John McCain is an elitist.

[tongodeon]

Ever since the primary there's been this constant refrain that Obama is an "elitist". I was hashing this out with ponsdorf last week and the more I thought about it the weirder this accusation became.

"Elitism" isn't thinking that you're smarter than everyone else is - that's egotism. "Elitism" also isn't just thinking that you're smarter than you

Comments

[matrushkaka]

Funny, just before you posted this I was in the middle of reading Willie Brown's column:

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don't want to be seen as defending the status quo.

[anonymous]

Someone with video skills should turn this into a 30-second YouTube video. Great post.

[crisper]

As always, you get little to no say in how other people choose to use the words and phrases that you care about. If they want to pretend that flammable and inflammable mean different things, you don't actually have much of a way to stop them. This is also why a group of people who pride themselves on (read: are crafting a mythology around) the way their Faith empowers them to work together on improving their Small Town Lifestyle... have somehow also managed to make "community organizer" into a pejorative.

[jorm]

Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor.

[deeptape]

Good one!

[swingland]

Yeah, and look where that got him.

[hwrnmnbsol]

There is an important different between being an elite and being an elitist. Being an elitist means having a belief that elites should rule, or otherwise continue to be elite, because they are elites. It is possible to be an elite without being an elitist.

[tongodeon]

This distinction, though accurate, doesn't change the narrative much. McCain has directly and indirectly received the advantages of the elite social class, sought out more elite advantages through marriage, and has turned Obama's anti-elitist, populist strategy into a target of mockery. Obviously "elitist" is a spectrum, not a boolean value, and it's possible to be both less elitist and more elitist than McCain is, but by every standard I can think of McCain is many times the social elitist that Obama is.

[hwrnmnbsol]

Nevertheless: were I a McCain strategist, and were I to receive this criticism through the mass media such that I were forced to respond to it, I would say something like this

[the_axel]

If Obama were an elitist he wouldn't want to become a Senator, let alone President because he's not from an elite in the first place.

[fabfunk]

How is elite suddenly a bad word? Last I checked, we were voting for a PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, not a class president or something. I hope that motherfucker is the most elitist of the elite, like, ever. Like super elite. Like Superman-on-the-Justice-League shit.

[tongodeon]

See my second and third paragraphs. "Elite" is ambiguous but "elitist" isn't. "Elitist" implies a social elite, not someone who is 1337. You're thinking of meritocracy, and you and I agree that meritocracies are good thing.

[swingland]

Obama totally leveled up. And he shouldn't be penalized for that.