The Rich, the Poor And the Oval Office

Rich man, poor man–the American presidency has had its share of each. Yet history tells us that economic status is one of the less reliable leading indicators of presidential performance. The office has been occupied by old-money class warriors and self-made worshippers of capitalist dogma. Indeed, the Oval Office may be one place where size doesn’t matter. At least where the size of one’s fortune is concerned. It’s how a President defines success and what, if any, scars he has accumulated in his rise to power that reveal more than his net worth.

It’s hard to imagine Abraham Lincoln as a traitor to his class. But as a candidate for Congress in 1843, Lincoln was the target of a whispering campaign inspired by his marriage into the elite Todd and Edwards families. Lincoln professed astonishment that anyone who had known him as a $10-a-month flatboat man could really believe he had morphed into “the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction.” Likewise, his legal work for the Illinois Central Railroad–for which he received as much as $5,000 a case–would later be cited as evidence that Lincoln was no friend of the workingman.

He inoculated himself against such charges in the spring of 1860, when Lincoln-for-President partisans marched into the Illinois Republican state convention bearing a weathered pair of fence rails purportedly split by their hero. In another bit of orchestrated spontaneity, the candidate was called upon to acknowledge his youthful handiwork. He wasn’t certain of the rails in question, said Lincoln, but he had split a good many better ones since growing to manhood. In that moment, A. Lincoln, Railroad Lawyer, gave way to Abe Lincoln, Rail Splitter, a more marketable image for one who hadn’t betrayed his origins so much as he had spent a lifetime escaping them.

Mitt Romney says Americans celebrate success, and he’s right. But that doesn’t mean they do so uncritically, still less that they agree on its meaning. The controversy surrounding Romney’s wealth, how it was acquired and whether he understands those who have been less successful is part of a long-running debate over private gain and public obligation. It is inseparable from presidential politics, in which the biggest single determinant of any incumbent’s chances for re-election is usually his record of economic stewardship.

No matter the era, what hasn’t changed is the vulnerability of politicians in times of economic distress. No one begrudged the first George Bush his ancestral home in Kennebunkport, so reminiscent of the Kennedy compound down the coast in Hyannis Port. There the parallels end. That Kennedy lived off a $10 million trust fund established by his bootlegging father didn’t preclude him from labeling price-gouging steel executives “sons of bitches.” Like Theodore Roosevelt confronting “malefactors of great wealth” as embodied by J.P. Morgan, Kennedy defined himself not by his money but by his enemies. The gentlemanly Bush picked no such fights. While JFK’s sailing prowess reinforced the misty legend of a classy guy, Bush’s cigarette boat defined him by class. His overhyped encounter with a supermarket scanner fed the narrative of a country squire with oil on his boots, his instincts dulled by noblesse oblige. Would it have generated the same reaction had the country not been in recession? The question answers itself.

JFK was right. Life is unfair. Few questioned the tax ruling under which Dwight Eisenhower, World War II’s ultimate hero, was able to treat the considerable income from his war memoirs as a capital gain. Even the IRS liked Ike. By contrast, Herbert Hoover, having earned millions as the Great Engineer and given away much of it as the Great Humanitarian, refused his salary. That didn’t keep him from becoming a caricature of Depression-era heartlessness, indifference in a batwing collar.

Through the smoke screen of faux populism, one can discern the real issue at stake: Is a President–or would-be President–out of touch? Poverty, it seems, may or may not generate sympathy, but it’s no guarantee that the man in the Oval Office will be seen as one of us. During his first week on the job, Gerald Ford asked a White House staffer when he could expect the first installment of his presidential salary. He had a son about to enroll in college, Ford explained; a quarter-century on Capitol Hill had done nothing for the family finances. That the Fords were among millions of American families living paycheck to paycheck failed to establish a Trumanesque bond between him and others of modest means. Self-made Ford may have been, but he was never self-dramatizing.

Symbolism matters. Long before Jimmy Carter rebuked the imperial presidency by walking down Pennsylvania Avenue on his Inaugural Day, Thomas Jefferson dispensed with his predecessors’ horse-drawn coaches for his oath taking. The epicurean Jefferson was as tightfisted with the people’s money as he was reckless in spending his own. As President, he slashed the military budget and shuttered foreign outposts in his determination to liquidate the national debt. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Andrew Jackson wrote in vetoing the rechartering of a national bank. Only a President, implied Jackson (a slave master and the owner of a large plantation), can protect the humbler members of society from monopoly and crass exploitation. Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal were not conceived in the spirit of us vs. them. Rather, each was envisioned as a chapter in the unfolding story of American democracy, confirming the irrelevance of bloodlines and bank accounts alike.

Put another way, fortune may favor the 1%, but history rewards those who redistribute opportunity. As in other periods of economic distress, the 2012 election promises a referendum on the Forgotten Man. Is he the victim of capitalist redundancy and Wall Street ruthlessness to whom FDR brilliantly pitched his political revolution? Or is he the patriot at war with the popular culture, feeling his talents oppressed by Washington’s social engineers, who rallied to Richard Nixon in 1968? Nixon’s brand of cloth-coat conservatism anticipated Reagan’s religion of the marketplace and its populist offshoot, the Tea Party.

Ultimately, what’s in a President’s bank account matters less than what’s in the average voter’s. A century ago, amid the nation’s worst depression to date, William McKinley ran as “the advance agent of prosperity” just three years after he flirted with personal bankruptcy. Rich friends bailed him out of his distress. Their patronage didn’t hurt McKinley’s chances among an electorate radicalized by economic despair. Counterintuitive as it seems, is conspicuous success anymore a disqualifier? Might a quarter-billionaire with millions stashed in the Cayman Islands defy the odds by making himself the candidate of today’s Forgotten Man? The answer depends largely on how voters gauge their prospects come November. In the meantime, a word to the wise of both parties: Stay away from speedboats and Donald Trump.

Smith is a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University