Bush the aristocrat

I've been pondering Jonathon's well-taken comments below on today's New York Times editorial ripping the President (there's lots of other objectionable stuff in the editorial, by the way, which makes it worth reading). The line Jonathon quoted is:

Mr. Bush is a man who was reared in privilege, who succeeded in both business and politics because of his family connections.

Setting aside the truth of that statement, which is at least debatable, one has to ask what the Times is driving at. Surely they don't mean to excluse all wealthy elites from office, or if so they ought to be ripping John Kerry, who attended Harvard and is married to a woman worth $160 million in inherited wealth (here's where it comes from), and Howard Dean, who may cast himself as a humble doctor but in fact grew up in the Hamptons in a family with social ties tro the presumably detestable Bushes (Bush's grandmother was a bridesmaid to Dean's). And of course Al Gore, that stellar "Man of the People," grew up in Washington hotels as the scion of a wealthy political family but somehow never got blamed for it.

There seems to be no consistency in the Time's position, and I suspect that Jonathan is right: They just HATE him.
- posted by Anonymous @ 5:38 PM