Barack, your application to join Slytherin has been approved...
Posted on 04/15/2008 2:27:41 PM PDT by mdittmar
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, accused of being elitist for remarks he made about small-town American voters, said on Tuesday the slap at his background is amusing and signals a nation in the midst of "political silly season."
The Democratic senator, campaigning in Pennsylvania, dismissed the charges of being elitist and out of touch by fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton and by Republican John McCain as unfounded, given his background.
"I am amused about this notion of elitist, given that when you're raised by a single mom, when you were on food stamps for a while when you were growing up, you went to school on scholarship," he told a town hall meeting of U.S. military veterans in western Pennsylvania.
Obama has come under fire by opponents after he told an audience in San Francisco last week that economic problems led voters in some small towns to become "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion" as an outlet for their frustrations.
Neither of his wife Michelle's parents attended college, and both he and his wife financed their educations with student loans, Obama said.
"We lived for the first 13 years of our marriage up until three years ago in a three-bedroom condo without a garage so if you live in Chicago that means you're scraping ice every morning," he said in rejecting the elitist label.
"When somebody makes that argument, particularly given that I've spent my entire life working with workers in low-income communities to try to make people's lives a little bit better, that's when you know you're in political silly season," said Obama, who leads Clinton in the tight race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"This is what we do politically when we start getting behind in races, and we start going on the attack," he said.
The winner of the Democratic presidential nomination faces McCain, the Republican presumptive nominee, in the November general election.
Obama and his wife lived in a condominium they bought in 1993 for $277,500, The Boston Globe reported. They now live in a house for which they paid $1.95 million in 2005.
Clinton has condemned Obama's remarks from last week in a political ad featuring a woman saying she was "insulted," while McCain said the comments represented "a certain out-of-touch elitism."
Obama's comments on Tuesday came in response to a man in the audience who said he felt the label of elitist was not far from the label of "uppity," a racially insulting term used against blacks.
Obama said he did not think there were racial overtones to the criticism.
Completely agree and I can remember the 1956 election with some clarity (mom was disappointed when Adlai got trounced AGAIN).
Oh, how I hope they nominate this guy. McCain is a bust but he is head and shoulders above either of the dems - on a scale of 1 to 10 I rate McCain at about a 3 maybe a 4. Obama is at Carter’s level (1) and Hillary is at Nixon’s (about 1.5).
At this point I don’t see how McCain can lose against either of these people. But I am sure he will try and find a way.
This is the worst group of Presidential candidates I have seen in my lifetime.
Right on the money.
Well,let me play Devil’s Advocate here:
Is elitism really so bad?Why do they have AP classes for extra bright students in school?Aren’t the Green Berets and the SEALS elite forces in the military?Are not just a few people capable of becoming nuclear physicists?
If I am sitting in a crowd of people trying to read Chaucer,Dante or Shakespeare while everyone around me is yukking it up to Def Comedy Jam or oohing and aahing at Jerry Springer,does that make me an elitist too.
If so,I’m proud to be one.
Agreed. The only hope I have is that we survived a Civil War sort of intact.
Obama calls this silly? Dismissing an entire group of Americans who think his snide, demeaning, nasty little diatribe is pretty stupid.
We don’t need this stupid, fatuous elitist in power.
SnObama does not have the intellectual horsepower to comprehend how elitist he is, it is becoming apparent.
I don’t know if BO is elitist, but his comments show a certain disdain for gun owners and non-America hating church-goers.
It’s not even the “small-town” portrayal... that was simply shorthand for ALL the “little people” of America with even moderately conservative values, whether we live in small towns, suburbs, or cities.
Whenever Obama steps in it he he goes after others in a effort to redirect attention from his mistakes. And of course the MSM lets him get away with it because his is their messiah.
That is everyones fear.
Snob is better than elitist.
What does the number of homes a person owns have to do with elitism? There are plenty of rich people who are salt of the earth and many poor people who desperately hold on to their beliefs of personal superiority.
There is so little to do with his specific _words_ that is the problem with his statement - it’s not guns, church, bitter, etc... It is the attitude that he illustrates - his attitude toward workaday Americans all over this country!
See the quote: Obama, speaking of some Pennsylvanians’ economic anxieties, told supporters at the San Francisco fundraiser: “You go into 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 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.”
The key here has almost nothing to do with “bitter”, nor does it have to do with “small town”... the key is how this “uniter” and similar members of the “intelligentsia” look down on we the “little people” of this country, and our beliefs and values and political motivations! Unless you happen to be one of his elitist comrades or at a high rolling fundraiser, he considers you to be a seriously duped person if you don’t agree with him. Whether it’s religion, guns, illegals, etc... it’s all looked at as being part of being lower class.
His looking down on we who happen to seriously care about our religion explains why he could simply ignore all that Wright was saying to begin with, too. It really didn’t matter to him what was going on in the sermons. He was simply there for show to begin with, and to put in some face time to get “known”.
Even in his “apology”, he can’t see that it’s the way he looks down on us that is the reason for the firestorm. He’s still “standing by” the sentiment - that sentiment has nothing to do with “bitter” but with how these “elites” look down upon us “rubes”.
Now, thanks to his own remarks, that we the “little people” have become seriously aware of how OBama is, “elitist, out-of-touch, phony, and even unpatriotic”. The fact that he “bared his soul” this way in front of a group of super-rich, super-libs who had supposedly been vetted and would never release these SECRET remarks is even more telling about how much of a Marxist, and elitist he is. Don’t forget that these honest thoughts of his were never supposed to be known by the general public, only by his Marxist supporters.
SnObama -— It can’t be said any better than that in seven letters.
Well stated.
“I am amused about this notion of elitist. Responding to the silliness of calling me elite is beneath me.”
All of us have unique talents, and in that we we can consider ourselves somewhat elitist in that we feel that we are perhaps better than others on those things. The thing that galls me about both Obama and Hillary is neither is really talented in anything. Really. Come on... disparage the working class, but neither of these clowns could even change a light bulb. They simply have no talent. Any working class person easily could out accomplish O-Luna or the Hillabest in just one morning’s work. The interesting thing is that both are trained in the law, but do not seem capable of concatenating words in a logical manner. And creativity? Foggetabowdit! We’ve got some king sized problems in this country, and I gar-an-tee that neither could answer even an elementary problem about economics, fuel prices, global warming (not) etc. A pox on them all... including McKennedy.
Barack, your application to join Slytherin has been approved...
I see your point.Both Hillary and Obama are very clever wordsmiths and maybe thats why the entered Law instead of business or the military.And both of them have never worked a real job in their lives unless you believe politics and the law are real jobs.
They both remind me of people George Wallace described as”pointy headed intellectuals who couldn’t park their bikes straight”.
The irony is that I have been one with little talent for mechanical aptitude and love the world of ideas as well.Yet Wallace was still right about the liberal intellectual class in this country.
Obama told Joe Klein: "I had to reconcile a lot of different threads growing up—race, class ... For example, I was going to a fancy prep school, and my mother was on food stamps while she was getting her Ph.D."
That puts things in a different light.
He does bring up an interesting issue, though.
We have a generation of young Black people picked by prep schools, colleges, and universities out of markedly unelite circumstances to become part of the country's elite.
If it worked, if they did become part of the elite, can they escape the anti-elite feelings of the rest of the country?
As politicians go, Obama's probably less a part of the country's established elites than many of his peers, but with some of the things he says, you do have to wonder.
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