Millionaires for president? Ho-hum

Running for president is not polo, but, beginning with the Founding Fathers, it has generally been a rich man’s game. In our time, it has been a bipartisan curse or blessing as you choose to see it. Noblesse Oblige is the name of all the horses.

It is not money per se that worries me, but the distorted view of government that often accompanies it does. The patron saint, Ronald Reagan, said, “Government is not a solution, to the problem: government is the problem.” That bromide continues to guide the Republican Party and threaten the rest of us.

I didn’t think it possible, but they found someone worse than Reagan in 2016 and he won’t go away. An unqualified billionaire is leading in the Republican polls and is running for dictator.

I admit that not all rich presidents are indifferent to the needs of the rest of us. A few Republicans have overcome their burden of bucks, but too many have not.

Millionaires have made the White House their golden home. Since 1928 when native son of Iowa, Herbert Hoover, was elected, only Harry Truman might have benefited from food stamps. Since Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, both H.W. and George Bush, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden were or became multimillionaires.

Harry Truman was the exception. He had so little that during his time in office, the presidential salary was raised. In 1958, when he told the speaker of the House he was going broke, a pension was established. It is now $220,000 a year.

From Truman to Trump was quite a leap. Donald Trump’s net worth is over $5 billion. He says he wants to be dictator for a day, but by statute he is elected president for four more years. Man the lifeboats. The ship of state will spring a leak and sink.

Making the way for Reagan, Barry Goldwater laid out what a conservative agenda should be. He yearned for the good old days when “there was no federal welfare system, no federally mandated employment insurance, no federal agency to monitor the purity of air or the food we eat “ I thought it couldn’t get worse.

But Trump and his MAGA followers accept Goldwater’s rearview vision. If Donald said the earth is flat, they would try to avoid the edge and accuse leftists and Communists of making it round during the night. When he said Joe Biden was anti-Catholic, they believed him.

Barry Goldwater is no longer with us and is not directly on the ballot this year, but a version of his ideas is. Cut Social Security, don’t spend money to keep the air we breathe or the water we drink clean enough to keep us alive.

Goldwater of old and Trump of now would create a world none of the other presidents would have. Goldwater is gone, but Trump is with us still, infected with new virulent disease. If he were elected, we would all suffer. My hope is that he will go the way of polo. Soon.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”