I espouse the radical view that the president of the United States should be held to higher standards than the average person. This doesn't mean that presidents and presidential candidates must be demigods who aren't allowed to make human mistakes, but rather that I have a serious problem with what you could call the Sarah Palin criterion for leadership: the more average, the more appropriate.
I admit that my expectations put presidential candidates in a tricky position: they must be at once exceptional and relatable, elite and populist, above the chatter of daily life and yet very much in touch with the chatterers.
The question then becomes: in what specific ways should our leaders be held to higher standards, and in what ways should they be expected to think like and relate to the average person? A related question is: how elite is too elite?
The second question is perhaps easier to address. Consider intelligence or intellectualism on a scale of zero to absolute elite. Many countries in the world, including the US, would and should be happy with leaders who also happen to be scientists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. These are certainly elite professions, but by and of themselves they don't plausibly remove their practitioners from daily encounters with a multitude of social types. Sure, there are plenty of demagogues who would call someone with a PhD in history from a well regarded state university who makes $56,000 a year on 60-hour work weeks an 'elitist,' but in practice such characterizations are pretty thin. There are always exceptions, of course.
But would you want an Albert Einstein for president? A T.S. Eliot?
I would think not (at least I'm not so sure I would myself), because this is the sort of person whose understanding of the world, while perhaps infinitely valuable to humanity, is so distant from that of the average person that the task of leadership on a national or international scale would seem fraught. Of course the Einsteins and T.S. Eliots of the world could very well make an effort to connect with a breadth of people and demonstrate fitness for high-level political leadership--which is why 'type' or 'profession' should never be absolute barriers to leadership--but they would have to show me something else besides the Theory of Relativity and The Waste Land before they could win my vote for president.
If it's not clear, my point here is that while presidents and other high-level political leaders should be exceptional (to the extent that they can cope with the exceptional expectations of an exceptional job), extreme elitism is something that must be countered and explained for viable presidential candidates. The question of whether such a leader can not only handle the rigors of the job but also keep a finger on the pulse of the common constituency is a legitimate question. Could you imagine T.S. Eliot speaking productively on pedagogy and assessment strategy before a panel of frustrated, inner-city school teachers as a prelude to education policy reform? Could you imagine Einstein making personal calls from the Oval Office to the families of lost and wounded military heroes?
It's easy enough to speculate in this way about various levels of intellectual elitism precisely because America's tolerance for leaders with intellects verging on the elite is extremely low; so low, in fact, that we rarely get a glimpse of that kind of elitism in public office. If President Obama, a lawyer (like everyone else in government) and part-time law school lecturer is considered the extreme end of that spectrum, then, and no offense to Obama, we're a long way off from being ruled by T.S. Eliot or Albert Einstein.
Other forms of extreme elitism, however, would seem more acceptable in mainstream American politics. While having attended Harvard (despite how many people in government have attended Harvard) is considered a relatively extreme mark of elitism (such that all those politicians who attended Harvard have to be pretty quiet about that), having a seven-figure annual income is at worst a neutral reality, and at best the cornerstone of a presidential campaign. Elitism in wealth, to extremes that far surpass any intellectual elitism in government, is conventionally taken not as a sign of removedness, but one of industriousness and, ironically, blue-collar values.
We would be naive to think, however, that extreme wealth doesn't have the ability to separate those who possess it from the average person any less than extreme intellectualism. The likes of Mitt Romney, the obvious and until now unnamed subject of this meditation, does not hunch over the kitchen table to do his taxes once a year the way the rest of us do. He doesn't cram into a bus on the way to work every day; and when he flies, it's not on the way to his only vacation of the year, a 5-day trip to a mid-Atlantic beach, in coach between two screaming infants. When he asks you to borrow money from your parents to attend college, he assumes that your parents, like his did, have money to lend. I could go on.
Now when this kind of elitism, which serves to disconnect in very practical terms the likes of Romney from the quotidian lives of average people, is pointed out, they call it class warfare. What pointing out such realities really is, however, is asking the same kind of question that every one of us, left or right, asks about a presidential candidate: can I relate to this person, or are they so removed from my world in their elitism that I can't trust them to govern on my behalf? Conservatives continue to ask the same question about President Obama; the only difference is that they tend to frame it in terms of Obama's intellectual 'snobbery' or elitism.
So I put the question to you: do you want a really rich president, a president who is in terms of financial elitism more like an Einstein or a T.S. Eliot than is Barack Obama?
An important thing about this question is that, contrary to the way it's too often received, there is no implication that being elite is somehow immoral or a bad thing. Say what you will about Romney, but I certainly don't begrudge him his wealth. No more than I begrudge Einstein his intellect (though if given a choice between the two, I certainly think the latter has brought far more to humanity than Romney's business dealings; but that's another topic). No one says (or ought to say) that in our own private lives we shouldn't be free to pursue wealth or poetry theoretical physics to the apex of our abilities and opportunities. The question is simply whether extreme elitism in any form is something we want in a president. Because right now only one presidential candidate occupies the extreme end of the elitism spectrum, and it ain't Barack Obama. As for me, Mr. Romney will need to show me something apart from his financial elitism that qualifies him for the presidency of the United States; and revealing his offshore bank accounts and labyrinthine trail of semi? legal tax avoidance is no start. If only he were offering that much.
