An Outside the Beltway View on Daschle, CEOs Issue and Washington DC behavior

This is an interesting Op Ed piece from the NY Times. Many in Washinton, inside the beltway, have been defending former Senator Daschle and justifyng his "problem". They talked of his dedication to the nation and to public policy. We have heard many opinions defending excessive bonuses and salaries of Wall Street, bankers and some CEOs. This Op Ed piece gives us a peek into to how those outside the beltway might be thinking about this issue and how Americans view the opinion that those of power, Republicans and Democrats, who think the rules do not apply to them--they seem to think of themselves as a priviledged class.


Op-Ed Contributor
My Children Made Me Do It
New York Times, February 9, 2009
By STEPHEN AMIDON
Published: February 7, 2009
Greenfield, Mass.

MY father didn’t leave me much when he died.

Although he was at one time a fast-rising executive in a multinational company, a combination of corporate skullduggery and his own personal demons meant he had little in the bank when he died in 2001, a few days before his 70th birthday.

There was nothing for his four children except a small array of personal items, including a particularly sturdy hairbrush I was astute enough to claim. I still own it, in fact, and use it daily to tame my rapidly thinning hair, which is probably coming unglued due to worry about what sort of inheritance I will be able to provide my own four children.

I got to thinking about that brush when I read that a colleague of Tom Daschle had said that his tax woes — not to mention the lucrative private-sector temptations he gave into — may have stemmed from his desire to make enough money to lay a fat nest egg for his children.

It is hard to see how riding in a free limo benefits future generations, but even if I give Mr. Daschle the benefit of the doubt, I cannot help but note the paradox here. A man’s desire to provide his progeny with a big score has resulted in him saddling them with a very different sort of inheritance — a legacy of embarrassment.

Instead of being remembered as the savior of the nation’s health care system or even as just a middling health secretary, their father will now forever be known as the guy who hitched a ride with some private-equity hot rodders and then neglected to chip in for the gas. Most sons and daughters I know would gladly forgo a portion of their birthright in order to be invited to pool parties at the Obama White House and not to have a dad serving as fodder for late-night television wisecracks.

Inheritances can be tricky things. Even those given with the best of intentions can often go awry. Just ask King Lear. He simply wanted to turn Britain over to his daughters so he could enjoy the medieval equivalent of retirement in Boca Raton, but wound up starting a bloody civil war that brought ruin on his family.

On the other end of the ancestral give-and-take, there’s Richard Carstone, who appears in Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Richard was a nice enough boy who caused his own destruction by obsessively pursuing a share of a disputed legacy.

At the bottom of the barrel, there’s Bernard Madoff, who is reported to have planned to dispense a desk full of booty to his relatives to keep the family fortune one step ahead of the law. Sure, everybody wants to get a surprise bequest from their Uncle Bernie, but probably not if it comes with a co-conspirator rap attached.

Granted, it’s hard to spend much time worrying about setting something aside after a month in which the economy shed nearly 600,000 jobs. Most parents these days are too wrapped up in staying afloat to be able to capitalize their children’s futures.

Still, those moments when I contemplate how little I’ve socked away for my offspring cause me no small amount of anxiety. In fact, the one thing that is sure to get me thinking I should do something I really do not want to do — or perhaps even something I should not do — is the desire to endow my brood. All manner of behavior that would otherwise be considered contemptible seems to be justified in the name of inheritance. Saving for your loved ones, not patriotism, is apparently the last refuge of a scoundrel.

One way I manage this anxiety is to ponder those friends and colleagues who have been well provided for, and to wonder if I really want to leave that sort of feathered nest for my children. Because there is often something not quite right about these fortunate sons of the baby boom.

I am not talking about trust-fund brats who get arrested for throwing hissy fits on Sunset Boulevard. I’m speaking of those perfectly well-mannered folks whose parents left them enough to ensure they never have to lie awake at night worrying about college tuition or second mortgages.

The young family who can afford the brownstone without ever enduring cramped life in an apartment, the couple who are able to jet away on holiday while the rest of us sit in traffic on the way to the local beach, the household whose teenage children are never asked to help out — there is something missing here, the sense of accomplishment derived from patient effort. It is hard not to think that their parents have done them as much harm as good by installing an express escalator on the uphill sections of their lives.

Perhaps this skepticism is just my way of rationalizing an inability to provide my own children with an anxiety-free future. No one wants to struggle and worry; a little help is always appreciated. And in the end, it is up to each of us to figure out how much is enough to leave behind, and how much is too much.

For me, the answer lies with my father, who wound up dragging his weary bones around the country in a series of lousy jobs at a time in life when many of the men who had once worked under him were perfecting their golf swings.

One of the main reasons he continued to work so hard, I believe, is that he was mortified at the thought of being a burden to his grown children. Leaving behind an inheritance of debt would have been a disgrace, his own version of not paying taxes on a freebie.

He was, for all his faults, an honorable man. It was a quality that sometimes held him back, especially during the 1980s, when many of his colleagues were eviscerating their corporation to create the private fortunes that they would one day leave to their own children. My father refused all that because he was more concerned with maintaining his good name.

That sense of decency, his good name, is what he passed on to us. Looking at some of the shamelessly greedy men he worked with, it is an inheritance I am happy to have.

Though I’m also glad I got the brush.

Stephen Amidon is the author, most recently, of the novel “Security.”