A long, long time ago, in a nation far away, American entrepreneur Ed Chiles ran a television ad for his little ol’ company with this tagline:
“If you don’t have an oil well, get one! You’ll love doing business with Western!”
The messenger was a lanky young woman with big hair, a Texas accent and a white hard hat with a big W on the front. Often the ad would run on Sundays during NFL football games.
The sell was to invest in the Western Company of North America as it searched for oil and gas riches. At the end of each ad came the hard hat wearing woman, grinning from ear-to-ear – “If you don’t have an oil well, get one!”
Just think about who was watching NFL football on those Sundays in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Folks. Regular folks. But odds are mostly blue-collar folks more than anything else. Folks that Eddie Chiles knew well.
You see, Chiles had worked as a roustabout, a roughneck and a Merchant Marine before hitchhiking in 1930 to Oklahoma University in Norman. He left in 1934 with a B.S. in petroleum engineering.
At 29, just five years out of college, Chiles founded Western. He had two trucks and three employees, and originally worked with oil and gas companies, until Western became an oil and gas company itself.
Those ads, those invitations to regular folks to get on board with Western, reflected the optimism Chiles had not just about his business but about the free enterprise system, as well.
Fast forward to the recent Democratic National Convention. If the idea was to sell happy, happy, joy, joy, no one told that to the rich folks speaking during the week.
Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Michelle and Barack Obama have a combined wealth of $3.7 billion – give or take a million or so.
They could have easily stepped up to the podium and shared, Eddie Chiles’ like, a love for the nation and the economic system that brought them their wealth and celebrity. But they wouldn’t be Democrats then now, would they? They would more likely be Republicans or Libertarians or Rastafarians … anything but Democrats.
In speech after speech, nary a Clinton or Obama even mentioned the remarkable system that has afforded them lives of affluence and, let’s face it, power.
That system, of course, is capitalism. Something of a dirty word in Democrat lexicon anymore.
In the midst of Bill’s “boy from Hope” schtick, filled with jabs at Trump and lofty praise for Harris, came a crazy “statistic” regarding job creation. Since 1989, Bill said, 51 million jobs have been created and Democrat administrations accounted for 50 million of them. Umm, not exactly.
It immediately reminded us that Bill Clinton hasn’t changed. In 1996, Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey called Clinton “an unusually gifted liar.” Indeed, Clinton works in half-truths and outright falsehoods the way the great masters worked in oils and marble.
But even if that were remotely accurate, the system enabled such job creation? Capit— shish!
Hillary offered even less substance than her husband. But she did mirror Bill’s call to fight income inequality and corporate greed. “We need to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” she said.
In fact, if one ranked the things the Clintons, the Obamas, and virtually every other speaker the Dems rolled out that week, believe Americans should fear the most corporations ranked second only to Trump. And not too distant a second, either.
Yet, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley . . . from Hollywood to Martha’s Vineyard, Bill and Hill and Barack and Michelle have mustered up the courage to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Corporate Greed.
So, we don’t have to, yes?
Michelle Obama’s speech bears special attention. First, her opening, “Hello, Chicago!” followed immediately by “something, something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” was surprising in that she wasn’t fronting for the Goo Goo Dolls or REO Speedwagon.
It would have been something if she’d continued with, “Are you ready to rock!”
She didn’t. Instead, she struck out on the familiar course. Beware the path that leads to too much of a good thing for there lies corporate greed. Only Michelle had a twist.
She said her parents “didn’t aspire to be wealthy – in fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed.”
For the record, the Obamas walked into the White House in 2009 worth somewhere in the vicinity of $1.5 million. Today, with homes in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Martha’s Vineyard, they’re in the bank at around $70 million.
Obviously, Michelle’s aspirations exceeded those of her parents.
Finally, we get to Oprah Winfrey, billionaire three times over.
On the one hand, she rightly pointed out that the majority of us – one hopes – would rise to the occasion in a crisis and save the life of a stranger. We wouldn’t ask what political ideology they follow. Certainly, we witnessed that on September 11, 2001.
(Of course, that was 23 years ago. How many TikTok videos are out there taken by people watching mobs brutally assaulting someone or storming into a department store and robbing it blind?)
But, while Oprah’s given away a car or two, does she ever praise the nation that provided her with a pathway to her enormous success. Afterall, she’s quick to mention the isms she seen and often encountered – racism and sexism, along with income inequality.
And that’s what’s frustrating about Oprah and the Clintons and the Obamas. They speak as if they have magically overcome things that, well, ordinary folks couldn’t possibly hurdle. They decry the America that made them wealthy. That America is out of reach for people who . . . aren’t them, one imagines.
That’s not the case. They know it, or at least they should know it.
Eddie Chiles knew it. He wasn’t a one-off. He understood that what he did wasn’t extraordinary. Rather, America is extraordinary.
So, another Democratic National Convention came and went, and that simple declaration – America’s extraordinary – wasn’t uttered. So far, it hasn’t been heard from the Harris Walz campaign, either.
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