Obama's Touch of Class

[proud2BlibKansan]

Obama's Touch of Class
By THOMAS FRANK
April 21, 2008

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – "What's the Matter With Kansas?" – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Mr. Obama's offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: "Bittergate."


In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

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Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Consider the shower of right-wing love that descended in February on small-town newspaper columnist Gary Hubbell, who penned this year's great eulogy of the "angry white man," the "man's man" who "works hard," who "knows that his wife is more emotional than rational," and who also, happily, knows how to "change his own oil and build things."

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If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120873309012529689.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

[geiger]

1. amen.

[ProSense]

2. So Frank is saying he will vote for the candidate who will restore equality to the U.S.

On edit: delete question.

[Hamlette]

3. the best part of that column

Mr. Frank is the author of "The Wrecking Crew," forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. He will begin a weekly column each Wednesday in the Journal on May 14.

and this:

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that 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.

The whole thing is very good. I look forward to more from Mr. Frank at the flipping WSJ (?????) in future.

[keep_it_real]

4. The tone of his article suggest he is somewhat PO'd

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. I can certainly understand why

[Two Americas]

6. misapplied

I understood the message as a failure on the part of the faction controlling the Democratic party and modern liberalism to empathize with and fight for the working class. Many people are using it to promote the exact opposite message - "we aren't elitists! It is the fault of those stupid morons out there if they don't understand or support us!"