From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Political Offices Are Not Meant to Be Family Heirlooms

Ace of Spades, making his case for his friend Mike Flynn in the special House election in Illinois’ 18th Congressional District, made an interesting point in an aside:

Mike Flynn’s opponent is not a bad man, I imagine. But he seems to have fallen into country-club Republican politics the same way many hardware store owners’ sons fall into hardware. Not out of any particular interest in the subject matter, but because it’s the easiest way to make a comfortable living. You’ve got the connections, you’ve got the in, and, heck, your name is already written on the awning over the door.

As the son of Roy LaHood, former liberal Republican Congressman turned Obama Transportation Secretary, Darin LaHood is just the sort of man the Establishment likes.

But there’s a key difference between, say, Jeffrey Beaumont taking over his dad Tom’s Beaumont Hardware Store in North Carolina* and sons and daughters taking over their father’s or mother’s elected offices upon their retirement.

Look, if you build the family business, you’re entitled to hand it down to your children. To contradict our president, “you built that. Somebody else didn’t make that happen.” If you do build something, you’ll have a lot of discretion about how you spend the money that comes in, and who takes over when you leave the scene. If you think junior’s got what it takes to run the place well, you go right ahead.

But political offices aren’t supposed to be family heirlooms. Because they didn’t build that. They don’t own those offices; they occupy them – at our discretion.

Of course both parties have their dynasties and offspring gliding relatively easily into elected office. On the GOP side, there’s son of a senator George H.W. Bush, and his offspring George W. Bush and Jeb Bush and of course Jeb’s son, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. Then there’s Liz Cheney, Ben Quayle, Shelley Moore Capito (her father was governor of West Virginia)… Rand Paul.

Last November, the election of an 18-year-old Republican state delegate in West Virginia was a brief sensation… of course, her election seems less stunning when you realize her father is a state senator and was a state delegate for many years.

On the Democratic side, Hillary clearly climbed to the top with a lot of help from Bill; Almost every key race for Democrats in the red states in 2014 featured some offspring of a longtime political figure: Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason Carter running for governor in Georgia, Florida congressional candidate Gwen Graham, Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn, Sen. Mark Begich (his father was Alaska’s Congressman), Sen. Mary Landrieu (her father was mayor of New Orleans), Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor… then there’s New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, California Gov. Jerry Brown (his father was governor), and the entire Kennedy clan… (You’ll recall quite a few folks contended Caroline Kennedy was a terrific choice for U.S. Ambassador to Japan because she had “good genes.” Suddenly there’s widespread belief that ambassadorial skill is contained in DNA strands.)

Earlier this year, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz did a bit of number-crunching and calculated that the power of nepotism – or the natural advantage of having a successful parent – was much more intense in politics than in other fields:

I went through a wide range of fields and found a consistent pattern: greater success for the sons, but nothing like the edge a winning politician provides.

Here is the estimated parental edge for other big American prizes and positions. An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.

These kids of political figures might be really nice guys. But they embody the argument of Angelo Codevilla that America today has an unprecedentedly uniform “ruling class”… and the election of more and more offspring of previous lawmakers strengthens the argument that we live in an era of an increasingly more formal aristocracy.

* We all know Jeffrey Beaumont changed his name, joined the FBI, and was hired to work a case in the Pacific Northwest.