David Brooks asserts:

We're so full of it. We pretend to be a middle-class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. We love our Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes, Deans and Gores. We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before the New England summer homes. How else can you explain the Bush vs. Kerry matchup that confronts us this year?

I know this is an op-ed, but who is this loving 'we' of whom Brooks speaks, and does their love survive the descriptions of Kerry's wealth that follows? How else to explain? I was shocked in 1999/2000 when Bush emerged as the Republican forerunner; I think of him as more capable now than I did then, but I really don't remember seeing him revealing much that would qualify him when he was on the campaign trail. So that's one person explained as somewhat inexplicable. As for the other half, Kerry might well have benefited from an odd and much discussed asumption that people voted for him because they thought he was electable. Why did the voters think that Bush and Kerry were electable? Maybe it goes to the blue blood, but I'm not yet willing to concede that.

There aren't too many normal people waking up in normal suburban split-levels assuming they should rule the world. But God bless the upper class. They've lost their legitimacy, but they haven't lost their self-confidence.

I had thought that affording "suburban split-levels" implied you were a member of the upper class, albeit not the Heinz/Kerry/Bush class. But anyway... wasn't part of Clinton's charm his utter belief "oh, just trust me, I can take care of it" attitude? I see him as someone who would have thought to himself, "Bosnia, Middle East negotiations, of course people will listen to me, I'm much more legitimate than all of your Bubba-mocking op-eds make me out to me." If you see world politics as a debate match between countries' leaders, with the match win going to the leader with the largest and loudest cheering section,* then Clinton, Mr. Man-of-the-People, is the one you want representing you, not Kerry or Bush, the Messrs. Silver-Spoon.** If two people have the same feeling of entitlement to power to which Brooks refers, then isn't Clinton's "my childhood wasn't great but I created this for myself" for impressive and empowering than Bush's "I have the same first and last name as the former president"?

* "If you see world politics as a debate match between countries' leaders, with the match win going to the leader with the largest and loudest cheering section": Perhaps you, the reader, finds this premise false. In that case, the entire statement is technically true by some fun bit of formal logic. "If my mother is purple, she is my aunt" is a true statement so long as my mother is, in fact, not purple. If this is all getting too bizarre, though, the validity of what I'm saying may come down to "you" equaling "me." I don't, however, feel like switching my words into the first person.

** Is that the proper plural? I remember a William Safire "On Language" column in which he explains that Burger King officially forms the plural of "Whopper Junior" incorrectly, but I can't remember Burger King's usage, or even the last time I ordered a Whopper Junior in the singular, much less the plural.