Let’s see ... after graduating from Harvard Law as Law Review Editor, one candidate -- the grandson of a goatherd from Africa <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOOwMgWY_VIA&refer=home">[Bloomberg News]</a> -- heads for Chicago’s notoriously poor and ravaged South Side to organize neighborhoods in need of community playgrounds, asbestos cleanup and just plain help after the steel mills had shut down, leaving families with no jobs and not much hope.   <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usobam025598601mar02,1,6933215,full.story">[L.A. Times]</a>
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The other made Law Review at Yale, married the Arkansas political ‘boy wonder,’ and, while he was attorney general, managed to turn $1,000 --- put into cattle futures on the advice of a Tyson Food counsel --- into $100,000. <a href="http://www-marshall2.usc.edu/main/magazine/98winter/hillary.html">[Marshall Magazine]</a> . Later, “just as her husband was being inaugurated as the nation's youngest governor,” she was made partner, at age 32, in the Little Rock-based Rose Law Firm, where she was putting $200,000 in the family coffers by the time she and her husband moved to Washington.  <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E2DB163AF935A15751C0A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2">[N.Y. Times]</a>

The other guy... the one from Illinois?  He started a civil rights practice and taught constitutional law.

And she, according to the New York Times, “lent prestige to the (Rose) firm’s letterhead [and] served as director of several of Rose’s” major clients, “including Wal-Mart and TCBY.”  The Times also reported that “the head of the firm's executive committee ... said she was a leading ‘rainmaker’” who brought in clients based on her marriage to the governor.  <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E2DB163AF935A15751C0A962958260">[N.Y. Times]</a>

Since becoming a senator, she and her husband have made $109.2 million <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89397707">[National Public Radio]</a>.   Just last year the William J. Clinton Foundation received hefty donations totaling $131.3 million from a grateful Canadian financier, who brought along Mr. Clinton in his corporate jet, when the two traveled to Kazakhstan.  Upon arrival they headed for a dinner with the president --- infamous for his suppression of dissent --- and soon the former governor/former president’s ‘friend’ won “three uranium projects controlled by the state-owned uranium agency ...”  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html">[N.Y.Times]</a>

All the Clintons have to do is show up and money falls from the sky.

Go to Barack’s website <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet_barack.php">[BarackObama.com]</a> and look at the black and white shots of this earnest young man trying to help folks who actually needed help.

And after you’ve seen his story, you tell me who’s among the ‘elite’ ... And who represents people struggling to get by ... who understands the real needs of real individuals. 

We need a president to represent the family at their formica kitchen table ... not the big shots seated around the mahogany board room table.