actually lived in an elegant estate and had selected another Southern patrician, John Tyler, as his running mate. The Whigs deflected attention from their aristocratic ticket by embracing the pejorative log cabin image and celebrating their candidate’s (imaginary) common touch. They built log cabin campaign offices, sang log cabin songs and freely distributed log cabin cider.

The “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign set the mold for modern attitudes about wealth in the White House. Americans rewarded tales about a climb up the ladder, stories that validate our cherished myths about the rags-to-riches possibilities of American life. Everyone can grow up to be president, the saying goes. But we actually elect only men of substantial means; with very few exceptions (Clinton among them), America’s political leaders have been drawn from the ranks of wealth and privilege.

Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy grew up among the upper crust, enjoying the comforts of life and the leisure to cultivate political careers. Reagan, Lincoln, Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson may have been born into relatively modest circumstances, but before they reached the White House they had accumulated plenty of scratch. Through fair means (Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover) and foul (LBJ and Warren G. Harding), fortunate marriages (Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower) and unexpected inheritances (Woodrow Wilson and Truman), nearly every American leader entered the highest office with ample assets.

The current wave of millionaire candidates--Checchi, Huffington and Perot--have accumulated fortunes without the experience of public service that once accompanied high social standing. They try to play it both ways, to be both upper class and anti-establishment. They are not true heirs of Washington and FDR, who never denied their own privilege and assumed responsibility for their less-fortunate fellow citizens, but of Harrison--rich insiders who pretend to represent the disfranchised and discontent average citizen. Will we fall for that again? After all, $550 million buys a lot of hard cider.