Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harry Simpson who wrote (10957)	2/8/2000 12:28:00 AM
From: Harry Simpson	Respond to of 769670

Bush's spectacular career rebuts the notion that America has become a meritocracy, in which we are all born equal and then judged upon our intelligence, talent, creativity, or aggressiveness. Bush is an aristocrat. His successes are in one way or another a direct consequence of his name and family, and he has been exempt from the normal competition?academic, financial, professional, political?that confronts most Americans and sorts them on life's ladder. He comes from that powerful and half-hidden world whose most important question is not "What do you know?" but "Who are your people?" On the basis of his own performance, he is more qualified to be King of England, through his father's kinship with the Queen, than president. Bush was a mediocre freshman in high school and yet won admission to Phillips Academy, Andover, one of the country's most exclusive preparatory schools, because his father had gone there before him. He was a mediocre student at Andover, and yet won admission to his father's alma mater, Yale, again as a "legacy." He was a mediocre student at Yale and yet won admission to the Harvard Business School. When he decided to fulfill his military obligation during the Vietnam War by entering the Texas Air National Guard, he was promptly accepted and granted a lieutenant's commission after a mere five weeks of basic training. He entered the oil business with between $13,000 and $20,000 of a family trust fund and failed at it?only to be bailed out repeatedly by friendly investors who were willing to lose money in exchange for association with the name Bush. He was invited to join a partnership of investors who needed him as a front man for their purchase of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He had to borrow his own share of the investment, and then watched his $600,000 stake turn into $15 million as the city of Arlington, Texas, built the team a new stadium with public money. He ran for Congress from a West Texas district in 1978 and lost, despite no lack of funds from family and oil-business cronies. When he ran for the governorship of Texas in 1994, he turned for help to Don Carter, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, who, in a taste of things to come, wrote out a check for $100,000. And when he decided to run for president in 1999, he raised so much money so quickly?more than $60 million?that he was immune to the normal political risk that early defeats in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries might put him out of the race. Bush has enough money to survive right through to the Republican convention in Philadelphia even in the unlikely event that he loses every single primary.