The 'two Americas' Canard

Together, John Kerry and John Edwards possess family fortunes totaling probably in the vicinity of $1 billion. If elected, John Kerry would be the richest president in American history, richer even than his hero John F. Kennedy. And unlike other rich men to seek the presidency -- Ross Perot, Herbert Hoover, and so on -- Kerry is the very opposite of a self-made man: He came by his money by marrying a woman who inherited it from her husband who in turn inherited it from his great-grandfather.

Yet the Kerry-Edwards campaign is audaciously presenting itself as a crusade against unearned wealth and privilege. As the saying goes: Only in America!

Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of the situation, Kerry has left the populist heavy lifting to his running mate, a man whose fortune is estimated in the mere double-digit millions. But even Edwards must choke a little at the preposterousness of his famous "two Americas" speech:

"One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life. One America -- middle-class America -- whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America -- narrow-interest America -- whose every wish is Washington's command. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a president."

By my count, that's actually five different pairs of Americas, and no two pairs overlap.

Pair 1: Those who work and those who collect rewards without working. About 60 percent of Americans work; the other 40 percent are in school, retired, unemployed, at home with small children, and so on. It's not very nice of Kerry and Edwards to try to foment divisions between working Americans and their children and retired parents -- and it does not seem like very smart politics either.

Pair 2: Those who pay the taxes and those who get the tax breaks. About 65 percent of federal income-tax revenue is contributed by the top 10 percent of taxpayers. Again, you have to worry how wise it is of Kerry and Edwards to suggest that some nine-tenths of their fellow citizens are mooching off wealthy people like themselves.

Pair 3: Those who will do anything for their kids and those who never have to "do a thing" for them. It is unfortunately true that there are a lot of rotten parents out there. Edwards seems to be suggesting they are all Republicans.

Pair 4: Middle-class vs. narrow-interest America. What exactly do Edwards and Kerry offer middle-class America? Astoundingly little, really. In 1992 Bill Clinton offered middle-class tax cuts and universal government-guaranteed health insurance. True, Clinton reneged on the first promise and failed to deliver on the second -- but that was after the election. Kerry and Edwards offer neither. In fact, most of their campaign promises are carefully targeted to -- you guessed it -- "narrow interests."

Pair 5: Those who are struggling to get by and those who can buy anything they want. Political pros sometimes talk about 70-30 issues, meaning issues on which one side outnumbers the other by better than a two-to-one margin. Edwards is going here for a 99.9-to-0.1 issue. Who in America can buy anything he wants? Not me, and probably not you either, and possibly not even John Edwards himself. His running mate sure can, however -- but does Edwards really mean to condemn him?

How did Edwards talk his way into this maze?

During his own presidential campaign, Edwards plainly hankered to be a Robert F. Kennedy for our times: a handsome, wealthy man who has taken it on himself to give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless -- a tribune of the plebs who basks in the gratitude of the adoring throng. But while Edwards may enjoy this mawkish fantasy, the calculating part of his brain recognizes its danger. There simply aren't enough poor people in America to elect a man president, even if they all voted, which they don't and won't.

So Edwards rejiggered his old RFK message to lump together, as "one America," pretty much everybody who earns south of $200,000 dollars a year. This is the message that the media ballyhooed as "down to earth." Down to earth? Think how amazingly remote from earth you have to be before the difference between $14,000 a year and $50,000 a year begins to look infinitesimal. Which may be why this would-be man of the people so signally failed to impress the actual people when he ran for the Democratic nomination.

Liberal Democrats have dreamed since the 1960s of creating a coalition of the poor and middle-class against the rich. The coalition always fails, and for the same two reasons. Economically speaking, there are not two Americas, but many, and there always have been. Politically speaking, America is divided less by economic interests than by values.

In American, what voters earn matters far less than how they earn it. A college professor earning $90,000 a year is far more likely to vote Democratic than a gas-station owner earning $45,000. And the same is true however high or low you go on the income spectrum: An entertainment-industry executive earning $1 million a year is much more likely to vote Democratic than his equally opulent oil-industry counterpart. And you are much more likely to find Democrats among those on disability pensions than on veteran's benefits.

In fact, there is some reason to think that the very richest Americans lean Democratic these days, not Republican. Kerry has raised almost as much as George W. Bush for his presidential campaign and in much bigger gifts: The biggest one-day fund-raising haul of 2004 was Kerry's, not Bush's: $7.5 million. And it's not just Hollywood or the wealthy trial bar that backs the Democratic ticket: Of the twelve richest zip codes in the country (as measured by house prices), Bush seems likely to carry only four.

Are these rich Democrats acting irrationally? More likely, they are responding to the truth behind the Kerry-Edwards sloganeering: This is not in fact a very populist ticket. A Kerry-Edwards victory would be expensive for upper-middle-class America -- for doctors, lawyers, dentists, and accountants. Their income taxes would be raised and their hope of relief from the estate tax would disappear.

But truly wealthy America would do just fine. Kerry and Edwards plan to raise the capital-gains tax rate only to 18%. Nor will the truly rich suffer much from the reinstatement of the estate tax: As the inherited and re-inherited fortune of the Heinz-Kerry family proves, that tax is paid by those rich enough to accumulate something, but not rich enough to afford creative lawyering.

Meanwhile and on the other hand, the Kerry-Edwards ticket has little to offer the genuinely poor. My NR colleague Mark Steyn has had some good and deserved fun with one tear-jerking John Edwards speech about a little girl "somewhere in America" freezing because her family cannot afford a winter coat. As Steyn points out, a girl's coat can be bought at JCPenney for $9.99.

Bargains like that are available, however, only because Congress has defied the protectionist instincts of John Edwards, who opposed NAFTA and other trade-opening agreements. Trade barriers are among the most daunting taxes today's poor must pay -- and the Kerry-Edwards ticket supports those taxes and more.

If that ticket's pseudo-populism makes little sense economically, it makes even less sense politically. Americans vote their values as well as their interests, and on the core values historically associated with American populism -- work, family, and nationalism -- Kerry-Edwards has zero to say. Kerry has begun to use the word "values" often without specifying what those values might be -- a trick pioneered by Michael Dukakis, with ungratifying results.

This is a ticket led by a senator who disdained welfare reform (and then flipped to vote for it) and balanced by another who voted against eliminating the marriage penalty. It's a ticket that regards laws to protect traditional marriage as "bigotry and ignorance," to borrow the language Kerry used to explain his vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. It's a ticket that vests its hopes for American security in the United Nations and sees the War on Terror as essentially a police action. This is a ticket led by a man who pedals an $8,000 bike. This is populism? No, this is Massachusetts liberalism at its most caricatured. Its working motto is not "two Americas," but "Vote for Kerry: He's better than you."