While we in the news media have long wrung our hands about the ways in which campaign financing warps the political process, what about the ways in which politicians’ frenzied competition for donations warps their views of the world? They now spend so much time among the country’s plutocrats, sowing friendship wherever the funds are, that their bearings and their yardsticks surely change, as must their sense of their station.

I’m sure the Clintons don’t feel as fabulously rich as they’ve become — Bill alone made $104.9 million in speaking fees between January 2001 and January 2013 — because they needn’t look more than a few feet in any direction to spot someone with 10 times their net worth. At the pinnacles of power, there are mountains of money, and it’s easy for a politician to wonder why it belongs to people no brighter than he or she is. It’s just as easy to feel entitled to some of it.

Wealth and politics have never been strangers, and some candidates aren’t hustling in real time and taking extravagant gifts only because the salary cap of “public service” is irrelevant to them. Their affluence is the antecedent to their bids for office.

Among the Bushes, it was always said that you made your fortune, then staked your political claim. Jeb Bush did a bit of that, and his net worth when he became governor of Florida in 1999 was about $2 million.

It fell to about $1.3 million over the next eight years, immediately after which he exhibited an “unapologetic determination to expand his wealth,” according to Michael Barbaro in The Times, who wrote that even though “the path from public service to private riches is well trodden,” Bush took an unusually “aggressive and expansive approach to making money.” His net worth now isn’t known.

That of another Republican contender, Carly Fiorina, is in the range of $71 million, as Matt Viser of The Boston Globe reported in a recent story that also mentioned the median household net worth in the United States right now: $81,200.

“In an election season expected to be dominated by appeals to blue-collar Americans,” Viser wrote, “the ability of candidates to credibly connect with average voters will be a major challenge.”