Obama the Elitist??????

Obama the Elitist

13 April 2008

Written by: Mike Krauss Posted under Essay Index

Senator Barack Obama seems to have a penchant for honest thought. It was again on display in remarks he made this past week about some Pennsylvania voters.

Obama said, "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them...They take refuge in their faith and their community and their family and the things they can count on."

Hillary Clinton immediately accused Obama of "looking down" on Pennsylvanians. A spokesman for the McCain campaign described the remarks as "condescending" and "out of touch."

To the contrary.

Unlike the candidates for president who are in Pennsylvania for the primary election, my family has been in Pennsylvania for three hundred years. I was educated in its public schools and one of its very fine private colleges. As Director of the PA Bureau of Rural Affairs I was responsible for the rehabilitation of dilapidated houses throughout rural Pennsylvania. As Director of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee I assisted candidates and campaigns in counties no candidate for president will set foot in this year, or ever.

Obama got it exactly right, and initially he didn't back off. (Although there is more spin in his campaign today than in the solar system.)

"No, I'm in touch," he countered. "I know exactly what's going on. People are fed up, they're angry, they're frustrated and they're bitter."

And many are, and have been for a long time.

James Carville once described Pennsylvania as "Philadelphia in one corner, Pittsburgh in the other and Alabama in between." As far back as Lyndon Johnson's Great Society the voters in that "Alabama in between" of socially conservative, rural and small town Pennsylvania saw the federal money flowing to the urban centers but not to their depressed communities, and they resented it.

As the old coal mines and steel mills were closed and shuttered, but the suburbs of the new economy boomed, that resentment deepened into bitterness. Now, as the economic prospects of the middle class worsen that bitterness is spreading.

Both the Clinton and McCain camps seized on these remarks to work another theme they have been trying out and that I suspect will resonate in many parts of Pennsylvania and may cost Obama the primary election there: that he is an elitist.

It all came down to bowling.

Attempting to connect with - dare I say what they were both thinking, the common man - both Obama and Clinton went bowling. For the record, they showed themselves equally inexperienced. But, Obama's reaction was telling.

Obama noted that there is a bowling alley in the White House. (Easily the most elite housing in the nation.) He got a few laughs when he said he planned to "tear it out and build a basketball court."

A person more at one with those Pennsylvania voters would have said he planned to take lessons and not - since we're being honest - that he would elevate a largely black sport over a largely white sport.

Clinton would never have missed the racial implication. Obama did. He may actually be the first post-racial candidate of the modern era. He may be the modern era.

Obama is not an elitist, which may be broadly defined as one who has a sense of entitlement by virtue of belonging to a group or class of people with self perceived superiority. That would be Hillary (Ready On Day One) Clinton, w ho has relied on the moneyed elites with whom she and her husband have hung out for two decades to fund her campaign, while Obama has run the most broadly based fundraising operation of any candidate for president ever.

But while Obama may not be an elitist, he is undeniably part of the American elite: a well educated, wonderfully articulate and intellectually capable member of the most elite club in the world, the one hundred member United States Senate.

Clinton and McCain belong to the same club, of course, but I have begun to suspect that intellectually Obama may be in a different league, and that Clinton and McCain sense that.

So they brand his perception and candor as elitist and try to paint him as removed from the ordinary Americans whom they so well embody.

But being able to step back from those you represent or hope to represent, and keep enough remove to put their situation in perspective and understand what is actually going on, as opposed to being driven by focus groups, polling, racial antagonisms and the media psycho-drama of the day is a useful quality in a leader.

And all things considered, I think I may actually prefer Obama's evident intellectual remove to the contrived folksiness of many of the other elites who have campaigned for and governed as president in modern times. I name no names.

But then, what do I know?

I bowled in my college fraternity league, comprised entirely of the sons of the white, well-to-do, having learned to bowl as a boy with my grandmother, on the private two lane bowling alley at her country club, where the pins were set by hand by young African Americans, not yet called bl acks, but at that time still called Negroes.

I always thought bowling was an elitist sport, and was rather disappointed that the elitist Obama is so bad at it.