“Elitist!”

Clinging to religion or guns is one thing, clinging to the elite is worse

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
04/13/08

Back when I was 11 and in Southern California, a time of a too-slowly dying pope and a too-rapidly living president, I had a liberal aunt who loved Adlai Stevenson. As a part of her (eventually successful) drive to liberalize me, she had me listen to some of his speeches. They were on scratchy LPs, mono, and of dicey sound quality. Combined with Stevenson’s still-unfamiliar American accent, they made understanding the speeches a bit of a burden.

Part of the problem was that I was only 11. Stevenson, unlike most politicians, spoke as an adult to adults. Compared to what we have today, so did Eisenhower. Neither of them were aiming for audiences that might be mentally challenged by the Teletubbies. But Adlai had a wit that reminded me of my hero, Winston Churchill. And the Cuban missile crisis the year before had taught me that the boring stuff on the front page of the newspaper could kill me if I wasn’t paying attention.

My aunt told me of his legendary decision about letting cats roam free*, and the time someone told him that he was sure to “get the vote of every thinking man” in the U.S. Stevenson replied, “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.”

Years later, as Reagan ascended and America began a decline, I heard some of those speeches again. He didn’t use sound bites, he didn’t use race or economics or religion to bait and entice his listeners or stir up their anger against commies or beatniks. He spoke to them as if they were thinking adults capable of evaluating the facts and drawing their own thought-out conclusions.

I like to think that he lost his presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 because in the first, he was running against an incredibly popular war hero who had a folksy but articulate style, and in 1956 because he was up against a popular incumbent.

I watched the political discourse decline in American, poisoned by the slow seep of hatred from the right and the increasing willingness of politicians to obey their campaign advisors and toss aside all pretense of policy or personal opinions and flat out pander to focus groups. In due course, the Mencken prediction came to pass, and we now have a White House that is “adorned by a flat-out moron.”

So when Barack Obama gave his speech on race, I was caught a bit off guard. He didn’t pander or fingerpoint, and he spoke clearly, directly, and said things which would make some people uncomfortable. That is rare in politics these days. You see it in fringe candidates like Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel or Ron Paul, but mainstream candidates mostly just pander and play gotcha games against one another. That informed my own distaste for even bothering to discuss the presidential campaigns.

I won’t go so far as to say that Barack Obama is the next Adlai Stevenson, but he does have a trait for speaking clearly, directly, and as an adult speaking to other adults. It’s a trait that shows the essential absurdity in the campaign process: the elements of personality that we need most desperately in a leader are the ones considered suicide on the campaign trail.

The other night, in a closed campaign meeting in San Francisco, he said the following: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them, and they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Now, here’s a surprising thing. You won’t find a single person who will say that the statement is false in any way. To put it in psychobabble, people take free-floating externalized anxieties and sublimate them into responses that at least have an illusion of being proactive. Put people under a type of stress they can’t address, and they’ll react by doing something – anything – else. But I guess that’s elitist talk. Bad ME!

Now, a demagogue will take free floating anxieties like those Obama was describing, and twist them to his own ends. “You’re out of work because the Mexicans stole all your jobs!” “You’re unhappy because you don’t let Jesus into your life.” “There are people out there who mean you harm. So be sure to have a gun handy at all times.” Sometimes it doesn’t even have to make sense. The crowd at the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page have been telling middle America for years that they are poor because rich liberal elitists are taxing the wealthy and that costs jobs. Here in timber country, people still bitterly blame “enviros” for the lack of timber jobs, and ignore the fact that timber extraction is the highest it’s been in 25 years. Environmental concerns didn’t wipe out the jobs: the mills and the cutting operations simply got more efficient and the companies laid off all the superfluous workers. But the timber companies promoted the spotted owl as the culprit so a scapegoat would get the blame instead of them.

One of the weasels tried to turn it around, and asked what I would think if Hillary said that a lot of black people, faced with misery in their lives, cling to their charismatic religions. I thought about it for a moment, and said that it would be just as true as what Obama said, and realized that if Hillary DID speak forthrightly like that, and stopped trying to please the right (a fatal flaw that greatly weakened President Clinton in his first year as president and benefited neither him nor the country), I would be a lot more inclined to support her.

Instead, she pandered, calling Obama “elitist, divisive and out of touch and did not reflect the values of Americans”

“I don't think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not. If you want to be the president of all Americans, you need to respect all Americans.”

By talking to them as if they were children, incapable of introspection or self-honesty, Senator? Is that how you respect Americans?

Only in America can someone claim to represent the working class after pulling down $100 million over the past six years. Only in this political climate would a candidate have the gall to call someone who only made $30,000 a year a few years ago “elitist and out of touch” with working people.

It was a disgraceful performance by Clinton, who seems to share her husband’s delusion that if you are nice to the far right, they’ll be nice to you. It’s time for tea with your good friends, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Scaife, Mrs. Clinton. You can discuss how to make Obama look elitist.

McCain tried to exploit it, too, but he’ll have trouble getting any traction from it. The multiple homes and shop-worn trophy wife don’t exactly mark him as a working class hero, and if he isn’t the worthless third-generation whelp in a family of idle billionaires like Putsch, his amassed fortune can’t take close scrutiny. (Clinton, at least, came by her money honestly). The idea that McCain represents ordinary working people is ludicrous.

Obama, to his credit, stuck by what he said. “...[I] said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter. They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through. So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country. And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention.”

We need a politician who can talk to us as adults. Obama seems to fit the bill.

* Stevenson, as governor of Illinois, vetoed a bill intended to punish cat owners who let their pets wander off the property, writing, “I cannot agree that it should be the declared public policy of Illinois that a cat visiting a neighbor’s yard or crossing the highways is a public nuisance. It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming. Many live with their owners in apartments or other restricted premises, and I doubt if we want to make their every brief foray an opportunity for a small game hunt by zealous citizens—with traps or otherwise. I am afraid this Bill could only create discord, recrimination and enmity. Also consider the owner’s dilemma: To escort a cat abroad on a leash is against the nature of the cat, and to permit it to venture forth for exercise unattended into a night of new dangers is against the nature of the owner. Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in rural areas, in combating rodents—work they necessarily perform alone and without regard for property lines.
“We are all interested in protecting certain varieties of birds. That cats destroy some birds, I well know, but I believe this legislation would further but little the worthy cause to which its proponents give such unselfish effort. The problem of cat versus bird is as old as time. If we attempt to resolve it by legislation who knows but what we may be called upon to take sides as well in the age old problems of dog versus cat, bird versus bird, or even bird versus worm. In my opinion, the State of Illinois and its local governing bodies already have enough to do without trying to control feline delinquency.”