September 02, 2010 06:26 PM UTC

Let them eat cake? A blue blood vs. the common man.

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• by: H-man

One of the themes in the Colorado Senate race is class.  No I don’t mean whether Mrs. Bennet or Mr. Buck had any when they both showed up at Andrew Romanoff’s birthday party.  I mean class in terms of strata of society.  

Senator Bennet is an incumbent who has never previously run for office.  He was appointed or given the office much like he has been given other things in his life.  A member of the aristocracy, tracing his American roots back to the Mayflower as he proudly recounts on his Wiki entry and preparing for his posting by serveing as a congressional page while attending prep school in Washington DC, not county.

Ken Buck had a more mundane path to his party’s nomination to run for the US Senate.  He traces his Colorado roots back to a shoe repair store his grandfather had in Greeley in the earlier depresssion, the one in the 1930’s. Economic strife tends to emit a sentiment of populism in the air which has not historically been a good thing for a blue blood.

There is an interesting op-ed in today’s Washington Post written by one of my favorite commentators, George Will. https://www.washingtonpost.com/… He offers his thoughts about the personal aspects of the Colorado Senate race.

He contrasts the two candidates.  Michael Bennet is cast as follows:

. . . Sen. Michael Bennet, who is a direct descendant of a Mayflower passenger, grandson of an economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and son of an official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. He attended tony St. Alban’s school in Washington and Yale Law School.

Ken Buck is described in this way:

Buck is a Princetonian.

But to erase the stain of privilege, Buck stresses that his family, although hardly poor, was frugal — “No, you won’t get a Happy Meal, you’ll get a burger.” And he worked in a Princeton cafeteria and later as a truck driver, ranch hand and janitor, so there.

A large man with close-cropped gray hair, he was a college football player talented enough to get a tryout as a punter with the New York Giants. Having, perhaps, an unslaked appetite for blocking and tackling, he became, after years in business, a prosecutor in Weld County, north of Denver. Explaining his Senate candidacy, he says: “I was in law enforcement for a long time and had seen how politicians had screwed up, so I decided I couldn’t do worse and might do better.”

Both backgrounds and experiences of Bennet and Buck play differently to different audiences.  Given the make up of a Colorado electorate, as opposed to the Saint Albans prep school, is it any great surprise that Buck is ahead?