Beltway Narratives on Elitism

It seems that beltway media insiders have decided that, with the nomination basically locked up, it is time to scare the hell out of Democratic superdelegates and create electoral problems for Barack Obama in the general. These people have seen Democrats lose before (and helped make it happen), and think that apparent elitism has been a big part of the problem. They cannot escape the prism of the last few campaigns to examine the electorate. They are the ones who condescend and degrade the electorate when they repeatedly tell us one dumb quote by Obama will taint him, as if these blue collar folks cannot size people up except via the single sound bite.

Consider the discussions tonight on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN about Obama's problems. Pundits say:

-The substance of this "bitter" quote does not matter because the American people have chosen good 'ol boys over "elitists" like John Kerry and Al Gore before. Hmm, I wonder who made these men so elitist and out of touch? Oh, right, beltway writers in love with the romanticism of cowboy George W. Bush. And who made the economy worse for working people? Oh, right, George Bush.

-Obama is an Ivy-league educated man who is not a blabbering fool but can actually form coherent sentences. Never mind that he is the only candidate not to take lobbyist money--he just SEEMS so elite and well-spoken, why not write stories about it?

As Rachel Maddow trenchantly pointed out, John McCain does not get scrutinized for making extremely important factual mistakes about Muslims and who is and is not in al Qaeda because such mistakes do not fit into the MSM narrative about him. Meantime, the flowery, dazzling Obama says something that is probably factually accurate (if poorly worded) and it becomes a huge scandal. Not because it is problematic with voters, but because MSM writers have decided it ought to be. So they report the hell out of it and distort it and make him seem elitist, so when voters start to think he is elitist (because of reporting), the chattering class will look to have been correct all along!

The best way to condescend is to think for others, to predict their thoughts, to essentialize them based on one or two elections. That is what prejudice is all about. And these pundits are guilty.