The Tea Party, Obama and Elitism

The prosecution had begun to point its finger during the 2008 campaign: Barack Obama was elitist. As if having been a brilliant student and having an interest in ideas and intellectual debate was itself a flaw. America has changed: John Kennedy was surrounded by the “best and the brightest,” in the words of journalist David Halberstam, all graduates of Harvard, Yale or Princeton, had never been criticized for his elitism. Instead, we admired his style, whose tone was set by the poem written by poet Robert Frost for the occasion of the day of his inauguration. In the final days of campaigning before the polls open on Tuesday, Nov. 2, the charge of elitism has only increased against the 44th and against the Democrats, who, since Franklin Roosevelt, have been the party of the working and middle class. In the sickening climate of America today, where common sense is gone, Obama is seen as a Harvard-educated millionaire who has lost touch with ordinary citizens, who Sarah Palin would call “Joe Six Pack.” These critics forget too quickly that Barack Obama was raised by a single mother who sometimes had to resort to state assistance to feed him.

Ironically, the tea party and its supporters want to believe that Obama is elitist (read: against the people), even while they are funded specifically by those who are the real elitists — Wall Street and members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example — at least those indifferent to the interests of ordinary Americans, looking especially toward a fiscal policy that is more favorable to the richest. But in the contradiction that the United States has become, nothing has meaning and truth is irrelevant. They prefer to believe in, like in the good old days, the smooth talker who sells snake oil to cure all ills, rather than those who warn against his lies. Christine O’Donnell, the tea party’s candidate in the Senate, launched a campaign whose slogan says, “I did not go to Yale. I didn’t inherit millions, like my opponent.”

The debate on elitism isn’t new, of course, but it has a new resonance in times of acute economic crisis (even if nobody was offended that John McCain was incapable of saying how many houses he owned when the question was posed to him). The candidate for the Senate seat from California, Carly Fiorina, a multimillionaire, said recently that American ideals were threatened by “the elitists of the government.”

By not responding to his critics, leaving his opponents to say the most unlikely half-truths, Obama has reinforced the idea that he is disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Americans, those hit hard by massive unemployment that doesn’t seem to know reflux. His intellectual side, far from that of wily Bill Clinton, but sensing the mood of the country, played against him (not to mention Michelle Obama’s disastrous journey to Spain this summer) instead of inspiring confidence in his conduct of the country. There remains two years for the 44th to change his image. It’s not won.