Okay, just one more: this is from William Raspberry’s column this morning, describing another troubling thing about John Roberts.
…a friend — black, conservative and Republican — [was] laying out the reasons he opposes the Roberts nomination.
It isn’t his conservatism, my friend said, but the too-smooth path by which Roberts has arrived at this juncture. Son of a wealthy steel executive, Roberts attended private schools, Harvard and Harvard Law School, then held a federal appeals court clerkship, followed a year later by a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice (now Chief Justice) William Rehnquist.
He then was named special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, and associate counsel to the president (at age 27) before joining one of Washington’s top law firms. Then Roberts went to the office of the solicitor general of the United States and, for the past two years, a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The point: Nothing in that glide path suggests exposure to anything that might temper his conservative philosophy with real-life exposure to the problems and concerns of ordinary men and women. Roberts is undeniably bright, said my friend, but his life has been one of quite extraordinary privilege.
And then it occurred to me: Roberts’s life has been amazingly like that of the man who wants to put him on the court — but with better grades.
Perhaps the point here is that our government is increasingly made up of privileged, wealthy elitists who have little knowledge of or interest in the everyday lives of everyday people. These are people who have no idea what the cost of a gallon of milk is, what a grocery store scanner is, or what it means to actually scrimp and save to pay bills… or, for that matter, to pay taxes.
When it comes down to it, in the last election our choice was between two elitists — one who pretends to be “just like us” and one who doesn’t even try.
My jury is still our on Roberts, but I don’t buy this argument for a second.
Take the mighty left-winged Messiahs, JFK and RFK. They too had the similar path, yet no one questioned their “real-life exposure to the problems and concerns of ordinary men and women” at least not as of late.
Just seems like someone being bashed because they had the audacity to utilize the resources they were born into. So he was borrn luckier than 99.9% of us, good for him. The fact that he didn’t spend all of Daddy’s money snorting coke off the ass of a hooker and instead choose to make something of himself, makes me like the guy that much more.
I don’t think there is any “increasingly” about it, this has been going on since 1776 in this country, and since pretty much the dawn of time everywhere else.
My point was that if this was a liberal politicos often have the same backgrounds, but no one seems to mention it as they have here.