from The Weekly Standard:
Al Gore owns four homes, one boat, and gorges on kilowatts while urging the world to make small carbon footprints. John Edwards crusades for the destitute while building a palace. John Kerry promotes higher taxes while dodging those on a $7 million yacht he bought in a recession. Michelle Obama urges young people to reject high-paying jobs in the business world for nonprofits and community service, while indulging a taste for designer couture, expensive vacations, and designer sports sneakers, which she wore while feeding the poor.
What’s wrong with these pictures? Two things. First, the hypocrisy undercuts the moral authority, and makes it ridiculous. Second, it’s a mega leap up from what looks from the outside to be not that much more than upper-middle-class comfort—nice house in town, nice country house, nice small sailboats, nice American cars—to the mega-rich level of yachts and multiple mansions, available to only a very small fraction of the upper crust: rock stars, sports stars, film stars, nouveau-riche captains of industry, and others not known for their modesty, balance, and sense of restraint. Live on a level accessible to some of the people you govern, and you send the message that you are a citizen. Live like a king, and you send the message that you think you are one, that you see nothing amiss in appropriating far more than what your politics say is your share of the universe; that you are entitled because you are worth more than others, that this is your due. Someday, Democrats should sit down and ask themselves how they came in such a short space of time to produce so many marquee figures who wanted to talk like French revolutionaries while living like French royalty. Ask Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, or the Bushes to spend $7 million on anything, and they would have had heart attacks. Ask them to buy a yacht during a recession, and they would have been aghast.
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