""I asked Mubarak whether he felt ready to serve as Egypt’s President. He smiled. “I’m not going to answer that question the way you’d like me to,” he said. “What I will tell you is that, in the last nine years, my social and political exposure has given me a better understanding of the issues, of the problems that average citizens feel.” "Gamal and his older brother, Alaa, were raised in tightly guarded, luxurious residences in Heliopolis, a neighborhood favored by top officials and military officers, and were driven around Cairo in limousines. “Gamal spent his life in palaces,” Osama al-Ghazali Harb, who is the editor of a foreign-policy journal in Cairo and an acquaintance of the Mubarak family’s, said. “He never walked the streets, he never took a taxi, he had no contact with Egyptian culture. He lived as a prince, surrounded by generals and millionaires.”" (thanks Redouane)