Six term Rhode Island Congressional Representative Patrick J. Kennedy let the cat out of the bag last week at a Young Democrats meeting in Washington: “ I don’t need Bush’s tax cut. I’ve never worked a f….ing day in my life.”

Kennedy makes $154,700 in his Congressional salary alone for 251 days work a year, about five times the income of the average American. He also benefits from a Federal retirement and medical plan worth millions-- far better than the constantly endangered Social Security-Medicare programs Congress thinks is good enough for the ordinary citizen. And he gets hundreds of thousands of additional taxpayer dollars to pay for his staff, offices and their expenses, but this is just chicken feed to a rich heir to the Kennedy fortune. The fact that the stock market took off like a scalded cat after the Bush tax cut he didn’t need seems to have escaped him.

Perhaps most importantly, Kennedy, 36, has been in politics all his adult life. But he clearly doesn’t  consider representing his Rhode Island constituents in Congress any real “work,” so it must be some kind of hobby. And it certainly hasn’t interfered with his other rich boy pursuits for one minute. Kennedy was treated in his teens for cocaine addiction and seems to spend recent summers cracking up other people’s yachts and requiring the Coast Guard to break up fights with his girlfriend, when he isn’t shoving some security guard around at the Los Angeles International Airport where a bloody terrorist attack had taken place only a few months earlier.

“The rich are different from us,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway. But their hobbies have changed lately. They used to get their egos massaged by owning stables of polo ponies and thoroughbreds, forming great collections of art and competing in expensive sports like yacht and sports car races. At least they amused the common people with their spectacular marriages, divorce squabbles and murder cases. But today the number of millionaires in political office is at an all-time high. What better place for a Kennedy, Pell, Boxer, Corzine, or Bloomberg to receive the attention they adore than putting themselves directly in the path of the 24/7 media coverage of modern political life?

Of course the rich have taken an interest in politics since even before the American Revolution. George Washington created his own master plan and carried it out with all the earnestness of the young Great Gatsby—he would achieve some kind of military renown, get rich, and then serve in politics… and he did precisely that. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt used their wealth to enable them to spend a life in public service as well. What is different about today’s rich is while Washington and the Roosevelts at least worked their way up through a political structure they took very seriously, the Corzines and Bloombergs want to start at the top. And if politics is just some sort of hobby, why not? Like a bored baronet buying a commission in the British Army in Regency England, it is at least something amusing to do, and who cared about the fate of the common soldier under them anyway?

The problem with rich hobbyists who start at the top is that they haven’t a clue what the real responsibilities of their office might be nor do they care to understand the most pressing problems in the life of an ordinary citizen. There is no better example than New York’s current mayor. Facing the city’s largest financial crisis in 100 years, Mike Bloomberg spends weekends playing golf in Bermuda, interrupts an appointment with a family trying to get his help in finding some remains to bury of a 9-11 victim to make a Knicks game, and adds another tax hike on the most heavily taxed citizens in the country. No wonder businesses and New York’s most productive citizens are leaving town. And no wonder Bloomberg is rated as being out of touch with the needs of ordinary New Yorkers by over ¾ of those polled this week. 

With any luck he will buy Calumet Farms or run as a recall candidate for California Governor to replace Gray Davis. At least it would be hard for California to do any worse.

Veteran journalist Thomas Lipscomb is Chairman of the Center for the Digital Future Tom@digitalfuture.org
 

© 2003 Thomas Lipscomb