Liberals who want to take Jeb Bush down a notch may want to avoid focusing on his wallet or potential inheritance.
That strategy might have been successful if the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton had not recently revealed her $30 million payday over the past 16 months. As both presidential hopefuls try and win over the middle class, Clinton seems far more elitist.
Some claim Bush has the same problem that faced Mitt Romney when he ran for president — they both worked in finance after leaving their political posts and they didn’t have humble beginnings. According to The New York Times, Bush made $8 million since leaving office in 2007. Those earnings include about $3 million for board positions at public companies and delivering more than 100 speeches at about $50,000 a pop.
The Clintons, meanwhile, have earned 10 times that amount for some of their speaking fees.
Bush’s new cottage on his family’s Maine compound looks more like the staff’s quarters at the $100,000 summer rental the Clintons shacked up in last year in the Hamptons.
As far as President Obama is concerned, both candidates with multimillion-dollar bank accounts are among “society’s lottery winners.”
Both pols have focused on income inequality during their stump speeches. Last week, Bush told a group of conservatives at the National Review Institute summit in Washington, “If you’re born poor today, you’re more likely to stay poor. We need to deal with this.”
Bush’s Right to Rise PAC’s website centers partly around this issue. On the “What We Believe” page, it reads, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”
Hillary Clinton is trying to steal a page out of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s playbook with lines like her goal of “toppling” the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
Clinton’s message, however, falls off the tracks when she tries to convince people that “we’re all in this mess together.” With the ranks of her hired help vastly larger than a lot of small businesses, it’s laughable for her to claim she’s “in this mess.”
The only “mess” both pols are in as it pertains to wealth distribution is how can they help a group a people they have nothing in common with.
Jaclyn Cashman co-hosts “Morning Meeting” from 9 a.m. to noon on Boston Herald Radio. Follow her on twitter at @JaclynCashman.
Copyright © 2024 Jaclyn Cashman.
