Posted on 05/12/2008 9:15:42 AM PDT by fweingart
Nothing has been quite as exciting and as disappointing or even disgusting as the grand drama of this Democratic contest for the nomination.
We have seen Barack Obama rise and, with a new tone, make biracial identity a public fact of American life. We have also seen Americans reinvigorated, surging with a refreshing patriotism that is fully aware of the country's shortcomings.
We have seen America's history of struggling toward fairness become, perhaps for the first time, a common heritage that crossed lines of color, class, religion, region and sexual identity.
In Obama's world, every American can lay claim to the Constitution, to the Abolition movement, to the destruction of the slavery system by the Civil War, to women getting the vote, to organized labor, to the defeat of fascism and to the victories of the Civil Rights movement. Those were not the struggles and the victories of special interest groups.
As Patrick Buchanan predicted, the only hope for Obama's foes was to knock him off of his pedestal and into the mud-wrestling we have seen define our politics. But the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was the big bomb that didn't quite go off.
Wright's ethnic Gong Show - and the vast right-wing conspiracy that Hillary Clinton joined when she helped to give it credence - may have allowed Clinton to greasily slip through the door of victory in Indiana, but it raised issues that should make us stop on a dime.
Columbia- and Harvard-educated, bad-bowling Obama is an elite, the conservatives - and the Clintons - claim. He is out of touch with the working class, they say.
It has become commonplace for the predictable millionaire puppets of Fox News and their conservative talk radio counterparts to present themselves as the voices of the working class in combat with an educated elite from places like Harvard.
But beneath those cliches fester ideas that are deeply anti-democratic.
They are anti-democratic because they scoff at this basic truth: Education is the key to social mobility in our country. The stereotyped working class has no innate limits. It has produced the majority of doctors, engineers, architects, educators and others who realized the dreams of their families by studying hard and moving into careers quite different from those of their parents and their neighbors.
Education has always been viewed as suspect by everyone from slave owners to totalitarians. Wherever in the world you find them, they share one hostility: They hate books.
The presidency is not an Academy Award for Best Performance as a bowler, a fast food gobbler, a whisky and beer guzzler, a hard-hat-wearer or a hunter. We ought to know how far leadership capabilities are from surfaces, slogans and costumes.
And we should be ever suspicious of anyone or any group that scorns education, that pretends to believe that only the simple and the uncomplicated can express the national ethos.
That is absolutely ridiculous in a country from which so much technological and scientific innovation has come. Tell that to Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers or Bill Gates, none of whom were from the upper class. Or are we to believe they were just simple men looking for a loud bar and a cold beer?
The precious opportunity that our democracy provides is the chance to stop, look, listen and think through all that history has taught us about the bottom and about the top.
Real leadership is something internal, not superficial, and should be judged by substance, policy and solutions that are empathetic but realistic, inventive, fiscally responsible and feasible. No one knows the taste of pie in the sky, but we have all felt and smelled the putrid humidity of hot air.
His entire career has been playing cards with entire deck being comprised of race cards. He attempts to hide his actions along with his "trusted" spiritual adviser.
People say he's the new politician , but what comes out of his mouth and what he does are diametrically opposed. Not to mention his past. Rezko , Rev.Wright, his not proud wife.. People in this country elected Bush because he was the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. We got what we asked for. Now we have a chance to elect an educated, half-black man. Does that give you goose flesh or what?
The future of our country, and probably the planet, hinge on the outcome of this election.
Needs a “BARF” alert!
BAAAAAARRRRRRRFFFFFFF!
Like the only people criticizing Obambi are the uneducated...
I could plausibly argue that the ones supporting the Obamamessiah are the propagandized, not the educated.
No, I show contempt for miseducation.
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley on the capacity of the elite to rule.
When elitist jackasses attempt to insult the right wingers (me, hopefully you) in this nation by suggesting we're uneducated, it only points out the embarassing fact that their education has been larded up with absolutely all non-essentials.
If politically correct science can come up with a text book, it will be taught.
Kool-Ade vendor alert!
Let’ s change that from a Boston phone book to say, Omaha.
Let’ s change that from a Boston phone book to say, Omaha.
More like a COSMIC MEGA-BARF, HURL’EN from the souls of my feet alert..
The left doesn’t understand it, because it’s part of their worldview.
It’s not about how rich or how educated someone is that makes them elitist.
It’s about their attitude towards others. That somehow, they “know better”, or can possibly have more knowledge about the situations that people are in than sumation of the knowledge the millions of people that are actually IN those situations.
They think that they, from their ivory tower, can make more informed decisions than the individuals in the situations requiring the decisions.
Enemies of ‘elite’ Barack Obama oppose reeducation camps.
“We have also seen Americans reinvigorated, surging with a refreshing patriotism that is fully aware of the country’s shortcomings.” What planet is this guy from? Oh, yea, New York.
One of the reasons that people like Obama succeed in this country is that the American public appears to be and behaves as though it’s completely incapable of seperating the Propaganda of the Liberal Media outlets from the true facts of a situation. This article is typical of how the Liberal Elites in the media will package the Obama campaign; they will ignore the facts of Obama, i.e. that he’s a big “S” Socialist and likely a racist as well. If Americans elect this guy, they will have openned the door to unbridled wealth redistribution aimed at relieving the middle class and the upper middle income groups, (not the wealthy, they can’t be hurt because they’ll just leave), from their property and any savings they might have managed to accumulate. And that will then be redistributed, (badly) to the PCP’s, i.e. the Politically Correct Protected Entitlement groups. Worse, by raising taxes on dividends to 40%, they seek to insure that Joe Average white guy will never be able to retire, to otherwise “withdraw” quietly from the system, but rather, will require he toil away endlessly, feeding the evil, corrupt government.
The writer’s idea of “educated” is indoctrination to Communism. And now science is infiltrated by an insane insistence that evolution has more than a passing importance in “hard” science, something most Communists find not just “hard”, but impossible.
Once again, Obama isn’t criticized for being one of the elite, he is criticized for being elitist. Big difference.
And he still supports Obama. Amazing.
It's Obamaesque elitist LW policies that have lead to inner city 40% high school drop out rates.
I think it’s a signal about how great America is, where else can a Black Kid raised by a single mother become an elitist?
That’s Social Mobility in the USA for you that the Europeans can only dream about.
It's too bad that he's also an educated, smooth talking (when scripted, photogenic idiot.
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