Once again, All the Best People lost the election. In fact, most of them didn`t even bother to come.
The Truly Elite are vanishing from American government. Look at the political landscape after last week`s voting and what do you see? Boobs, boobs, boobs. No, this is not a tasteless reference to the record number of women running for office this year. I am referring to boobs as in H.L. Mencken`s ”Booboisie.” I`m talking Yahoo, which All the Best People pronounce with the accent on the second syllable.
I mean those couthless clods in icky manmade fibers with Reagan stickers on their Econo-Vans and tasteless Lincoln Town Cars. They consider abortion not as something ”a deb does discreetly” but as something actually to be discussed in public. They worry more about the prayer in schools than the prep. They hate government, instead of recognizing it as necessary to keep everything just as it is. Hey, I`m talking ”Not Our Kind.”
I`m referring, of course, to today`s Republicans. All the Best People were never Democrats, except in Charleston, S.C., where until recently the criminal penalties for talking to Republicans were as harsh as those for talking to Yankees.
The Kennedys, after all–excepting the Truly Tasteful Jackie–are just a bunch of Boston Southies with gobs of money. The Democrats are the party of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who slurped down his wine while the emperor of Japan was making a toast to him, and of Lyndon Johnson, who used to hold meetings while using his bathroom.
ONLY THE BEST
When I was a child in Rockefellerland, which is to say New York`s posh, prestigious Westchester County, the Republican Party had only All the Best People. Instead of precinct captains, I think it had a membership committee.
When a Stevenson motorcade had the temerity to drive through our village one day in 1956, people came out and threw things at his car. The town policemen did nothing because they were busy tearing Stevenson posters down from lampposts.
In the old days, when one of the Best allowed himself to be elected to office, he did so out of noblesse oblige, which is to say, he had time on his hands (you can`t simply play squash all day) and needed something to do.
But where are the Best now? Two years ago, Elliot Richardson, who`d been absolutely everything you could be appointed to in federal government, kindly mentioned that he would allow the people of Massachusetts to elect him to the U.S. Senate. He not only lost the Republican primary but lost it to a man who didn`t go to Harvard!
Massachusetts` Adams family produced Founding Fathers, two presidents and a minister to England. What are they reduced to now? Direct descendant F. Douglas Adams is a member of the Lincoln, Mass., town planning board. Oh thrill.
An aide to Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis told me the traditional Republican Party has ceased to exist in Massachusetts. The Brahmins have forsworn politics and gone back to their clubs, leaving the GOP to the Reaganite peasantry.
FISH STORIES
Upper posh, prestigious Westchester County still has the splendidly elite Hamilton Fish Jr. as its congressman. In fact, I think he assumed the seat of his father, 98-year-old Hamilton Fish Sr., without bothering with an election. It was just sort of handed down like an heirloom.
But lower posh, prestigious Westchester had Bella Abzug as one of its congressional candidates this year. Can you imagine her representing debutantes?
The Truly Elite still have two of their own running for president. One is Pierre DuPont IV, who twice allowed the people of Delaware to elect him governor and once referred to the average voter as ”Joe Six-Pack.” Alas, experts say the only way he could get elected president is if the Democrats ran the equally snobby John D. Rockefeller IV, who recently allowed the people of West Virginia to elect him to the U.S. Senate after spending some $11 million of the family stash.
The other, of course, is the simply super George Bush, who`s of Yale and posh prestigious Greenwich and dresses in a marvelously coordinated combination of Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean. He knows how to run the government and he knows how to tea dance. But instead of chatting on about Joe Six-Pack, Bush has been down in Redneck Land, praising Bibles and cursing commies. He`s even telling Texans that (gasp!) he`s one of them. As tacky as it may sound, the man is actually working at winning votes.
