He may not be president of anything, but his job, per the HHG, is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.
In a piece titled "The Tea Party Warns of a New Elite. They're Right," Charles ("Bell Curve") Murray defines a 'new elite' no longer composed of bluebloods, but of people who've graduated from the best colleges, who hail from the upper middle classes and who have at least one college-educated parent themselves.
Yeah. Like we run the world or anything.
Because last time I looked, Big Money still rules the world. Even with all the stars aligned our way, it took a year-long death march for the good guys to get an almost-universal health care bill through Congress. Regulation of the Wall Street mega-rich boys who brought down our economy a few years back was watered down, and the jury's still out on whether it will really amount to much. Many other things we were for (climate change legislation is probably the sine qua non of hoped-for actions whose strongest constituency was Murray's 'New Elite') didn't even get considered by one or both houses of Congress.
The New Ruling Elite is the same as the Old Ruling Elite. Money = Power. Murray's just trying to draw people's attention away from that fact.
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I'd also note that the Real America he sets against the New Elite is largely rural/small town and white. Like many others on the right, he's still peddling the notion that America should be run to suit small-town white people, even though they stopped resembling a majority a long time ago. Same old same old.