Election 2010
Elitism: The Charge That Obama Can’t Shake
PICK ONE Barack Obama is either a snob or misunderstood.
By PETER BAKER
Published: October 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — In the Boston-area home of a wealthy hospital executive one Saturday evening this month, President Obama departed from his usual campaign stump speech and offered an explanation as to why Democrats were seemingly doing so poorly this election season. Voters, he said, just aren’t thinking straight.
Also in the Week in Review
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D.I.Y. Populism, Left and Right (October 31, 2010)
Doug Mills/The New York Times
HEAR ME? As the elitism war has raged this fall, the president has fought back.
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“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” he told a roomful of doctors who chipped in at least $15,200 each to Democratic coffers. “And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.”
The notion that voters would reject Democrats only because they don’t understand the facts prompted a round of recriminations — “Obama the snob,” read the headline on a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush — and fueled the underlying argument of the campaign that ends Tuesday. For all the discussion of health care and spending and jobs, at the core of the nation’s debate this fall has been the battle of elitism.
Mr. Obama’s remark that autumn evening played into a perception promoted by his critics that he is a Harvard-educated millionaire elitist who is sure that he knows best and thinks that those who disagree just aren’t in their right minds. Never mind that Mr. Obama was raised in less exalted circumstances by a single mother who he said once needed food stamps. Or that although he went to private school, he took years to pay off his college loans. Something about Mr. Obama’s cerebral confidence has made him into a symbol of something he never used to be.
As the elitism war has raged this fall, the president has fought back. His closing argument, too, centered on the theme. In the last weeks of the campaign, he hammered away at the gusher of secret money poured in by special interests to influence the outcome of the elections, arguing in effect that the elites of Wall Street and corporate America were trying to hoodwink everyday voters into casting ballots against their own interests to benefit the powerful. The other side’s central economic plan, he tells virtually every audience, is to extend tax cuts for the rich.
“The elitism argument is kind of a false one because the president talks about people’s economic interests and middle-class families,” said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist who advises Mr. Obama. “And those who are supporting Republican candidates right now — because they think they’ll look out for their interests — are going to be very surprised when they find out what the corporate sponsorship of that party is buying.”
But Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Obama had not connected with popular discontent. “A lot of people have never been to Washington or New York, and they feel people there are so out of touch,” he said. “When you’re unemployed and you’re sitting in your living room and you hear the president say, ‘You don’t understand what the problems really are — you’re just scared,’ that makes people really, really angry.”
None of this is new, of course. The parties have been jockeying to get on the right side of the elitism argument for generations. Think back to Richard Nixon’s affiliation with the “silent majority” or Al Gore’s charge for “the people, not the powerful.”
Mr. Bush regularly described himself to audiences as a C student (without mentioning that he attended Yale and Harvard). Just two years ago, Mr. Obama tried to explain away his comment about “bitter” working-class Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” while his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, could not remember how many homes he owned.
But the debate has taken on particular resonance in a time of economic distress, underscoring the socioeconomic divide in America amid sky-high unemployment and deficit spending. Michelle Obama’s summer vacation at a five-star Spanish resort might not have generated quite the same heat in a different environment. And if Mr. Obama managed to deflect it in 2008, he seems to be having more trouble this time as the leader of the party in power.
“It didn’t hurt him much two years ago — or not as much as we wished it would have,” said Mark Salter, a longtime McCain adviser who worked on the campaign. But “he’d probably be wise to keep the sociology lectures to himself.”
“Not too many voters like to be told there’s something wrong with them,” Mr. Salter said.
The appeal to antielitism has played out throughout the country this fall. In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate, started one television advertisement this way: “I didn’t go to Yale. I didn’t inherit millions like my opponent.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee issued a sarcastic statement last week “extending congratulations” to “multimillionaire John Raese,” the Republican Senate candidate in West Virginia, after authorities granted permission to build a glass conservatory on his Palm Beach, Fla., property.
As Jacob Weisberg documented in Slate, “elitist” has become one of the favorite attack lines of the surging Republican campaign effort this year, from Kentucky, where the Senate candidate Rand Paul called Mr. Obama “a liberal elitist,” to California, where the Senate candidate Carly Fiorina warned that the American Dream is endangered by “elitists” in government.
By elitist, politicians do not mean simply those with money, since Ms. Fiorina is a wealthy former corporate chief executive herself, but those who control the state and the culture, including news media outfits like The New York Times. (Katie Couric of CBS News, the bête noire of Sarah Palin supporters, probably did not help last week when she talked to the Daily Beast about visiting “the great unwashed middle of the country” in the Midwest; she later said she meant overlooked people who are politically in the middle.)
Elitist or not, the thesis of Mr. Obama’s remarks in Boston does reflect a certain frustration on the part of the president and his team that, in their view, the public might not be listening. Rather than entertaining the possibility that the program they have pursued is genuinely and even legitimately unpopular, the White House and its allies have concluded that their political troubles amount to mainly a message and image problem.
Former President Bill Clinton has a riff in his standard speech as he campaigns for Democrats in which he mocks voters for knowing more about their local college football team statistics than they do about the issues that will determine the future of the country. “Don’t bother us with facts; we’ve got our minds made up,” he said in Michigan last week, mimicking such voters.
But if they understood the facts, he continued, they would naturally vote Democratic. “If it’s a choice and we’re thinking, he wins big and America wins big,” Mr. Clinton told a crowd in Battle Creek, pointing to Representative Mark Schauer, an endangered first-term Democrat.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was lambasted in television ads as “another rich liberal elitist” during the 2004 presidential campaign, used similar language in his introduction of Mr. Obama at the Boston fund-raiser two weeks ago. “Facts, science, truth seem to be significantly absent from what we call our political dialogue,” he said.
Advisers like Ms. Dunn said that’s not elitism, but a reasonable reaction to what they call a Republican fear-based campaign. “The president I don’t think has an elitist bone in his body,” she said. “The fact that Republicans claim that we’re the party of elitism doesn’t mean that it’s true or that everyone believes it.”
In two more days, voters will finally register what they’re thinking. Clearly or not.
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