Working Class Hero
Via Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Times reports on Sarah Palin’s working class lifestyle:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has introduced her family to the nation as small-town common folk since she burst onto the scene as the surprise pick for the Republican vice-presidential nominee last month. A check of financial records, though, shows the Palins live anything but a common life when compared with their fellow residents of their hometown of Wasilla.
Their combined income of nearly a quarter-million dollars last year was five times the median household income for Wasilla’s 7,000 residents. They own a single-engine plane, two boats, two personal watercraft and a half-million-dollar, custom-built home on a lake that is worth three
times the average of other homes in town.
The Palin family’s rather luxe lifestyle is, I think, a great illustration of the main point of Gellman, et. al.’s book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, namely that the culture war is not, as pundits often have it, fought primarily between fancy pants blue staters and salt-of-the-earth red staters. Rather it’s fought by rich people on either side of the cultural divide. Between the kind of prosperous family that would spend their money on a single-engine plane, two boats, ad two personal watercraft and the kind of prosperous family that would spend their money on a Brooklyn condo that costs substantially more than $500,000. Actual economically struggling people don’t have the means to indulge these kind of outsized consumer preferences and their voting behavior tends to be much less influenced by cultural issues.
68 Responses to “Working Class Hero”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 1st, 2008 at 3:16 pm
All I need to know is if she properly hates arugula. Fearing it would be even better.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Evidently, they’re pretty comfortable.
But I don’t think this amounts to much: surely small planes
are pretty common in Alaska ? Perhaps the Alaskan equivalent
of driving a BMW or Mercedes. And maybe a plane is essential for
Todd Palin’s oil service work ? “Personal watercraft” -
presumably jet skis – are a modest expense, perhaps $5K each -
and a perfectly normal possession for middle-class folk living
on a lake. “Two boats” is pretty vague, but presumably these
are also small boats suitable for fishing on a lake – again,
a normal middle-class luxury.
This is basically the good old American dream – get a union
job, work hard, save money, have a nice house and kids,
pursue your dreams. And lots of people in the 1960’s and
1970’s could do this. What’s sad is that with stagnant real
wages and rising costs for healthcare and other necessities,
most people with the Palins’ economic and educational background no longer have a good chance of attaining that
level of comfort.
McCain’s fortune is something else altogether, but good jobs,
comfortable homes, and a little extra for luxuries like a
boat are what we should be fighting for, not mocking.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
It’s really not about money and what you have. It’s about your act, she talks and acts like an everyday person. A calculating, slightly dumb, vindictive everyday person. There’s nothing about her that’s distinguished and since many people feel that way, they tend to like Sarah Palin. There are tons of people thinking that if this moron could run Alaska, how hard can it really be?
October 1st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
“All I need to know is if she properly hates arugula. Fearing it would be even better.”
She can see Arugula from Alaska. In fact she’s planning to meet
with the president of Arugula and let him know for sure that she’s committed to the mission and is all about not blinking.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:33 pm
This might be a dumb question but what exactly is the difference between a boat and a watercraft?
October 1st, 2008 at 3:33 pm
After telling Hugh Hewitt that America needs a “Joe Six Pack like me,” she points out:
I know lots of Joe Six Pack families. I’m of a Joe Six Pack family. We don’t have in excess of $100,000 in the bank.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:36 pm
What’s pretty shocking is that a family with so much wealth seems to have failed to inculcate their children with a set of upper middle class bougeois values. Surely there are many many families that wish they had the resources that the Palins have when it comes to giving their kids a shot at going to a good college and helping them into the professional class. That doesn’t seem like the path the Palins have set for their kids, and they might look at the years they spent growing up with their parents as the “prosperous years.” The Palins squandered a lot of privilege they had on… boats.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
It’s never been a question of ifthe elites will lead but rather which elites will lead.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Light airplanes are quite common in Alaska and range from beat-up 1990 Chevy (beat-up urestored Cub) to BMW (tundra’d up Cessena 182) to luxe Land Rover (Cessena Caravan). Just owning a plane is not any different from owning a pickup in the lower 48 – it matters what plane and how it is used.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I know lots of Joe Six Pack families. I’m of a Joe Six Pack family. We don’t have in excess of $100,000 in the bank.
Who on earth has over $100,000 in a savings account? That really sounds like a Darwin Moment waiting to happen.
“Drinks on me for anyone over 9 ft tall!”
October 1st, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Light airplanes are quite common in Alaska . . . Just owning a plane is not any different from owning a pickup in the lower 48
If it’s a scandal for Barack Obama to have a grandmother in Hawaii, I think we can give Sarah Palin some shit for having a personal airplane in Alaska.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
“Just owning a plane is not any different from owning a pickup in the lower 48″
Thanks, very illuminating.
“Surely there are many many families that wish they had the resources that the Palins have when it comes to giving their kids a shot at going to a good college and helping them into the professional class”
I think this is a loser as well. Kids are kids, it’s not easy
to turn them out the way you want. And the Palin’s aren’t
wealthy: that $500K home doesn’t mean much against $40K+/year
college tuition (for four years for four kids …).
No, leave Palin’s kids out of this. It’s sufficiently
disturbing that she herself seems to be lacking in knowledge,
curiosity, managerial competence, or even ability to speak
coherently without a teleprompter. Her lifestyle and her
personal choices about how to raise her kids are
unexceptional and not really our business.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Good for her. She and her husband made bucks, profiting from the Clinton years, no doubt. In this, she is like Obama, who has also made bucks due to his book. In both cases, I find it heartening.
That one’s self-image doesn’t correspond to one’s year to year income tax return is not exactly news. This isn’t like McCain marrying a beer heiress. Palin worked her way into the upper income bracket. She brought in a good salary as a mayor, and apparently her husband brought in a good salary as a Union oilfield worker. Between the two of them, they managed the loan on a 500 thousand dollar house – which, given their salaries, was well within their reach.
The problem is that too few people can do that, nowadays. Working class hero she isn’t – but her lifestyle is certainly something the working class aspires to.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Matt,
You assert that’s “Actual economically struggling people…['s] voting behavior tends to be much less influenced by cultural issues.” And yet the polls consistently show that low-income, low-education BLACKS support Obama almost universally while low-income, low-education WHITES support McCain by an almost equally overwhelming number. They may not pay attention to some parts of the culture wars, but clearly the racial dog-whistle aspect of the culture wars is affecting their votes.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
“Actual economically struggling people don’t have the means to indulge these kind of outsized consumer preferences and their voting behavior tends to be much less influenced by cultural issues.”
Not if you define abortion as a “cultural issue.” That’s certainly a huge factor for many of these voters.
Then, of course, you have ALL OF THE SOUTH. Think white working and middle-class voters in the South are not voting for “cultural” reasons? Guess again.
So that would be wrong, wrong, wrong. Totally wrong.
Now the first half of the sentence is just silly. Indeed, poor and working class people don’t “indulge” “outsized consumer preferences.” It’s, also, atrociously written.
Snap out it, Matt!
October 1st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Personal watercraft are Jetskis and similar things; some huge models can carry a few people, but they’re all for going fast and feeling the adrenaline, not really for cargo, recreational fishing, or work (though they can be useful as transportation). A “boat” can be anything from a dinghy to something others would call a yacht – functionally, probably anything from 10 feet long with an outboard to fifty feet long with dual inboard motors and three fully furnished cabins.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Re: Who on earth has over $100,000 in a savings account?
Some people have moral objections to the stock market, Davis.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Just owning a plane is not any different from owning a pickup in the lower 48 . . . .
There are about 9000 general aviation planes in Alaska:
http://www.aopa.org/special/newsroom/stats/aircraft_state.html
With an Alaska population of about 670,000, that is about 1 plane for every 74 people.
There are about 100,000,000 light trucks in the United States:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html
With a U.S. population of about 300,000,000, that is about 1 light truck for every 3 people.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I think that in talking about the “regular ol’ Sarah Palin” idea, it’s important to keep in mind that people in national politics are generally quite rich. In national politics, what might normally be called “upper middle class” is the equivalent of “poverty.”
Take a look at this chart. It’s old and rather big, but fun.
http://memlingcandidates.googlepages.com/candidates_net_wealth_full.jpg
Look at the size of people like Tancredo, Kucinich, Huckabee, Biden, and Dodd. Even Barack Obama is pretty small. Yet even Kucinich — someone utterly destitute by the standards of national politicians — never has to worry about where his next vegan meal is coming from. I’m not condemning these candidates, or our political system as a whole, for this fact. It’s not realistic to expect someone to go from waiting tables to the governor’s mansion, nor do I think that it would really be desirable.
In that context, though, how rich is Sarah Palin? I’d guess that she’d be pretty small on that chart — maybe a bit bigger than Kucinich or Biden, but probably smaller than Obama. Maybe Tancredo-sized. By the standards of ordinary Americans, that’s quite rich, if not unimaginably so, but by the standards of national politicians, it could well be true that Palin is a woman of fairly modest means.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:27 pm
By the way, I don’t care per se if Palin has a professional-class lifestyle. But I do think it is funny for such a person to be calling herself “Joe Six-Pack”. Sounds to me like they can afford to buy by the case.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Yeah, as much as I’m horrified by the idea of Palin as our VP, I don’t think this is terribly exciting. Just about everyone categorizes themself toward the middle class when discussing their place in society. The fact that the Palins are somewhat better off than their neighbors is easily attributable to the work they have done. Though her policies are awful, Sarahcuda has worked her way up from broadcaster to mayor to governor and her pay has gone up accordingly. I don’t know how much Todd Palin makes, but it’s a union job, not some kind of executive position.
The problem with the Palins isn’t that they think of themselves, or at least present themselves, as just folks. Just about every politician presents themselves as just folks as a way to get people to like them. Sarah Palin is presenting herself as just folks as independent proof of her qualifications. Being like “Joe Sixpack” may mean that I want to have a beer with you, but it doesn’t mean I trust you to negotiate with a foreign nation.
Now, people like McCain who are legitimately bazillionaires should definitely be chastized for pretending to be like the Waltons when they’re clearly like the Ewings.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
They’ve spent a lot of money on toys, how much have they spent educating their kids? Their son is in the Army, which is fine, but he’s not going to college. Their daughter is pregnant and about to marry an eighteen-year-old high school dropout.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Todd Palin, who does not have a college degree, made $93k last year doing blue-collar work. (He used to make even more when he had a management job at BP, but he stepped back down to a unionized job when his wife got elected to avoid conflict of interest charges.) That’s the American Dream: a lot of land and resources per inhabitant allowing the average hardworking Joe to live large.
Much of the frenzied hatred directed at the Palins is cultural — they’re into a motorsports lifestyle that is utterly foreign to people like Matt. And, most terrifying of all, they’re outbreeding the Stuff White People Like folks.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:52 pm
To: Who on earth has over $100,000 in a savings account?
The very people that McCain is trying to win over from Obama: small business owners. This is a small segment of the population whose businesses are not publicly held, and who are very exposed in terms of both business and personal assets with the lower coverage limits. They are also the people who perceive that they will be handed higher taxes under Obama’s plan.
They are the three percent of the population that could tip November toward McCain.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Per M Says (24), right on the money. Most of the small biz people in my area are solid GOP. I think they’ve got the smarts to suspect that the national party is doing them in the ass, but they’re hoping to make it big, and be one of the folks GWB referred to as “my base”.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:36 pm
No, leave Palin’s kids out of this.
I am leaving Palin’s kids out of this. It’s the parents’ attitude towards their kids I’m criticizing.
That’s the American Dream: a lot of land and resources per inhabitant allowing the average hardworking Joe to live large.
You forgot about the part in the American Dream where they use the gains from that hard work to support more and better opportunities for their kids.
You’re damn right it’s cultural: the good fortune the Palins had is being squandered on toys rather than invested in their children in the hopes of giving them better access to opportunities.
For all of the talk about how anti-intellectual America is, the mainstream culture is very bourgeois. Lots of middle class families and sacrificing and struggling to make sure their kids get an education and have better professional opportunities. The achieved a lot but are squandering what privileges they have, and that’s going to seem alien to a lot of people. It makes them look like those lottery winners who later go bankrupt.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Steve, I don’t think anyone really cares that people like the Palins are outbreeding the “Stuff White People like folks” (clumsy phrase, but useful). Half the people I know in New York are red-state refugees. We don’t even breed at replacement, but we don’t have to.
But besides a cultural divide, there also might be a bit of resentment. I get the feeling that a lot people with degrees don’t really like the idea of someone without one making $93K, unless the job is really awful. Not that they’d ever say anything like that.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Tyro, why on earth would the Palins care about getting into the “professional class”? They’ve done just fine without doing so themselves.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I wouldn’t like to see being Republican made a capital crime; too much power in the hands of government. What I WOULD like to see is a game management approach. There would be a Republican hunting season and a neocon hunting season, with daily limits (say, eight), and small fines for taking a Republican or neocon out of season, or exceeding the daily limit.
I could see this as being a real boon for taxidermists. Can you imagine, say, Cheney’s head stuffed and mounted in the den? Sweet.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Sarahcuda has worked her way up from broadcaster to mayor to governor and her pay has gone up accordingly.
To be fair, she stabbed a lot of backs, or better yet, burned a lot of bridges, on her way up.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Tyro, why on earth would the Palins care about getting into the “professional class”? They’ve done just fine without doing so themselves.
Why don’t we compare the factory workers in the 1950s and 1960s who took those two different attitudes towards their children and their futures and see how things turned out down the road.
As I said, lots of middle class parents and struggling as they attempt to sacrifice for their children to help them get ahead and get a good education. The Palins have advantages that a lot of other families could only dream of, but they’re not taking advantage of them and instead used them… for boats. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of people in the USA who are like the Palins, but when it comes to swing voters — the soccer mom/patio dad set — this is the sort of trap they try to avoid.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I don’t have any strong feeling one way or the other about raising the limit on FDIC insurance, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. Damn few people have over $100,000 in financial assets. Those who do, and are afraid of risky investments, can open a second, or third, account somewhere else. I just found out that my 84 year-old father-in-law has managed to accumulate over $100,000 all in a single bank account. We were going to open another for the excess (there’s no way I could talk him into diversifying and getting a better return, and at his age and with his spending habits he’ll probably outlive his money even if he keeps it in his mattress), but now we won’t have to bother. Saves us some paperwork, but otherwise no big deal.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Tyro, are you seriously saying that swing voters will react badly to the Palins because one kid’s going into the Army and another is pregnant, or whatever their sins against bourgeois career paths are supposed to be? I really don’t see it.
You’ve also made a hash of the causality. There’s no evidence whatsoever that buying the boats had anything to do with the future prospects of the children. If anything, it’s the other way around; the Palins have more money for luxuries because not all the children are going to college.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:28 pm
This is stupid. The boats probably add up to $20K or less;
4 years at a good college costs $150K+. You might as well
criticize them for drinking coffee. Anyhow, Todd Palin earns
money as a commercial fisherman – those boats are probably
helping him *earn* money.
As for the $500K house, I believe he probably built it himself.
Given that Wasilla is a booming town, I’m very sure they
didn’t pay $500K when they acquired the land.
They don’t have a lot of cash or income by coastal-elite
standards: they have enough to live a nice life by Alaskan
standards. So what ? They’ve worked hard.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Bloody hell. Is it such a big crime against bourgeois values that Bristol Palin wants to choose life? I suppose that you people would teach your one daughter to choose the vacuum tube on the baby’s skull, instead. The hatred that some people have for children and life is astonishing.
Bristol Palin made the right choice, and anyone who chooses abortion in such a circumstance would be making a wrong one. She deserves our admiration, and you people who jeer at her for choosing life deserve nothing but contempt.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:43 pm
And the Palin’s aren’t wealthy: that $500K home doesn’t mean much against $40K+/year college tuition (for four years for four kids …).
Sorry, did I miss something? Did they announce at some point that they’ve quit their jobs and are going to finance all future expenditures by selling their house? Or maybe they’ll pay for the education or their children by using their, you know, income.
Income which, by the way, is greater than 98.5% of all households in the US. Warren Buffet they are not, but that sounds fairly well off to me.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
This isn’t about Palin being rich. It’s about the ridiculous conventions under which anything a Republican does counts as Joe Six-Pack and anything a Democrat does counts as Montague Q. Elitist. If Palin’s jetskis are okay, then why was Kerry’s windsurfing somehow unspeakably upper-class?
October 1st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Thank you, KCinDC. Not sure why there were so many tangents in this thread, but your last sentence is exactly the point here.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:28 pm
“Steve, I don’t think anyone really cares that people like the Palins are outbreeding the “Stuff White People Like folks” (clumsy phrase, but useful).”
You must not have paid attention to the Most Emailed Articles lists in the New York Times and LA Times over the last month! The fertile Palin family hit an enormous nerve.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:05 pm
“Income which, by the way, is greater than 98.5% of all households in the US. Warren Buffet they are not, but that sounds fairly well off to me.”
First of all, Palin was only earning $60-70K as a mayor: so
their move from about $140K/year to over $200K/year is quite
recent.
Secondly, I don’t get steamed about a family income that’s
less than what a decent mid-career doctor or lawyer earns.
Good luck to them.
I hate her policies and I think she’s unqualified for
national office, but I’ve got no problem at all with her
financial status.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Richard Cownie,
Again, people aren’t criticizing Palin for being a member of the professional class per se. It is just her nonsense about being “Joe Six-Pack” that we are ridiculing.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:28 pm
“It is just her nonsense about being “Joe Six-Pack” that we are ridiculing.”
You’re making the mistake of assuming class is nothing but
money. The Palins fall into the same range of income as
lawyers or doctors. But they’ve got there with less education
and working lower-status jobs: educationally and culturally,
they aren’t of the professional class, regardless of their
current level of income.
They really *are* in the “Joe Sixpack” class. But that’s
no qualification (nor disqualification) for high national
office. It’s irrelevant. The question is whether she has
the knowledge and skills to do the job: and the answer is
very clearly no.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
The picture seems to show a Canadian registered DeHavilland Beaver – about the biggest single engine airplane there is – while the FAA registry: shows Todd Palin owns a fifty year old Piper super cub — about the least pricey non-ultralight there is.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:49 pm
The previous entry seems to have ignored a link — I’ll try again:
http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/nnumsql.asp?NNumbertxt=8194D
October 1st, 2008 at 10:10 pm
“The boats probably add up to $20K or less [...] those boats are probably helping him *earn* money [...] As for the $500K house, I believe he probably built it himself”
You’ve certainly made a compelling, well-researched argument.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I live in Alaska
If anyone had payed attention to the interview with her Husband:
He built the house himself with help from friends.
The aircraft has been in the family for a while.
I own two boats and three four wheelers and my HHI is less than 80K.
And he is a commercial fisherman… owning boats is sort of like required.
I wish the election was over. It’s turning Ivy league bloggers into idiots.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 am
Some more numbers on the Palins’ worth. Looks like they make just enough money that they wouldn’t qualify for an Obama tax cut–putting them in the top 5% of all Americans. Average Joes indeed.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:17 am
the Yglesias crowd is pissed because 1)the Palins have more money 2) are not even remotely as smart and even more damning 3) make very lowbrow spending choices
La Cimbali DT great investment Kawasaki SX-R destroying your childs future
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:32 am
But they’ve got there with less education and working lower-status jobs.
Todd Palin was management at BP before he took leave. Sarah Palin is Governor of Alaska, after having been a Mayor and then Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
So, “lower-status”? That’s just nonsense.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
“Todd Palin was management at BP before he took leave. Sarah Palin is Governor of Alaska, after having been a Mayor and then Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission”
“Management” is an awfully vague term. There’s a “manager” at
the Dunkin Donuts near my office, but that isn’t what I’d call a
high status job. My impression of Todd Palin is that he’s
an outdoorsy roughneck kind of guy, not someone who sits in an
office. Sure, Palin’s last couple of jobs are highly-paid and
prestigious: but that’s just 3-4 years of a 25-year career.
Local TV sportscaster and small-town mayor aren’t elite
positions.
I’ve got no problem with their career and lifestyle, but
it’s pretty hardscrabble stuff, not like being a doctor or
lawyer or stockbroker or college professor or big-company CEO.
If you put Sasrah Palin and Carly Fiorina in the same room,
do you think they find a lot in common ? I don’t think so.
To get back to Matt’s original point, I think he’s missing
the obvious: poor struggling people might share these views,
but poor struggling people don’t have the luxury of devoting
their time to the risky business of running for elected
office. And it’s pretty hard to get elected to anything
unless you’ve already been successful at something else
(or have family connections like GWB). So it’s just about
inevitable that prominent politicians are financially
comfortable. That doesn’t necessarily mean that poor people
have different views: it just means that poor people don’t
get to become prominent.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Well before Gellman’s book, Paul Fussell wrote Class, the framework of which clarifies everything.
The Palins are high prole, in Fussell’s categorization–skilled blue collar. They certainly do have more money than many in the middle class, as do legions of high proles.
The mistake that middle class and upper middle class observers make is to lump all blue-collar workers together in the same predicament. It’s the low-proles and mid-proles that are hurting the most.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Cownie, I see what you’re saying, but I think you’re really missing the forest for the trees. The Palins are the middle class people that middle class people try to avoid being — or, at least, try to forget that they were.
I fully admit to having a bit of coastal selection bias, but the people I know who “made it” in the working class were the ones who, like the Palins, “took the ball and ran with it,” parlaying their working class opportunities into a fair amount of economic and business success– and they did so working day and night, night and day, in the hopes that their kids wouldn’t have to put up with the same opportunity barriers that they faced. And the middle classes are doing the same, except that without the wide availability of high paying working class jobs as are available in Alaska, they’re scraping by rather than living it up.
La Cimbali DT great investment
You see, this is the funny thing: the middle classes and upper middle classes don’t buy stuff like this. It’s a misperception that by dint of having as much money that they must somehow have other, similar class-equivalent habits. I bow to no one in my “cultural elite” bona fides, but I don’t know anyone who owns this or something remotely equivalent. If there’s one bourgeois spending vice, it’s sinking way too much money into real estate. Though if you used a La Cimbali DT as a synecdoche for spending too much on kitchen renovations, I suppose that’s a fair point: but in both cases it’s considered an economic vice.
A lot of this election seems to have gravitated around “which candidate is not like us?” I think a lot of people are taking a good look at Alaska and thinking, “yeah, this place is pretty weird.”
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Well before Gellman’s book, Paul Fussell wrote Class, the framework of which clarifies everything.
Let me echo that endorsement, if only for his last chapter on “Class X” which was basically beat “Stuff White People Like” to the punch by 25 years.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
“Cownie, I see what you’re saying, but I think you’re really missing the forest for the trees. The Palins are the middle class people that middle class people try to avoid being — or, at least, try to forget that they were.”
Having been born and raised in the UK (though living around
Boston for the last 15 years), I probably have a different
perspective on class. In England, class is very definitely
determined by ancestry, education, and occupation rather than
by financial status. And it’s clearly marked by accent and
speech patterns. You can be clearly upper-class, and yet
poor. And you can be wealthy and yet still clearly marked
as lower-class by education and accent.
In the USA, there’s more of a tendency to think that money
is the prime determinant. But it ain’t so: Sarah Palin might
well have assets worth $1M, but her background, education,
and especially accent mark her differently.
[Read "The Millionaire Next Door" for more on this - most
millionaires are actually not very fancy high-class people,
they're solid small-business owners who work hard and don't
spend much.]
And that’s fine as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing
wrong with earning money by “lower-class” manual work,
building houses or fixing oil production equipment. And there
are plenty of really smart talented people working those jobs
(and plenty of really dumb people with fancy college degrees).
What’s alarming about Palin is not she comes from a lower
class, nor that she has attained financial security. It’s
just that she appears to be ignorant and not at all smart on
the basic issues of national politics.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
What’s alarming about Palin is not she comes from a lower
class, nor that she has attained financial security. It’s
just that she appears to be ignorant and not at all smart on
the basic issues of national politics.
True, and I think plays itself out in her personal/family life as well. We Americans, as you’ve no doubt noticed, are reluctant to chalk these things up to “social class,” because we don’t want to claim it’s something immutable. What we would call it is a difference in value systems.
Also, good reference of “The Millionaire Next Door”– the thing is that the Palins don’t seem like millionaire next door-types. If anything, I’d argue the “The Millionaire Next Door” was written to try to explain to people like the Palins that such an extravagant lifestyle did not make for a millionaire.
To give you an idea of the perspective I’m coming at this from, I grew up around families who looked upon their working-class jobs as a means to an end– either as a means of raising capital for their own businesses or to finance their kids’ education. I see a bit of that wisdom and acumen in the Palins (eg, Todd Palin seems to have found a management position in BP, while I’m sure some of his peer oil workers are still doing the same job they’ve been doing for the past 25 years), but their perspective seems a bit short-sighted. By contrast, John Edwards’ father was in a similar position as Todd Palin, having moved up to be mill foreman, but used the opportunity as a means of sending his son to college and law school. Combined with Sarah Palin’s ignorance on basic issues of national politics, it strikes me that this provincialism carriers over to other aspects of her life. For a lot of middle class people, they fear getting stuck in that rut.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
“True, and I think plays itself out in her personal/family life as well.”
Possibly, but we really don’t have enough information to know
about that, so I don’t want to speculate about it. Sometimes
kids end up not getting to college no matter how much the
parents want it.
“If anything, I’d argue the “The Millionaire Next Door” was written to try to explain to people like the Palins that such an extravagant lifestyle did not make for a millionaire.”
But they don’t have “an extravagant lifestyle”! They bought
land on a lake when it was cheap, they built a house
themselves with help from friends, they have a couple of boats
used for a lucrative seasonal fishing business (a boat and
gear with value of about $20K is used to bring in income of
about $40-50K each year). And they have a couple of $5K
“personal watercraft” for fun. They don’t take expensive
vacations abroad. Heck, even Todd’s hobby of competitive
snowmobiling brings in prize money!
And that’s how they’ve accumulated those assets worth $1M or
more: precisely by following the “Millionaire Next Door”
strategy of working (until recently) unglamorous jobs but
being thrifty and making good investments.
Now I’d probably agree with you that if I were in their
position, I might be wishing I’d spent more time/effort/money
encouraging my kids to get more education. But that’s just
my Anglo/EastCoast bias.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:47 am
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…
March 1st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
cialis
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 2nd, 2009 at 4:29 am
In searching for sites related to web hosting and specifically comparison hosting linux plan web, your site came up.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:30 am
That
March 6th, 2009 at 5:25 am
Hi there, I found your blog via Google while searching for first aid for a heart attack and your post looks very interesting for me.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Incredible site!
March 14th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Interesting post, i have bookmarked your site for future referrence
March 17th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:27 am
tramadol
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:33 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:21 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 15th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Thanks very much for any help.