Professional politicians, Bah! from Radio Derb Transcript

Legislators know little enough about our lives and our concerns as it is. If they've never punched a time clock, met a payroll, made a sale, won over a client, or pacified a disgruntled employee, they're at one further remove from us, the great unwashed masses.

Professional politicians Radio Derb Transcript


This article is from the July 18th Daily Mail. Headline: Increase in "professional politicians" means one in seven MPs have never done a real job. "MP" means "Member of Parliament," which in Britain's system includes the Prime Minister and most of his cabinet. There are currently 650 Members of Parliament.
The article concerns a study done by the Parliamentary library on the backgrounds of those 650 MPs. It turns out that 90 of them — that's fourteen percent, nearly one in seven — have never had a job outside of politics. That's a fourfold increase over the equivalent study done thirty years ago in 1982. Then there were only 20 MPs who'd never worked outside politics. ...

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Obama's view of business.     A favorite on Radio Derb, with at least five mentions over the years, has been that passage on page 135 of Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father where he describes his few months working in the private sector. Obama felt, he tells us, like, quote, "a spy behind enemy lines."

What else did you need to know about Obama's attitude towards wealth creation? This man is government, government, government, all the way through.
I guess that strictly speaking those few months "behind enemy lines" excuse Obama from the remarks I've been making about professional politicians who never held a real job. Why should I give Obama any breaks, though? Would he give me any? So the heck with it; Obama's as much a professional pol as those 90 British MPs who never did an honest day's wealth-creating work between them, as much a professional pol as Anthony Trunks-full-of-junk Weiner.
If there was any doubt about this, Obama dispelled that doubt at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia last Friday. [Clip: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that …"]
Talk about being behind enemy lines! There's capitalism's enemy, in plain sight: the arrogance and ignorance of our professional politicians, who have no clue about the realities of wealth generation, about the risks and challenges of getting a business off the ground, about the struggles and disappointments and sudden crises that every entrepreneur knows too well.
But what's to be surprised about? Risks and challenges are things Barack Obama knows nothing about. He's spent his entire life on the reward side of the risk-reward equation. From a pampered middle-class childhood he was wafted upward through prestigious colleges on thermals of affirmative action, then wafted further upwards into the political stratosphere, with only minimal effort required on his part, by adoring liberals who saw in him their dream candidate — left-liberal, charming and well-spoken, black but unthreatening.
[Clip: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that …] That is one of the most outrageous things a President of the United States ever said. Obama, however, is the least surprising president to have said it. This is a guy whose entire experience of the private sector was a few months in a New York office, at a desk with a computer — "behind enemy lines."...
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