In one frame, at a resolution of 640 x 360, is a scruffy man in a gray t-shirt, a ball cap, a duct taped backpack strapped on his shoulders, speaking into a camera about the plights of joblessness and poverty in a state known for its high levels of both. In an adjacent frame, thumbnail-sized, is the same man, clean-cut and in a suit, sharing a screenshot with a couple of business reporters: “Spain, US Fiscal Cliff & Insolvency – Rick Santelli v Neel Kashkari.”
Here, on the total space of a mere YouTube page, is the problem of taking seriously a public figure trying to live as the necessitous do. Democrats in D.C. and elsewhere have made such attempts this year, recently “living the [minimum] wage” by subsisting on a week’s budget of $77 — Ted Strickland, the former governor of Ohio, had to walk instead of taking a cab (poor guy), and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) tweeted her beggarly diet of cereal, fruit, muffins and eggs (breakfast), standard sandwiches (lunch), and poultry and pasta (dinner). One of her suppers included hot dogs; contrary to the despair this was intended to convey, I grew up looking forward to the summer nights my family would grill, or even pan-heat, chicken sausages and eat coleslaw. Only an oblivious politician could regard normal facets of life as dire.
Kashkari, the vagabond in one video and the CNBC contributor in the next, and a Republican candidate for the California governorship, is the latest politico to wage such a “political stunt.” He spent a week in Fresno, Calif., with $40, one change of clothes, no place to stay and no place to work. He wandered from business to business looking for any employment he could find, and was turned away everywhere he went. He ate a Subway sandwich, bought a couple of bananas, and ate at a food bank. He went to a coin laundry once. He showered once. He slept on pavement and benches, and was told to move. And, of course, he did much of this while being filmed.
“When pressed to explain the video camera following him around,” the Sacramento Bee wrote, “Kashkari said he would tell people he was making a documentary about ‘the job situation in California.’ ”
When he was pressed further, “[W]e would come out and tell them who I am and what this is for,” he said at a press conference Thursday. One night, a security officer who asked Kashkari to leave the park in which he was asleep recognized him as a gubernatorial hopeful.
“I said, ‘Do me a favor … I’m working on a documentary on the plight of jobs and joblessness and homelessness. And I would really appreciate if you don’t tell anybody that you saw me,’ ” Kashkari said he told the guard. “And he said, ‘That’s no problem.’ And then I left.’ ”
Kashkari acknowledged in his short documentary, about 10 minutes long, that he knew there was an end game to his situation — that his inability to find a job would bother him for no longer than the week he volunteered to live on the street. When it concluded, he would return to being a banker, a former Bush administration official, a candidate, and a man, though not rich beyond the dreams of avarice, not short for money.
Yes, Kashkari tried his hand at a “political stunt” — but he was forthcoming about it. He tried putting his feet in another man’s shoes — but he wore them, walked in them, slept in them. His experience resulted in interviews with Californians down on their luck, produced interpersonal communication with the poor he is running to represent, and bolstered his belief, as he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about his time in Fresno, that “the best social program in the world is a good job.”
“I walked for hours and hours in search of a job, giving me a lot of time to think. Five days into my search, hungry, tired, and hot, I asked myself: What would solve my problems? Food stamps? Welfare? An increased minimum wage?” he wrote. “No. I needed a job. Period.”
He is a long shot to defeat incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown, who is flush with cash and 20 points ahead in the polls. But as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said about his recently unveiled anti-poverty agenda, Kashkari can at least “start a conversation” — one about “over-regulation and over-taxation that drive jobs out of state, failing schools and misguided water policies,” which have contributed to one of every four Californians living in poverty, 7.3 percent of them being out of a job, and many of them calling the street home.
What Kashkari did that others haven’t is begin the conversation at street-level.
