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Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN Opinion and creator of CNN’s Change the List project. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Email him at ctl@cnn.com. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
CNN
—
There seem to be two prerequisites for the modern U.S. presidency.
1. Being fabulously rich.
2. Successfully pretending you’re not.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz tried his hand at No. 2 last week as he announced his bid for the White House. With his back awkwardly turned to the TV cameras, and a drive-through-worker style microphone clipped to his ear, Cruz relayed a version of his life story, often in third person, to a student crowd at Liberty University in Virginia.
“Imagine another teenage boy being raised in Houston … experiencing challenges at home … heading off to school over 1,000 miles away from home in a place where he knew nobody. Where he was alone and scared. And his parents going through bankruptcy meant there was no financial support at home – so at the age of 17 he went to get two jobs to help pay his way through school. He took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of y’all can relate to. Loans, that I’ll point out, I just paid off a few years ago.”
And he’s not the wealthiest person whose name has been thrown into the hat as a potential candidate for 2016, according to estimates compiled by Crowdpac, a nonpartisan website that aggregates stats about potential political candidates.
Crowdpac estimates Hillary Clinton’s net worth to be $21.5 million (more if you include Bill). Jeb Bush’s: $10 million. Even Elizabeth Warren, enemy of Wall Street, champion of populist financial-sector reform, is estimated to be worth $3.7 million to $10 million, according to CNN Money.
Of the 26 potential candidates identified by Crowdpac, only four – Joe Biden, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders and Mike Pence – are estimated to be worth less than $1 million.
With a net worth of $150,000, Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, is perhaps the middle-classiest of the bunch. But don’t worry, his campaign would have backing from the billionaire Koch brothers and Steve Forbes, according to The Washington Post. He’s also little-known and has basically no chance of winning the increasingly claustrophobic Republican primary.
Apart from Cruz, no one has officially declared for president, so the names of those who may run are still largely a matter of speculation. Still, these folks deserve examination. The richest potential contenders are Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist (net worth: $200 million); Al Gore (also $200 million); and Carly Fiorina, a former tech executive (net worth: $80 million).
So, mostly millionaires.
And two almost-quarter-billionaires.
These folks may want to represent an America where median wealth is only $44,900. Meanwhile, the national median income is about $54,000 per year, and one in five children lives below the federal poverty line, which is about $24,000 annually for a family of four.
None of these would-be candidates can claim to represent that America.
None comes close.
When presidents were of modest means
It’s time for a middle-class president.
Or, at the very least, a middle-class presidential candidate.
It’s not impossible, and there would be important benefits.
First, we just have to look to the past to see that it can be done.
“The interesting thing about the (idea) of a middle-class president is that it’s actually relatively common in certain periods of American history,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “If we define (the middle class) essentially as someone who does not have exorbitant wealth, or does not inherit exorbitant wealth … there’s a period from basically about the mid-19th century up until 1920 where the majority of presidents are what we could consider to be of modest means.”
You can think of the history of presidential wealth in three waves.
Wave one: Landholdings and slaves made the first presidents incredibly rich. George Washington, for example, is estimated to have been worth $525 million in today’s dollars, making him the second wealthiest president in U.S. history, after John F. Kennedy.
Wave two ushers in the rise of the powerful (and rich) political party. There are downsides to this, of course, but, according to Engel, it helped civil servant types – “professional presidents,” as he called them – successfully run for office without being loaded.
Think Lincoln. Or, later, and somewhat separately, Harry S. Truman, who grew up poor and refused to let this nation’s highest office make him rich, turning away money for speaking engagements and advertisements, and refusing to sit on corporate boards.
Engel said he’d traveled to Missouri to see the home Truman lived in after he left the White House, which was actually owned by his mother-in-law, he said. In the kitchen, near the breakfast table, “you look up and you see a water stain on the ceiling because no one had the money to fix the water stain on the ceiling,” he told me. “It’s hard to imagine George W. Bush doing that.”
Not since Truman has a president been worth less than $1 million, according to data compiled by 24/7 Wall Street, which is the basis for the historical figures I’m using.
Now we’re in Wave three: the era when you kinda need to be a millionaire.
Engel says we can thank the decline of powerful political parties; the rise of expensive, media-heavy campaigns; and campaign finance changes, enabled by court decisions, that allow essentially for unlimited donations to political campaigns, favoring the wealthy and connected.
Wealth is a prerequisite
“Wealth and influence has always been an asset,” Engel said. “In the last two generations, we have seen that wealth and influence are prerequisite to entry to politics in a fundamentally new way. … Over the last 30 years, and especially over the last five years or so, we’ve seen such an incredible skyrocketing of the cost of entry to politics that we’re simply not getting a good cross section of Americans even conceiving of the fact that they might run” for office.
There’s no reason to expect a middle-class president would automatically – by merit of his or her income alone – support policies that would benefit middle-class people.
FDR, for example, was among the richest presidents (net worth: $60 million), and also arguably the most pro-middle-class. His presidential terms, which saw the country through the Great Depression of the 1930s, resulted in the federal minimum wage and Social Security.
“We have (presidents) who are very, very wealthy who wind up being on the side of the poor,” Engel told me, “and we have people who grew up with remarkable poverty – Herbert Hoover is a good example – who end up being economically conservative.”
Still, a middle-class presidential candidate could help Americans re-engage with a political system that many see as hopelessly corrupted by money.
Recently, I asked Facebook about the idea of a middle-class president.
Many of you find the idea inconceivable.
Your reasons were telling.
“The only way we’ll get a Middle Class candidate … is if he wins Lottery,” wrote Bryan Booten.
“The problem with someone from the middle class running for president,” said Gwenith Acor, “is that in order to be a viable candidate you would have to sell your soul to the billionaires. …”
“There should be a middle class president,” wrote Chad Oliver. “No one in the government is representative of the people governed … There is no way a middle class person could become any elected official without selling his soul to the devil. It just takes too much money.”
Why wouldn’t you feel that way?
Interests aligned with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each spent more than $1 billion trying to elect these men as president in 2012. How could a middle-class person (much less a poor one) rally that much cash? Maybe it’s possible, with enough wealthy friends. But it’s less likely for a middle class person to be able to infiltrate this world of the super-wealthy.
The real meaning is in the symbolism, though.
A middle-class candidate also could have the effect of encouraging young people from all ends of the economic spectrum to see a future for themselves in politics.
I believe Engel when he says most people see politics as out of reach.
And that’s partly because of the money involved.
Think of the future world leaders we’re shunning simply because they aren’t rich.
Is that the most we expect from democracy?
The value of a symbol
I’ll stop complaining for now and end with a suggestion.
What if just one of the 2016 potential presidential candidates vowed to live as if he or she were a middle-class person during the campaign season and while in office.
This shouldn’t seem like a death sentence. It’s what most of us do.
Or from Pope Francis, who drove a junker car and requested modest living quarters. Or from Truman, who shunned money associated with the presidency and had that water stain in his kitchen. (For this to work, this future president would have to give back some money, since the $400,000 presidential salary puts that person in the 1%.)
The candidates love to pretend they live in modern, middle-class America.
They don’t, but they could take real steps to learn what it’s like.
Photos: Presidents of the United States
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George Washington was the first President of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. He also served as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and he has the distinction of being the only President unanimously elected by the Electoral College.
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The second U.S. President, John Adams, served from 1797 to 1801. He was also the first vice president of the United States, and he was the first President to reside in the White House, moving in on November 1, 1800, while the White House was still under construction.
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Thomas Jefferson, the third President (1801-1809), was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. While President, Jefferson doubled the size of the United States by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.
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James Madison, the fourth President (1809-1817), was nicknamed the "Father of the Constitution." During his presidency, the first formal declaration of war was enacted -- the War of 1812 with Great Britain.
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James Monroe (1817-1825) was the last of the Founding Fathers to be elected President. During his seventh State of the Union address, he outlined a foreign policy that warned European powers against further colonization of or meddling in the Western Hemisphere. This was later known as the Monroe Doctrine.
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John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) was the son of second President John Adams. He was the only President to serve in the House of Representatives after serving as President.
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Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was the only President to serve in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He is also the only President to have been a former prisoner of war: Jackson was 13 when became a courier during the Revolutionary War, and he was later captured by the British.
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Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) was the first President to be born a U.S. citizen. Previous Presidents were born before the United States was a country, making them colonists and, consequently, citizens of Great Britain.
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William Henry Harrison (1841) probably had only just finished unpacking his things at the White House when he died of pneumonia one month into his term. Harrison was the first U.S. President to die while in office, and he had the shortest tenure ever of any commander-in-chief.
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John Tyler's term (1841-1845) saw several presidential firsts. He was the first vice president to succeed office after the President died, he was the first to lose his wife while in office, and he was the first to marry while in office.
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James K. Polk (1845-1849) oversaw the greatest expansion of territory of any President in history. The expansion included what would become the future states of Texas and California. Polk also negotiated with Britain to establish the boundaries of the Oregon Country.
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Zachary Taylor (1849-1850), aka "Old Rough and Ready," was a hero in the Mexican-American War. Mystery surrounds his actual cause of death from a stomach ailment. Did he just eat too many cherries, or was it murder? The 1991 exhumation of his body proved it wasn't arsenic poisoning at least.
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Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) was the last President who was neither a Democrat or a Republican. He helped pass the Compromise of 1850, legislation that included the Fugitive Slave Act and California's admission to the Union as a free state.
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Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) was the first President to not get his party's nomination for re-election. He signed the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people there to decide whether to allow slavery. This worsened the tension between the North and South.
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James Buchanan (1857-1861) was the only President who never married. He failed to prevent seven pro-slavery states from seceding during his term.
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Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865), purveyor of tall top hats and log cabins, preserved the Union during the Civil War and freed the slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation. He was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer.
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Andrew Johnson's (1865-1869) trial by impeachment in the U.S. Senate resulted in his acquittal by a single vote. History gives him a terrible performance review: His plan for post-war Reconstruction failed, and he had little support from Congress or the public.
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Tasked with unifying the country after the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) established the Department of Justice to protect the rights of freed slaves. He also authorized the military to fight the Ku Klux Klan and successfully lobbied for the 15th Amendment, granting voting rights to black men.
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Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) promoted women's rights, signing legislation that allowed female lawyers to argue Supreme Court cases. He introduced the White House Easter Egg Roll as a spring tradition and established the first presidential library.
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Just four months into his term, James Garfield (1881) was shot by a disgruntled lawyer who'd aspired to join the administration as a diplomat. The President was taken to the Jersey Shore, where doctors hoped the ocean air would help him recover. He died two weeks later.
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Chester Arthur (1881-1885) signed a bill mandating a merit-based system for hiring public workers. The idea was to curb patronage and politically motivated appointments.
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Grover Cleveland (1885-1889; 1893-1897) was the first and only commander-in-chief to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was also the first bachelor President to be married at the White House.
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Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) signed into law the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which authorized the government to fine large corporations for price fixing and other corrupt business practices.
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William McKinley (1897-1901) led the country through the Spanish-American War, a three-month conflict that began with the sinking of the USS Maine and ended with Cuban independence. During the beginning of McKinley's second term, he was fatally shot by an anarchist.
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At 42, Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) was the youngest man to take the oath of office. A progressive reformer and environmental advocate, Roosevelt brought lawsuits against corporate trusts, taking on business giants to level the playing field for the working class.
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William Howard Taft (1909-1913) also served as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in his post-presidency years. During his re-election bid, he managed to win only eight of 531 electoral votes -- the poorest performance of an incumbent president seeking re-election.
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Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for proposing and creating the League of Nations. But he was never able to convince the United States to join. Although he was first opposed to a federal amendment allowing women to vote, Wilson shifted his position during his second term and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
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Warren G. Harding's term (1921-1923) was cut short by his sudden death from a cerebral hemorrage. Harding captured 60% of the popular vote in 1920, marking the largest presidential landslide to date.
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Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) served as vice president until the death of Warren G. Harding. His 1924 campaign slogan was "Keep Cool with Coolidge," and his nickname was "Silent Cal" because of his reputation as a man of few words.
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Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) was inaugurated on the year of the stock market crash that sent the country into the Great Depression. Although Hoover pushed for money to be appropriated for large-scale projects, he opposed federal relief payments directly to individuals. The national economy never recovered during his term, and the shantytowns that developed were nicknamed "Hoovervilles."
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Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was the only President elected to the office four times. During his 12 years as President, he championed numerous social programs and measures, including the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. Roosevelt contracted polio at age 39 and never recovered the use of his legs.
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Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) served as vice president for 82 days before the unexpected death of Roosevelt. He authorized the use of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) had been supreme commander of the European Allied forces during World War II, and he ordered the Normandy invasion on D-Day. His popular presidential campaign slogan was "I like Ike!"
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John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was the first Roman Catholic President. He was assassinated in his first term, which was marked by the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the creation of the Peace Corps, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and the beginning of military involvement in Vietnam.
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Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) was vice president under John F. Kennedy and took the oath of office on a plane after Kennedy was assassinated. In 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation that banned segregation and discrimination based on race and gender. The law was a cornerstone of Johnson's vision of a "Great Society" that also included a "war on poverty."
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Richard Nixon (1969-1974) became the first President to resign from office as he faced impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Nixon made strides in domestic policy, proposing legislation that resulted in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Abroad, he established relations with China and a détente in Soviet relations.
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Gerald Ford (1974-1977) had been appointed vice president by Nixon after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign. He then became President when Nixon himself resigned. Remembered mainly for his pardon of Nixon and his physical clumsiness, Ford was not elected to a second term.
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Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the agreement that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. At home, Carter's presidency was plagued by inflation and unemployment, and he lost his bid for a second term amid the hostage crisis in Iran.
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Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) was the only actor ever elected President, and his talent as a speaker earned him the moniker "the great communicator." An affable Republican who wooed many Roosevelt Democrats, the staunchly anti-communist Reagan is seen as having played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) was a former CIA director and served two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan. His approval rating at home soared after he led an international coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait, and communism in Eastern Europe fell on his watch. But he lost his bid for re-election amid a sluggish economy and after reneging on a promise not to raise taxes.
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Bill Clinton (1993-2001) ran on the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." Plagued by various scandals -- including accusations of sexual impropriety -- he was the second president to be impeached. He was acquitted in 1999.
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George W. Bush (2001-2009) is the son of former President George H.W. Bush. His presidency was largely defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2003, he ordered the invasion of Iraq on suspicion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
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Barack Obama (2009-2017) became the first African-American to hold the office of President. He took the oath of office amid the Great Recession, the biggest economic challenge since the Great Depression. Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, millions of uninsured Americans have gotten health insurance.
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Real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump was sworn into office in 2017. His slogan "Make America Great Again," became the central theme of his campaign.