Why should we ever nominate ANYONE from a wealthy family again? [View all]

[Ken Burch]

FDR was a class traitor and a one-off. No rich people even considering entering politics share any of his values today, at least as far as I know.

JFK was marginal-he was a hardline Cold Warrior and helped get us into Vietnam. Bobby was much better, but there's no one in the 1% today who shares the combination of traits and experiences that made Bobby "Bobby"-by which I mean made him into the transformed post-1965 figure we revere today, as opposed to the person he was before JFK's assassination.

What we need in the future is a person who has a real connection to the lives the majority of the American people live.

Someone who has an actual sense of what hardship might be like, what being on the losing end of bigotry or economic royalism is like, what living paycheck-to-paycheck is life.

That person could be a woman, could be black or brown or Muslim, could be LGBTQ, could be anyone...anyone who has lived on the outside.

What 2016 taught us is that nothing we did in the past works anymore.

Therefore, we will need a candidate unlike any we have ever nominated anymore.

But it probably can't be a candidate raised in nothing but wealth. There are good people raised in nothing but wealth, but none who are so good that they are intrinsically better suited to the presidency than people raised outside of it.