The election is shaping up as ordinary folks versus the elite. The elite are winning. Lots of ordinary folks have absorbed the sneering values of the elite. Case in point: A friend of mine received a lovely note from none other than George W. Bush praising a book my friend had written. When the author went to the post office to graciously send the President a copy of his latest book, a postal clerk harrumphed, “A book for Bush? Maybe somebody will read it to him.”
Taxi drivers in Washington (I am a non-driver, so I know) listen to NPR all day and I find many are worried about…America’s Image Abroad. They are also eager to end the war so that the money that goes for it can be spent here, an odd proposition for guys who are obviously working hard and (at least as I can ascertain) not dependent on government.
The elite vs. ordinary battle helps explain why Sarah Palin became (in some quarters) an instant hate object: She doesn’t aspire to be accepted by the Ivy League set. How dare she! This makes her less vulnerable to their taunts. How really, double-dog dare she! Like Joe the Plumber, Sarah is the voice of ordinary people. Note her confidence in this interview with Glenn Beck.
“The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn’t qualify for admission to the national political fraternity,” writes Daniel Henninger in today’s Wall Street Journal. Read the whole piece-here is a tidbit:
“The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation’s mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.”
Sarah and Joe, however, have resonance for the ordinary American: here is an American Thinker piece suggesting that Joe-mentum may be greater than we think. And, the folks I’ve designed ordinary people are really more extraordinary than the tired old media and Hollywood hacks who set the elite agenda. Here Byron York meets some extraordinary ordinary folks at a McCain rally.
On the other side are our elites, including these pathetic academics, three thousand-strong, who have signed a petition against “demonizing” violent sixties revolutionary Bill Ayres-I’d say Ayres demonized himself when he tried to bomb the Pentagon and later said he wished his radical cohort had done more. Quite a few luminaries sighed:
“Among the people who signed the petition are No. 5, Columbia University professor of Arab studies Rashid Khalidi, and No. 814, former University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill.
“Churchill made headlines when he called the victims of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center ‘little Eichmanns’ and compared them to Nazis in an essay. He was fired from his job in Boulder for plagiarism.
“Khalidi, a Palestinian activist, was a director of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s press agency in 1982, according to The New York Times, when the PLO was still designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.”
Most ordinary people won’t hear about this petition-most of the the media is too busy trying to dig the dirt on Sarah Palin to bother with this very revealing story.