Dear Mitt Romney: Please don’t knock down your $12 million beach house in California and replace it with a new one almost four times its size. At least not while you’re running for president and your campaign has yet to catch fire. We know it gets cramped, but a lot of other people are cramped also, what with either being unemployed and having to move in with their relatives, or putting up college grad children who cannot find jobs, or having to downsize from the house they once lived in, but now can’t afford. Doing this now could seem like a poke in the eye to these people, whose trust funds weren’t quite the size of yours, and who saw their retirement funds dwindle through no fault of their own. For the next few years, your guests can find a motel, double up, or crash on the floor in a sleeping bag. If you have to go big, you can do it in the third year of your first term, when thanks to you, the economy is once again booming. Or you can do it after you’ve lost (either the primaries or the presidential election), when you will be your own man again and quite free to do and to spend as you please.
Dear Barack Obama: Do go ahead and have a lovely vacation, enjoying life with your wife and adorable children, but not at a 28-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard that rents for $50,000 a week. Not when you’re running for reelection, and your approval ratings are down around 40 percent, when long-term unemployment has become a huge problem, and the country’s credit rating has been downgraded for the first time in history. If you need room to relax, you have three fairly large houses, two of them owned and maintained by the public, one of them in a nice rural setting, and with many amenities. (There is also a big empty house in Chicago that you haven’t seen for quite a long time.) For many people, $50,000 would be a big down payment for a house in which they would live on a permanent basis. For some, it would buy a house in its entirety. For most (though perhaps not for your friends), it would amount to their entire income for a year. That’s what you might call quite an income disparity.
People have noted that your summers (and especially Augusts) tend to be difficult, perhaps because they are the times that you are at the Vineyard, where the gap between what you preach and the way that you live is especially evident. Perhaps, like Mitt, you might be well advised to defer large expenses until such time as you are back in the private sector, which, in both of your cases, may be sooner than either of you had planned. Perhaps in 2013, you will be free to live on the Vineyard on a year-round basis. And, if he wants another beach house, this on the Atlantic, Mitt could build one near you.
Dear Newt: Close out all accounts outstanding at Tiffany’s, and do not open them ever again. If you must visit the place, take a tip from the film, and bring in a ring from a Cracker -Jack box for engraving. Otherwise, never allow the idea of jewelry to cross your mind. In your case, it is less the money spent than what was bought with it: A house, however extravagant, is a necessity, and has a large, solid, aspect. A jewel is the essence of extravagance, also of uselessness, and is thus nothing more than a frill. Buying jewels by the quart or the carton is associated with sports stars and rock stars, playboys and showgirls, malefactors of great wealth (who have a bad name already), or with Ari Onassis trying to impress Jackie Kennedy, or Richard Burton when he tried to please Liz. It is not associated with great politicians, statesmen, or philosopher kings. Your chances of being rated among them have taken on water. Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend on different occasions. They are not, and will never be, yours.
Dear John [Mr. Teresa Heinz] Kerry: Are you having some down time on the Isabel, the yacht you bought for about $7 million just as the recession closed in? We hope you enjoy the varnished teak table, the wine storage, the wet bar, and the customized suites for the help. (And did you get around to paying the $500,000 in taxes that you tried to evade by docking the yacht out of state?) How nice to know you have someplace to go when your five mansions on land will not satisfy. Do you remember that right after your loss in 2004 to George Bush, a reporter (on Washington Week in Review, as we seem to recall) praised you for having been “true to your lifestyle,” for not playing the hick as Bush did, but exercising your right to revel in money, to ski in Sun Valley, take your jets everywhere, and go windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket wearing those cute flowered shorts? Did you ever think that this might have been one of the reasons you lost?
