The 'Golden Age of Aristocracy'?

Richardson, Bennet Roil Western Politics

By Richard Martin, 1-06-09

	Who you callin' an aristocrat?

With the withdrawal of Bill Richardson and the appointment of Michael Bennet, the Mountain West may have lost one politician on the national stage and gained another.

Withdrawing his nomination as Secretary of Commerce by president-elect Obama, New Mexico Gov. Richardson cited an ongoing federal probe into possible corruption in his home state. While Richardson himself is not expected to be implicated, the probe into a company called CDR Financial Products, which won state contracts for $1.48 million, will likely last well into the new year, and Richardson stated in an email to supporters that “I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process.”

Given that the investigation has been underway for months, political observers were surprised that Richardson was nominated in the first place.

“The obvious question,” writes NPR’s Political Junkie blog, is “Where was the vetting of Richardson, since there have long been reports about a ‘pay to play’ scheme in New Mexico?”

Even more surprising was Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s selection of Michael Bennet, the Denver public schools superintendent, to fill the Senate seat being vacated by Ken Salazar, who has been named Secretary of the Interior by Obama. Responses to the appointment of Bennet, who was chosen over much more well-known figures including Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver, have ranged from mystification to outrage, and it’s clear that Ritter now has a mini-Caroline-Kennedy on his hands – someone whose elevation to the Senate was more dependent on family and connections rather than relevant experience and expertise.

Bennet, wrote political commentator David Sirota on Colorado Pols, “was appointed to the U.S. Senate solely because of his aristocratic credentials - ie. connections to money and Establishment power and Beltway insiders.”

The selection of Bennet and the “center-right” qualities of Barack Obama’s cabinet picks, Sirota claims, indicate that “we are living in a Golden Age of American Political Aristocracy.”

This is nonsense. If anything, we are living in an era of rampant meritocracy, as the election of a black man with a Kenyan father proves. What’s more, while Bennet is a relative political neophyte, with enviable family connections (his father was president of Wesleyan and a U.S. diplomat, his brother is the editor of The Atlantic), he hardly rose to prominence without accomplishments of his own. He was the editor of the Yale Law Review (surely an appealing resume item to Obama, the first African-American to edit the Harvard Law Review), he served in the Clinton Justice Dept., and he engineered several big financial deals as an adviser to Colorado tycoon Philip Anschutz – though Anschutz’s well-known right-wing views hardly endear him to progressive Democrats like Ritter and Obama. What’s more, while his tenure as head of the Denver educational system has not been an unalloyed triumph, he has instituted an array of innovative measures including performance-based pay for teachers. Urban education reform will not be the highest priority of the Obama administration but it is certainly desperately needed in this country.

And besides, managing a system that tries to corral dozens of unruly teenagers will provide useful background for navigating today’s U.S. Senate.

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