You may not know this, but you are a smug, condescending liberal elitist. There are more appropriate names I could call you, but they wouldn’t be fit to print.
At least this is the perception the media has been reinforcing since Sen. Barack Obama appeared at a fundraiser in San Francisco last week and said that it is understandable how “bitter” many middle-income voters have become over their economic circumstances. Obama remarked that so-called middle Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to explain their frustrations.
Given that the Pennsylvania primary between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton is still a week away, and most news organizations have pulled their reporters out of Iraq, the newspapers and cable news programs have taken Obama’s remarks and stretched them out for a week of coverage of how Obama, the Ivy League-educated former law professor, is a cultural elitist.
Because the news outlets are far too lazy to practice any actual journalism, they have also decided to use Obama as yet another example as to why so many liberals, especially on the coasts, think they are so much better than everybody else. According to the experts, it is the cultural elitism of the left that makes Democrats so unelectable. (This time next year, the chances are good that the Democrats will have 60 seats in the Senate and control of the White House. Man, so unelectable.)
If you were to believe everything you see on Fox News, you would be under the impression that Obama is the leader of a mob of nouveau riche snobs. Of course, the reality is that liberals in this country are as varied a voting constituency as any in the world, ranging from carpenter unions in Kentucky to environmentalists in Colorado, from a growing Mexican-American population in the Southwest to college students at, say, UCLA.
Nevertheless, we’ve been forced to hear about how much Obama and all liberals really detest “small-town voters,” and how most liberals are latte-sipping, Birkenstock-wearing, Prius-driving snobs. It all became too much when I read through Monday’s New York Times and saw William Kristol’s column, which compared Obama to Karl Marx and said that the presidential hopeful is “disdainful of small-town America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize.”
First, let me just point out that Kristol is the editor of The Weekly Standard, the neoconservative magazine that made the most strenuous and myopic arguments for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Second, and more importantly, Kristol’s argument that Obama, like all liberals, is an elitist who looks down upon “middle Americans” for being religious, is just plain incorrect.
Obama’s comment is not elitist. It is in line with the teachings of every major spiritual leader in the history of the world. As Jesus is credited as saying in Matthew 19:24, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” It is commonly believed in religious philosophies that people who are preoccupied with material wealth are less likely to be guided by a spiritual core.
The truth is that media criticism of Obama holds no water and only reinforces the Republican Party’s line that liberals look down on “the common man.” The truth is that, starting with Ronald Reagan 28 years ago and moving up to the present, the GOP has done everything in its power to erase all the progressive economic policies of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. As a result, we have returned to a gilded age of robber barons and gross inequality.
The Republicans try to curry favor with lower and middle-income voters by presenting themselves as the candidates of “moral values,” yet when they get elected to office, the only thing they focus on is implementing hyperconservative policies that gravely harm those same voters.
So the next time you are accused of being a cultural elitist or a latte liberal, just ask the other person what kind of capital gains taxes they support, or what kind of health-care reform they want for the poor and the elderly.
You will be surprised to learn that you are more of a populist than Bill O’Reilly would have you believe.
E-mail De Jong at adejong@media.ucla.edu if you know the difference between an Ethiopian and a Sumatran blend. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.