John Kerry would have the poor and working class in this country believe he is one of them. That is a willing suspension of disbelief.
That being said, I actually have more in common with Kerry\'s Winthrop heritage than any part of the Bush family. No, I am not rich, but I do decend from an NE family who came to this country around the same time as Kerry\'s did.
John Kerry\'s America
taemag.com
By Chris Weinkopf
October-November 2004
Excerpt:
Stretching around the northeastern boundary of Boston Harbor sits a small, picturesque town with seven miles of beach, shady fruit trees, and quaint cottages. The town is part of a peninsula that, in 1632, the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, annexed from local tribes. Since 1846, it has continuously borne the family name--Winthrop, Massachusetts.
The town is but one of many signs of the storied role the Winthrops have played in New England and American history. Seven generations after Governor Winthrop formed his Puritan colony, Robert Charles Winthrop became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, before moving on to the Senate in 1850. One hundred thirty-five years later, another direct descendant of John Winthrop would serve the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for 19 years as a U.S. Senator before going on to seek the U.S. Presidency.
His name is John Kerry. John Forbes Kerry, actually. In addition to the Winthrop connection, the Massachusetts senator also descends from the Bay State Forbes clan, which launched the Boston-China trade and amassed a fortune in the American mercantile class. To this day, the family maintains several estates throughout the world, homes in which Kerry vacationed as a boy, between semesters at boarding schools and before marrying into a $300 million real-estate portfolio of his own. This is the same John Forbes Kerry who now campaigns on a populist promise to bridge the "two Americas" divided by wealth and privilege.
The theme isn\'t original, of course. It\'s recycled from the primary campaign of Kerry\'s running mate, North Carolina\'s Senator John Edwards. And at least symbolically, this political ticket represents the uniting of the classes that the candidates promise. Although shaking down doctors and insurance companies has launched Edwards into Kerry\'s rarefied tax bracket, his pedigree couldn\'t be more different--the son of mill workers, the product of public education and state universities, a lifelong resident of North Carolina.
It\'s often noted that the purpose of the modern Vice Presidential nominee is to bring to the ticket what the Presidential candidate cannot: Walter Mondale provided Jimmy Carter with Beltway street cred, as did the elder George Bush for Ronald Reagan. Dan Quayle was, in theory anyway, going to make Bush attractive to Baby Boomers. Dick Cheney gave the younger Bush "gravitas," while Joe Lieberman was supposed to make Al Gore seem strong of character. Kerry\'s selection of Edwards follows the same model, injecting a dose of Horatio Alger into Kerry\'s silver-spoon persona. But more important, Edwards brings some Deep South to a campaign that reeks of New England, in this case, Northeastern elitism and unapologetically liberal politics.
In many ways, John Kerry represents both the personification and the pinnacle of the region that spawned him, a region increasingly detached from much of the rest of America in terms of culture and values. Although his background has helped bring him to his current position of wealth and prominence, it could ultimately thwart his lifelong pursuit of the Presidency. Between now and November, Kerry will labor mightily to convince working-class, swing-state Americans that he is, at least in spirit, one of them. The question is: Can he pull it off?
To better understand the cultural and political ethos of New England today, we must go back to Governor Winthrop and the society he intended to found. It wasn\'t Winthrop\'s goal to create a new country, but to reform the old one by setting an example of religious and social virtue.
Winthrop and the one thousand hearty souls who came with him from England were Europeans at heart--as evidenced by their zeal to name New World cities and towns after Old World counterparts. Even a century and a half later, many colonists still thought of themselves as Englishmen first. During Revolutionary times, they were divided among the Patriots and the Tories--those who pledged their loyalty to America and its emerging national character, and those whose loyalty remained with the British crown and its attendant aristocracy. (One noteworthy loyalist was the Reverend John Forbes, Kerry\'s great-great-great-great grandfather, who served the British Empire at a key post in East Florida until 1783, when he fled to England, leaving two sons behind.)
As the country expanded westward, it was largely members of the lower classes--those with little to lose and much to gain--who ventured into the wilderness. Those staying behind were disproportionately those who, like the Winthrops and the Forbeses, enjoyed positions of privilege and distinction. The result is that, while class mobility and meritocracy were early phenomena elsewhere in America, New England retained a more rigid social and economic caste system not unlike the one that millions of immigrants would flee Europe to escape. With the hoi polloi seeking opportunity on the frontier while the elites remained in the east, a natural sense of superiority arose throughout New England--a sense that very much carries on to this day.
In the eyes of many New Englanders, the region is culturally more like Europe than the rest of America. It has cobblestone streets, centuries-old buildings, established families who dominate the local history books, each with its own seal and tartan. Those who grow up in the region feel a righteous sense of pride that their home is the birthplace of American liberty, of Plymouth Rock, the Minutemen, the shot heard \'round the world. Anyone who can boast a lineage that traces in whole or part "back to the May-flower" is something of an honorary royal, a living connection to a storied past. The floods of tourists who come in each year to marvel at sights they\'d previously only read about in history books--sights that, for the locals, are simply part of the everyday landscape--reinforce the notion that this is a place that\'s in some intrinsic way better than any of the newer, less interesting, less gentrified parts of the country.
Imbued with an innate sense of egalitarianism, no New Englander worth his salt will own up to being a snob, but New England snobbery is undeniable. It\'s there in the jokes, in the vocabulary, in the knowing references to the benighted souls back in the red states. In New England parlance, "West Virginia" is a synonym for uncouth, "Mississippi" for unread, "Iowa" means boring, and "Texas" boorish. A Southern accent is widely recognized as a sign of intellectual inferiority, and anyone who owns a gun is, by definition, a bloodthirsty, paranoid redneck.
True to the region\'s Europhilic origins, New Englanders, as a whole, care deeply about what France and Germany think about America, Americans, and U.S. foreign policy. When Kerry wrings his hands about the need to "rebuild our alliances," he\'s not just giving voice to his own concerns; he\'s playing to his base, a constituency that can\'t bear the thought of losing international popularity contests. Commensurate with the Northeastern affinity for international sensibilities is a disdain for the notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. has a unique role in the world, or at least a responsibility to exert its power for its own protection. All of which translates into a deep disgust for the man Kerry hopes to replace in November, President George W. Bush.
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