Here’s a question: How much would you pay to know what it’s like to have Nikki Haley in your living room?
Sorry…clarification: How much would you pay to hear what it’s like to have Nikki Haley in your living room so you can be bestowed with second-hand knowledge?
Whatever dollar figure (assuming you would actually pay in dollars) popped into your mind, you may not have realized that someone who is running for office here in New Hampshire has already given an answer to that question and quantified it publicly. The dollar amount ranges from $25,000 to $40,000…and thanks to a video released by the Washington Speakers Bureau last November, we know the person of interest who gave that appraisal is a GOP candidate for the Second Congressional District, Vikram Mansharamani.
Much has been made over the past several years about how government has become dominated by a class of ladder-climbers, bureaucrats, and experts, whose hallmark (besides their glibness) seems to be their desire to push an agenda that always consolidates more power for themselves at the expense of the governed. It’s not your imagination; Washington, D.C., really is a city isolated from the rest of the country. Moreover, it’s a place and a culture dominated by people who can easily wield their credentials and leverage their networks to insulate themselves from the perspectives of the rest of the citizenry. I ought to know. I once lived there.
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Soon after I arrived in the Beltway as a student at American University, it became obvious that there was a template of the kind of person the school wanted its students to emulate. That template included acclaimed authors like Francis Fukuyama, pundits like Fareed Zakaria, “foreign policy experts” like Ian Bremmer, and financial wizards like Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Wonky intellectualism and “global thinking” were prized over common sense everywhere and nearly always. When I hear Vikram Mansharamani talk about the interplay between “the U.S. economy, geopolitics, and the world economy,” it’s like hearing an old song for the first time in over ten years. You may not remember every single lyric, but the familiar chorus comes back to you fast.
Vikram seems like a nice guy, and he probably is. But he gives every indication of being the sort of candidate who wants to go to D.C. to move amongst the crowd of people he considers his intellectual and power-brokering peers. People in that mold make fine talking heads, lobbyists, law professors, diplomats, financial analysts, you name it. They don’t tend to make representatives who see their first duty as being to their constituents.
Which brings me back to the $25,000 to $40,000. To believe that the speaking fee justifies itself, you’d probably have to believe that every person who has insider access to everyone who makes a serious run for public office has obtained the secret to power for themselves. More importantly, to sell the secret to power – or as Vikram has referred to it, “how the sausage is made” – for a price tag, you’d probably have to believe that power is both an unalloyed positive and something that no one had figured out the secret to before. You might even be the sort of person who sees the ultimate things to chase in life as power and success.
I don’t know about you, but I suspect we have enough of those people in D.C. already.
