Wealth Porn

Meyer: Why The NY Times And Democrats Have A Secret Rich Problem

(CBS)  The Times magazine this week, ironically, was "The Money Issue." The cover story was a terrific profile of a more-than-hyper-rich hedge manager named Cliff Asness. The piece was a nice glimpse into the secretive hedge fund universe, but what made it riveting was the portrait of a not famous, under-40 gazillionaire. As always, the Sunday magazine had a section for real estate porn: page after page filled with ads for opulent homes. This week there were ads for 27 homes listed at over $5 million.

In the Sunday Styles section, Alexandra Wolfe - daughter of writer Tom Wolfe - filed a story about how grown daughters of people with names like Tisch and Della Femina are taking their kids to posh new clubs where they can exercise and socialize while their kids get taken care of nearby.

There was a short feature about what's hot in diamond earrings (hoops, not chandeliers, prices ranging from $2,400 to $16,500) and a long article about how David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg are concerned about giving the public access to public beaches in Malibu. There were also the regular weekly features about society weddings and charity balls.

The Sunday Business Section always profiles a hyper-rich guy and this week it was Ronald Perelman. The piece had real news value apart from the wealth porn, just like the hedge fund story.

I'm not suggesting the Times shouldn't have done any of these stories. I just want to point out the irony of running an excellent set of pieces about the anthropology and demographics of the hyper-rich in a paper that is dining out on them. It is a kind of limousine liberalism that I believe also afflicts the Democratic Party too often, a conceit that "we are the enlightened rich."

Bill Clinton didn't bash the rich a lot, but he could have; Johns Kerry and Edwards did bash the rich a lot, and it flopped. It flopped partly because Americans who are not rich simply do not have a European-style, class base resentment. Americans aspire to being rich. That's the American way. But the '04 Democratic rhetoric also flopped because the guys spewing looked like such phonies; they weren't just rich, they were richer than the Republicans: they were hyper-rich.

In the House, Dennis Hastert, former high school wrestling coach, is a more authentic voice of the little guy than Nancy Pelosi, wife of a wealthy real estate developer, and in her own right part of a powerful political family including two past mayors of Baltimore, one of them also a five-term congressman.

The Senate has plenty of guys who make well-to-do look shabby, but the Democrats probably have the greater net worth, led by heirs like Kennedy, Dayton and Rockefeller and self-made moguls like Corzine, Kohl, and Lautenberg.

The point is not that being rich, or exploiting interest in the rich to sell newspapers, should be disqualifiers for tackling issues of economic justice. The point is to do it with some humility and an ear well-tuned to hypocrisy.

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Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.

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