Lucia de Vernai

Here you are, packing your lunch of soggy tuna sandwich for the fourth time this week when the local news—you gave up cable six months ago—reports that the woman who bore the former governor of California’s love child has been getting $10,000 a month on top of housing expenses. Makes you feel silly about how hard you worked to get yourself through college, doesn’t it.

Setting aside the moral reprehensibility of the situation, let’s consider its political irony. The guy made enough money to be able to put six figures a year into a hush money fund. It’s the American dream, at least according to some rap lyrics. At least he’s not a deadbeat, right?

Schwarzenegger has long held firm convictions about money, single parents and responsibility— they just don’t apply to him. They apply to the millions of people who have been losing sleep over how they will pay for day care since the welfare cuts his time in office brought about. I am not claiming that years of going to bed every night with a Kennedy, who hasn’t noticed hundreds of thousands missing from the bank, is not stressful. It’s just not the kind of stress that makes you relate to the common man.

Likewise, Newt Gingrich, a man who describes himself as “very frugal” and just “a guy running for president who pays all of his bills” has a $500,000 revolving credit line with Tiffany’s. His impeccably dressed wife, Callista, is a lucky woman (and we’re all relieved that he is buying the baubles for his spouse, not a staffer). But let’s not pretend that a man who can spend the worth of your house on a necklace understands how barely making mortgage payments is putting strain on your marriage.

The appeal to the common man is the currency of elections, and politicians have great ideas about how to reduce the deficit, poverty, unemployment and foreclosure. Unfortunately we tend to ignore the fact that very few of those ideas apply the candidates’ tax bracket.

The absurd amounts of money politicians spend on what can’t be written off as necessary expenses even by the most creative accountants has cheapened the concept of fiscal restraint and brought to light the disturbing contrast between those who make policy and those whose lives it affects.

The financial crisis has made voters across America rethink the value of the dollar. Perhaps it is time rethink the value of political leaders whose financial reality is so detached from our own that their budget proposals are the equivalent of “let them eat cake.”

Off-shore accounts, hedge funds and stock options—all those are fine. If you can pay for your kids’ Ivy League educations, start multiple charity foundations in your name and employ live-in help, good for you. Who wouldn’t? But either spare those of us who live paycheck to paycheck and recycle tuna recipes your second-hand ideas on how to spend the money we don’t have, or start giving advocating for the Arnold Schwarzenegger-style treatment of all single mothers.

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