No Aristocrats Need Apply

There are three hundred million citizens in the United States of America. And while some people really are incomparably more qualified than others to assume positions of effective leadership, you can still be sure that for every single one of the people who do manage to find their way through the dreadful sausage machine of a career in politics to eventual high public office there are countless thousands of citizens equally or more qualified who do not. While it is, of course, always absolutely commendable to take up a life of public service no-one, surely, is entitled to a position of leadership in a democracy like we want here in the United States.

Anybody who fails to be content with the service itself, whether or not it eventuates in a position of conspicuous leadership, seems to me to have demonstrated themselves to be unqualified for such leadership, should it be their lot to take up its burden of superlative service.

That is one among many reasons I find the dynastic pretensions of families like the awful criminal Bush clan or the crusty Adams clan before them -- or, yes, the Kennedys, and most certainly the Clintons, too -- to be terribly inappropriate to the American ideal of good democratic governance.

It's not that I don't think a Kennedy or a Clinton or, hell, maybe even some now-fetal Bush might one day make a competent President in the abstract. It's just that it seems to me unseemly, to say the least, to imagine that among the thronging millions of living Americans the members of any one family could pretend that anything other than straightforward privilege could be the factor that would situate more than one of them to the prominence of Executive power in a working democracy. And I simply find it hard to fathom how such obliviousness would easily square with the sensitivity fit for a suitably modest exercise of the vestigial sovereignty that inheres in the American Executive.

The same goes for anybody who says what John Kerry is reported to have said in this piece earlier today: "Americans give people a second chance. And if you learn something and prove you've learned something, maybe even more so. Now, I don't know what I'm going to do yet. We'll make that decision down the road."

I supported John Kerry before many of my peers did last election cycle. I supported him with my words -- of which I have many in abundance -- with my money -- of which I had scarcely any on hand -- and with my vote -- of which I had just the one I was proud and hopeful to cast for him. I think he was a fine candidate, more a man of the left than I expected the debased Party process to produce, and I think he was disgustingly maligned in the 2004 campaign to the eternal shame of the Republican Party. Not that they don't have plenty more, and much worse, to atone for these days.

But, be that as it may, I will not gladly support John Kerry again, nor will I be pleased to find him making another bid for the pinnacle. I think such a bid would be vainglorious and frivolous (as would be Hillary Clinton's, too, frankly) in an historical moment that demands serious commitments and painful choices no careerist will comfortably undertake.

Kerry has his "second chance" to serve his country as a statesman already. The petty calculus another Presidential run will inspire in Kerry is the last thing we have time for from him in a moment like this. I hope he will have the decency and sense to get behind Feingold or Edwards when the time comes to make Presidential noises. But for now he needs to concentrate on the needs of our debauched and devastated democracy, especially the moment his Party manages in November to skew the balance of power enough to demand real accountability from the Killer Clowns running this place for now to the enduring shame and danger of us all.

American democracy needs no self-appointed celebrities or self-satisfied aristocrats in this historical moment, but commited public servants who grasp and respect the ferocious but nonetheless quite fragile forces of People Powered Democracy that have burst on the scene in an era of global digital networked information, communication, and collaboration technologies.