Gonzales' Father's Best Days

Throughout his ordeals of the past months and again yesterday at the climax, our outgoing Attorney General kept repeating the mantra, “Even my worst days have been better than my father’s best days.”

In clinging so fiercely to his own achievement of the American Dream, Gonzales was unwittingly evoking one of the nightmares of the Administration he served--reversing two centuries of constant upward progress from one generation to the next.

This spring, the “American Mobility Report” showed young men today worse off financially than their fathers were at the same age, a reversal of the generational advances that have made the “Land of Opportunity” a reality from the start.

In March, three out of every four Americans in a Pew Research Center poll said they believed that “the rich just get richer while the poor just get poorer.”

Gonzales’ benefactor George Bush made it possible for him to outdo his immigrant laborer father but, by widening the gap between rich and poor, has been pulling up the drawbridge for new generations still mired in poverty.

It seems to have escaped the Attorney General’s notice that he was faithfully serving a President who has been busy denying the possibilities that were open to him to millions like him who followed.