Wealth & Money Quote by Art Buchwald

Buchwald’s joke lands because it pretends to ask an innocent, observational question while quietly accusing an entire political culture of performance. Of course you’ve “seen” candidates talk to people on television. The punchline is that you almost never see them talk to the rich as rich. Wealth gets edited out of the campaign narrative, even as money quietly scripts the show.

The line works like a camera trick: it forces you to picture the standard montage of candidates in diners, on factory floors, at someone’s kitchen table. Politics, on TV, is intimacy theater. Candidates are always leaning in, always “listening,” always framed against the wholesome textures of ordinary life. The rich, by contrast, are either off-screen or disguised as “job creators,” “community leaders,” or donors at a tasteful fundraiser shot from a safe distance. Everyone knows the rich are there; the image just refuses to confirm it.

Buchwald was writing in an era when television fully fused politics with entertainment, and when campaign finance was becoming less a backstage mechanism than a governing reality. His question needles the hypocrisy without giving opponents a clean target: he’s not making a policy argument, he’s describing a missing shot. That’s the satirist’s advantage. If candidates openly courted wealth on camera, the public could judge the transaction. So the transaction stays implicit, and the candidate keeps practicing a kind of class ventriloquism - speaking “for” regular people while being funded by people you’re not supposed to picture.