Word: parvenus
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...having paid their dues," says Lew Uhler, president of the National Tax Limitation Committee, an antitax group, who is supporting one of Whitman's opponents. It takes a vast amount of money to be competitive in California, but the road to Sacramento is littered with the bodies of failed parvenus: Michael Huffington, the former Republican Congressman and ex-husband of Arianna, blew $28 million on a failed Senate bid in 1994; Al Checchi, a former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, spent $40 million losing to Gray Davis in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1998; and the businessman Bill Simon...
...Today Silicon Valley is akin to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after spring break. The tourists have abandoned us. Most of the people who came here in search of a quick buck during the past few years have gone. The foreign billionaires have scuttled back to Europe and Asia, the corporate parvenus have retreated, and Hollywood celebrities no longer swish through our office seeking a smattering of pixie dust...
...members have no use for parvenus and get-aheads trawling for business connections. Applying directly is the surest way never to be invited back. You will be “tapped” accordingly, if they decide to show an interest in you. During elections, it takes two black balls from the governing board to earn a rejection. “You really do have to know people,” says Minturn...
...parade of parvenus is the strange but direct result of federal campaign-finance laws that set limits on the amount of money most candidates can raise from any single donor. While typical wannabes might go to five donors to raise $10,000, a rich counterpart can just write a check and devote time normally spent at fund raisers to winning votes instead. That explains why the parties narrowcast for fat-walleted candidates who can shoulder the burden themselves. It also explains why elders of both parties quietly persuaded the authors of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill to remove...
...rest of us. Which is probably why, in the early days of his term, when the Clintons spent a lot of time palling around with the likes of Barbra Streisand and, in the case of the President, being attended by a Beverly Hills stylist, they came across as parvenus rather than Kennedyesque sophisticates--and were attacked far more fiercely for sucking up to Hollywood than the Kennedys and Reagans ever were. None of us wants our own class anxieties magnified by the White House...