Here in Illinois, we have a governor (Blagojevich) whose father-in-law is a powerful alderman (Richard Mell) and gave him his start; a mayor of our largest city who is, of course, the son of a famous mayor (the Richard Daleys, J and M); an attorney general and a speaker of the house who are daughter (Lisa) and father (Mike Madigan); a county board president who is the son (Todd) of the previous officeholder (John Stroger), appointed when his father had an incapacitating stroke; and assorted other second and third generation names scattered about our politics. My son is good friends with the son of one of the rare exceptions to this rule, and the father and I have both made jokes about my son riding his son's coattails to power. Hey, third grade is none too early to start planning your political career in a state like this, where dynasty is destiny.

Illinois' politics are unusually corrupt, up there with Rhode Island or D.C., but it's not like the rest of the country can say too much when a second Clinton is running to replace the second Bush (who defeated the Junior to a powerful senator who, by all accounts, groomed him for the job from birth). So it is cheering to see someone-- even if it's the mercurial figure of Grover Norquist-- finally arguing that we need to do something about nepotism in our politics:

While Americans complain about Hosni Mubarak’s plan to replace himself as president of Egypt with Mubarak Junior, roll their eyes at Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, the son of the late President Hafez al-Assad, and giggle at North Korea’s Kim to Kim dynastic communism, we are about to hold a presidential election that may extend a sequence that gives the land of the free four years of George H.W. Bush, eight years of William Clinton, eight years of George W. Bush, son of, and the start of eight years of Hillary Clinton, wife of...

This creeping tendency to see elected office as a family heirloom is not just present in the executive. Congress is littered with the spouses and sons and daughters of former congressmen who wanted to keep the position in the family. The father of Representative John Dingell of Michigan served in Congress for 22 years and then handed the job to his son in 1955. The debate recently has been whether the incumbent will hand it to his wife or one of his sons...

A bipartisan revulsion at this recrudescence of an aristocracy – Democrats think there have been too many Bushes, Republicans think there have been too many Clintons – has led concerned citizens (OK, me) to launch a campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to ban this practice. The draft now circulating was written by the legal scholar Bruce Fein and reads:

Section 1. No spouse, sibling or child of an elected or appointed federal, state or local official outside the civil service may immediately succeed that official in the same elected or appointed office.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, including exempting certain elected or appointed offices from its general proscription and defining the term “immediately succeed” to prevent circumventions.

Interestingly, even this proposal would not have prevented either of the presidential dynastic situations we've recently faced (nor would it have stopped Mayor Daley the II). (It also doesn't deal with the fact that Hillary could have run as early as 2000 by simply divorcing Bill.) For that reason, frankly, I would be happy to see it go further, and prevent any relative (as defined above) of the president from running for 16 or 24 years.

If people still remember Hillary fondly enough in 2016 or 2024 to elect her, she can try then-- but in the meantime, we'll have expanded our bench of capable candidates, not allowed it to contract to a few families with built-in name recognition. It may be mildly unfair to a few talented individuals of famous families-- but it is of obvious benefit to the nation in allowing many more individuals to run without all the cash and oxygen in their race being sucked up by individuals who have a famous name and, often, little else apparent to offer.