Barack an Elitist?

Barack is being tagged an elitist by his opponents now that an audio tape of him speaking at a San Francisco event last week has surfaced. Both Hillary and McCain are seizing with excitement this small crack in the Messiah's veneer. Responding to a question regarding the challenges of getting the support of working class voters in Pennsylvania, Barack explained that they're "bitter," and

“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.”



Unfortunately the tape isn't very good, so its not likely to get a good prime time TV run, but hopefully more, better quality, tape of Barack revealing his heart will surface.

Nevertheless, this is an important insight into the obvious - that to Barack Obama, working people are "them," a group of people whose feelings he doesn't dismiss out of hand - he shows his true liberal credentials by understanding them, but there is also the requisite liberal condescension. They are good people who are getting it wrong because they're not sophisticated enough to see through the fallacies that their frustrations lead them to embrace.

When Barack speaks of folks who work for a living, the word "they" must appear frequently. He was speaking to "us," a group of affluent supporters in the nation's most liberal city.

By the way, even as Barack mocks those who channel their frustration into support for the second amendment with his remarks to rich liberals in San Francisco, he mocks them again by positioning himself as someone who is pro-gun. Writes Politico:

The campaign has asked gun rights advocates like state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat from rural Elk County with an “A+” rating from the NRA, to form a coalition of supporters who can vouch for Obama.

“It is clear out there that I am for Obama, and they have reached out to me as a sportsman and a gun owner,” Surra said Thursday. “There has been an outreach to pro-gun legislators, pro-gun people who are sympathetic to Obama’s message.”

Is Barack an elitist? Well, how would you characterize someone who has lived Barack's life if he was white? Check out his resume, and its hard to see how Barack would have any sense of connection to working folk.

Barack went to a fancy prep school in Honolulu, got a degree in international relations from Columbia, banged around for a couple of years as a community organizer before going to Harvard law, finally getting his first career job, as an attorney, in 1993 at the age of 32.

Was he working as an attorney for a non-profit, perhaps, as one might expect from a Messiah, learning his craft while going into court to fight for the rights of the poor and downtrodden - looking to give back? Ah.... no.

The following is from a retrospective in the International Tribune from early 2007:

"As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama had his pick of top law firms. He chose Miner's Chicago civil rights firm, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.

Like many lawyers, Obama never took part in a trial. He spent most of his nine-year career working as part of a team, drawing up contracts, briefs and other legal papers.

The firm offered another advantage to Obama. It was close to the political action."

During this period, Barack also taught constitutional law. At age 41, Barack ran for the state senate, continuing to work at the law firm part time.

The reality is, life among the elite is about all that Barack has ever known. Even his much touted contact with foreign life came through the lense of the intellectual class. His fathers, after all, were in the U.S. on grants to study here.

Of course Barack is an elitist. He is where he is because he is the candidate of the elitists, his most important base of support being the suburban affluent and their college attending offspring.

His blackness is a huge asset in this race because he is a black whom liberal suburbanites feel so comfortable with, having lead a suburban life of privilege. His blackness is a huge asset because it is a barely noticeable surface hue that is secondary to his overall suburban, highly educated whiteness.

This is why Barack needed Pastor Wright. Jeremiah provided Barack with "street cred," making it possible for him to gain essential support from the black political community of Chicago as he built a political career.