McBama Wins – Hooray For The Other Side

The clock is counting down to a “new day dawning” as the currently leading candidate was quoted as saying. Smells like . . . victory. Only in this story, instead of napalm, the weapon of choice was money, and lots and lots of it.

My teenage daughter asked me how much the president makes. I told her that the salary was only a token at $400,000 and that most CEOs in larger US businesses make many times that. She asked, then why do they spend so much money to get into office? It doesn’t seem right.

I agree with her. Obama is said to have spent nearly $250 million while McCain, who opted into the public campaign coffers, was limited to $84 million. That’s an awful lot of money to make back, at most, $1.6 million in salary, $2-3 million in advances for the post-administration book deal and perhaps 20 years at a cushy job on the board of a major institution or law firm, yanking down another $2 mil a year. This all adds up to under $50 million. So what’s the logic?

Power. The kind of power that only you or I could dream of and probably, for the most part, don’t bother, since we have to get the kids to soccer, do the laundry, pay the mortgage and deal with an asshole of a boss, not to mention, find a marriage therapist and see whether we can get rooms at Disneyworld so that we can save on the car rental. $5000 for a family vacation: geez, that’s real money.