Reply #33: funny...I just posted this down-thread...

[stillcool]

it is taken from Ferdinand Lundberg's book "The Rich and the Super-Rich"..I think the copyright was 1965? Anyway..it cracked me up..

But the reason Democratic presidents must be sympathetic toward the big wealthy at all times, short of allowing them to upset the new synthesis, is simple: All these people, even if Republican, carry great weight in American affairs because of their intimate hereditary involvement through professional subordinates in complex enterprises penetrating into every comer of society. They may no longer be self-made they may have been sired by trust, testament or codicil out of holding company, foundation and monopoly-but they are independent power wielders. They aren't average citizens. And this is a political fact, not likely to be overlooked by any serious politician.

Any criticism of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for the nature of their top appointments should face up to this question: Where should they look for Cabinet officers? Kennedy and Johnson looked for them where Eisenhower looked for them, and where Roosevelt looked: in the large financial and industrial organizations. These organizations belong to the wealthy. They are part of their plantation, which in its broadest sweep is the market place itself.

Experts of greater if not complete independence of judgment are to be had, to be sure, from the leading universities, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy both drew heavily upon them for certain tasks. But scholars have neither the habit of command nor is their authority apt to be recognized by men practiced in the arts of expedient manipulation--Plato's men of the appetites. Any president has to look to the big enterprises, selecting competent men who are least compromised by egocentric self-service.

To be sure, it is not the quintet of Du Ponts, Rockefellers, Mellons, Fords and Pews that alone has supported the Republican Party in its struggles to protect and nourish big wealth and is now playing around the edges at least of the Democratic Party. They have had many collaborators among groups of lesser wealth, most of them strong Republicans in the past as now, even though some of them seem inclined to take fright as latter-day woozy fanatics come to the fore in the Republican Party.