Friday, April 25, 2008

What's the Matter with Bitterness?

Here is an article by Thomas Frank of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" fame on the "bitter" controversy between Hillary and Barak:

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge ... fastened upon Mr. Obama – "elitism." No one means ... Mr. Obama is a wealthy person... What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people... He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market. ...

Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. ...

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal... And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up...? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? ... Didn't he have a funky Southern accent...? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have ... brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

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