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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (65537)	4/15/2008 3:26:00 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

The gospel according to Barack Power Line Barack Obama's San Francisco remarks drip with contempt for the concerns of the average American. According to Obama, the beliefs and concerns of the average (small-town, Rustbelt) American are symptoms of embitterment and psychic damage. For this average American, even religion is a function of embitterment and false consciousness. Obama and his fellow congregants in the church of Jeremiah Wright have that true religion. In small-town Pennsylvania they have something that needs Obama's ministrations. Obama exudes arrogance and disdain. This past February, Michelle Obama delivered a speech at a hastily assembled UCLA rally. It is a remakable document to which only Hugh Hewitt devoted the attention it deserved. Michelle Obama presented her husband as the only candidate who stood to cure our sick souls. Her claims on his behalf only made express the implications of his own more soothing rhetoric. In the wake of Barack Obama's remarks to the San Francisco Democrats last Sunday, Michelle Obama's preaching of the gospel according to Barack is revelatory: <<< Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed. >>> We can only pray that our fellow Americans find the gospel according to Barack Obama to be too good for us. powerlineblog.com

To: Sully- who wrote (65537)	4/15/2008 4:30:06 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Trying to defend Barack Obama's comments Betsy's Page John Dickerson at Slate makes a valiant effort to explain away Obama's comments in the most favorable light possible. But even after giving Obama every benefit of the doubt, Dickerson still comes up empty. <<< Ultimately, in trying to explain what Obama was thinking, I run out of string. He wasn't expressing a sweeping view of the human behavior of small-town people. He was making a tactical point about how politicians appeal to voters at election time, but that tactical point about electoral behavior still relies on an unflattering view of small-town voters. No matter what helping hand you extend him, Obama still claimed that voters have been hoodwinked on Election Day, and no one wants to be told that in the past they've been duped into voting for the wrong person. Obama supporters should know just how offensive it is to hear this line of argument. They've been on the receiving end of it for months, as Hillary Clinton and her allies have described them as deluded cult members who are marching behind the inexperienced senator because he gives a pretty speech. Obama supporters don't like it when their well-thought-out reasons for following Obama are dismissed as emotional, irrational, and thoughtless. They should understand, then, why people who don't support Obama—or in the past haven't voted for Democrats—don't like being told that they've drunk some kind of crazy Kool-Aid. >>> betsyspage.blogspot.com

To: Sully- who wrote (65537)	4/15/2008 5:22:38 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

[T]his is a fundamentally Marxist way of looking at the world and Obama deserves to be called on it. Cling V. Bitter, Elitist V. Snob Jonah Goldberg The Corner I agree with Rich entirely. I don't mind him [Obama] saying that small town blue collar workers are bitter over lost jobs. I think that's objectively true in some cases and perfectly defensible as a general statement. The offending word here is "cling." It's a word drenched in haughtiness and condescension. We cling to rocks when we are caught in a current. Obama's imagery suggests that because the economic tide is receding these people are clinging to God and guns, presumably to compensate for the undertow. But he also suggests that if the economic tide were rising these same people would let go of God and guns and ride the currents to happier and more progressive lands where everyone thinks like Obama. In his telling Pennsylvania was once Belgium on the Susquehanna — cheese parties, Sam Harris book clubs etc — and it can be again if only these people get good enough jobs to lay down their guns and bibles. As just about everyone has observed by now, this is a fundamentally Marxist way of looking at the world and Obama deserves to be called on it. But it's not elitist, not really. It clearly snobbish. It's certainly myopic and arrogant. And it's absolutely wrong. But I don't think it's elitist. Maybe I'm biased because I don't have any pressing problem with elitism, rightly understood. Elite derives from the Latin for elect and in our elections we decide who will be our (political) elite. Jefferson believed in a democratic elite which rose up on merit. I do too. We're all elitists in one way or another (Show of hands: Who wants an elite surgeon to perform their heart-lung transplant and who wants a really average surgeon to do it? If you answer that you want the surgeon from the really meaty part of the bell curve, I will concede you are no elitist). What's offensive about Obama's comment isn't its elitism per se, but the arrogance of assuming that those who see the world through a different prism or who are relatively immune to his charms are somehow embittered and confused and therefore less equipped to decide who should be our elected elite. And yes, I understand that elitism has come to mean snobbish arrogance and all that, which is what most people mean when they say elitist. But I'm going to cling to my view of elitism regardless of which way the tide pulls me. 04/15 01:51 PM corner.nationalreview.com