Steve Reads

I’ll be quick. Just scanning the front page of the New York Times website:

Summary of the first blurb there: “Here’s a preview of what the media will be watching for. Here we, the media, are telling you what we, the media, think you’ll want to be watching for.” Once again I’m reminded of the Keynesian beauty contest:

It is not a case of choosing those [faces] which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

As for that second blurb: can we just stop with the more-middle-class-than-thou nonsense? Both of the presidential candidates, and both the vice-presidential ones, are above the middle class. Biden’s house is a 6,800-square-foot custom-built colonial … on four lakefront acres, a property worth close to $3 million. Palin and her husband last year had a combined income of a quarter-million dollars. Obama made plenty of money from his bestselling books. McCain married a beer heiress.

Am I alone in thinking that none of this matters? At other times it hasn’t mattered at all to the public discourse: I don’t recall anyone saying that Perot was “out of touch with ordinary Americans” because he’s a billionaire; if anything, this was supposed to give him greater cred: his success at business is supposed to be an indication of his managerial prowess, not to mention his hardworking puritan virtue.

If I care at all about my candidates’ wholesomeness, it’s that I want them to have come by their money honestly. A Horatio Alger story is worth something: up from their bootstraps, given nothing, they made it to the nation’s highest elected office. There’s something nice in that. If Sarah Palin and her husband work hard for their money, then I wish them the best of luck. Congratulations to Senator Obama for writing books that people want to read. Nice job, Senator McCain, for finding a trophy wife. Wait, scratch that last one.