While I agree in spirit that a family political dynasty is a dicey idea, there did used to be tradition of public service within certain well-to-do American families that appears to be dying out. The shine and allure of making money on the backs of the average American has taken the place of the nobility of helping him out. This is a big reason why Reaganomics didn’t work.
Public service careers, except on the highest of levels, generally are not lucrative, and even if the salary is favorable, can’t possibly compete with the profits the wealthy can reap from the market.
You see this same trend on a local level. Families who used to produce generation after generation of city councilmen, or board of education members, or even firemen, have by and large abandoned the generational career and are urging their youngsters to find a more lucrative line of work.
This is actually a fairly major paradigm shift for public personnel administration. The profession is revamping many of the features that made gubmint work gubmint work in an effort to match the attractions of the private sector.
Yeah, Linc’s cousin Freddy Lippitt (the result of the above mentioned marriage) made it as far as RI House Minority Leader and several failed runs for Mayor of Providence.
There is Theodore Roosevelt V, but he would have to get active in politics soon I would think. He is 39 and the little I know about it he is businessman and environmentalist. As a throwback to his most famous ancestor, he has apparently completed several full length ironman races. Environmentally is how I first became aware of him, but as a big time TR fanboy, I saw his name come up and did a little checking, sadly he does not seem to be in politics.
I think another factor is that the Roosevelts are a genuinely upper crust family. Their ancestry at the top goes back to pre-revolutionary times. There were members of the Roosevelt family who thought it was a bit vulgar for Theodore or Franklin to enter politics.
The Kennedys and the Bushes don’t have those kinds of roots. They’re only three or four generations removed from the ancestors who made the family fortunes.
On the plus side one time when we were sitting in the principal’s office he did teach me how to balance a playing card on my finger and flick it just right so it flies across the room. If that doesn’t make a person presidential material, I don’t know what does.
It was your link I used to get the peculiar double-in-law relationship. I guess that’s all you got and we can drop this. I notice you omitted, from your quote of my post, the detail of the genealogical relationship between Taft and Chafee, so I’ll repeat it for you:
I met Teddy Roosevelt 4 back when both of us worked at Lehman Brothers. He would spend about 2 weeks trading the family name for meetings. He was very popular in the Philippines.
I will also add that he was very professional, nice, courteous to everyone, and willing to go along with what ever was on his calendar from morning until night. (I don’t mean to imply he was a whore hound, but what I mean was he would be bright eyed and bushy tailed for an 8:00 breakfast meeting and then up for a 8:00pm client meeting to hear about how his grandfather was a saint.
Well, Harry was a beneficiary of the Pendergastmachine. No evidence of personal malediction, but if Obama is a ‘Chicago’ politician (based, AFAIK, solely on having actually been in Chicago), imagine the fun modern folk would have with Harry’s actual connections to machine politics.
