Elections in the United States are great equalisers, when there is an epic struggle to convince voters that the candidates are one of ‘them’. The presidential election season in 2024 is no different.
If the US Constitution is amended to stipulate that when the White House falls vacant every four years, new applicants for tenancy should be at least millionaires, it would lend a sense of realism to American presidential elections. Candidates for the most powerful political office in the world would not then have to engage in ridiculous antics such as serving French fries at a McDonald’s drive-in counter to identify themselves with ordinary voters, as Republican Donald Trump did in late October.
Candidates competing to occupy the White House, especially from the Republican Party, are more often than not multi-millionaires, if not billionaires. Trump is only the latest example. Previous Grand Old Party nominees John McCain of the Anheuser-Busch beer conglomerate family, the Bush household—and their vice president Dick Cheney—with vast oil industry connections, and film actor Ronald Reagan were all infinitely wealthy. Long gone are the days when Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican chief executive who was not a millionaire, could rise from a humble log cabin to presidency.
In the third millennium, Democrats are not very different. There was a time when presidential nominees from the Democratic Party were more aam aadmi, as Indians would say. Their lives and fortunes were more like the millions who vote for them. Democrat Harry Truman was the poorest president in US history. In 1949, the US Congress had to double Truman’s salary so he could make both ends meet in the White House. The US presidency became a pensionable job only in 1958—because Truman, by then a retiree, was slipping into penury.
According to Fortune magazine, vice president and Democratic presidential candidate in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris, has a net worth of $8 million, together with the assets of her husband, Doug Emhoff. The incumbent second gentleman is a lawyer, one of the most high-paying professions in the US. Shyamala Gopalan, the late mother of Harris, was an oncologist when the medical profession was not as lucrative as it is today.
Since Harris is not super-rich—half her net worth is from a Los Angeles mansion, according to Forbes—she does not have to struggle to appear equal to her constituents, unlike Trump. At worst, she had to cook masala dosas with celebrity actress Mindy Kaling to endear herself to Indian Americans when she made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019.
She is still struggling with the Indian American community to live down her life-long identification as black, via her father of Jamaican descent. However, in order not to have a voter identity complex in the biggest fight of her political career, Harris has repeatedly said during her current campaign that she worked in McDonald’s in the 1980s to partly pay for her law degree at the University of California.
The persevering and intrepid US media being what it is, dug up her 1987 curriculum vitae, when Harris applied for a law clerk’s job in the District Attorney’s office in a California county. That biodata made no mention of her having worked at any McDonald’s. Nor did her 2010 memoir narrate her fast-food worker experience.
Trump’s decision to don a McDonald’s apron at the French fries counter of a Pennsylvania fast-food franchise was Republican campaign fodder to claim Harris lied about her time at McDonald’s. Employment at a junk food restaurant patronised by the not-so-wealthy is to the average American voter the equivalent in India of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi having meals in Dalit homes, trailed by television cameras and reporters. It is not far from the truth that both these gimmicks amount to glorification of poverty and variations of poverty tourism. Like tours of Brazil’s vast favelas (slums) that are sometimes spread as far as the eyes can see.
The poorest locations in the poorest US cities will have at least one fast-food chain serving the cheapest and most unhealthy junk food. That is an ugly American reality, exploited by politicians from both the main parties during the poll season. No different from election campaigns in developing countries of the South Asian subcontinent.
The biggest electoral blunder during the current campaign was made by President Joe Biden—who is notorious for putting his foot in the mouth. Biden described supporters of Trump as “garbage” in the final phase of electioneering, prompting Republicans to allege that Democrats have no respect for ordinary, working-class Americans. In an extremely tight election, the President’s gaffe is certain to cost Harris enough votes in one swing state or another to lose the White House—unless Biden’s ongoing hair-splitting by bending over backwards to control the damage yields results. In 2016, voters viewed Democrat Hillary Clinton as privileged and entitled after she similarly said that half of her then rival Trump’s supporters are from a “basket of deplorables”.
In the 2012 presidential election, Republican Mitt Romney arguably lost millions of votes when a barman secretly recorded and later leaked the candidate’s very similar comments at a closed-door fundraiser. Romney said about supporters of his rival and then President Barack Obama: “There are 47 percent (of Americans) who are with him...these people pay no income tax...my job is not to worry about those people...they will vote for this president no matter what.” Romney is a fabulously wealthy American, vastly unequal to the majority of his people.
Probably the worst example of a candidate’s inability to be equal to his people was during McCain’s 2008 run against Obama. A journalist asked the rich Republican candidate how many homes he owned. McCain was not sure. “I will have my staff to get to you. I will have them get to you,” he answered. Obama immediately seized the incident to point out that his multi-millionaire rival was completely out of touch with the people.
Obama was not rich. He was a civil rights attorney and a community worker before he went into politics. Post-presidency, his net worth is $250 million, earned mostly from writing books and making speeches.
(Views are personal)
K P Nayar | Strategic Analyst