Shake the Elitist Tag?

I got a laugh today, reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page (from yesterday) while getting an oil change.

A lady by the name of Lynn Forester De Rothschild wrote a piece called "Democrats Need to Shake The 'Elitist' Tag". I'm sorry, but when Barack Obama is getting lectured by a lady named De Rothschild, who's a lawyer and CEO of a private investment firm, about being an elitist, I find it funny. It's kind of like having (the late) George Carlin tell you to quit clowning around.

She is actually correct in what she says, but she should have used a pen name for the article. Democrats in particular, and the left in general, do need to shake that tag. But it's a hard one to get rid of.

The problem is elitism implies that they are smarter than everyone else; and if you ask them they will tell you all about it. Obama has been doing it for months on the campaign trail. His party's surrogates have been doing it for years, long before Al Gore lost in 2000.

A great example of liberal elitism is Roger Ebert's issues with Sarah Palin (h/t to Charlie):

And how can you be her age and never have gone to Europe? ... Sarah Palin's travel record is that of a hopeless provincial. ... Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know. I trust the American people will see through Palin's facade, and save the Republic in November. The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.

Hey Roger, I've gotten to be her age, and only went to Europe because Uncle Sam thought it would be a nice detour on my way to Long Beach, California. I could have afforded to go more recently, but thought it more important to put money into my home, and my kids education.

A whole lot of people that the Democrats and liberals supposedly care about; working stiffs; reach 40, or 50, or 60, and can't afford to visit Europe. According to Roger, that makes them hopeless provincials.

Ms. Forester De Rothschild makes a good point, that part of John McCain's appeal to the folks slightly left of center is that he could be an elite, but refused to become one. He came from a good family, with a famous father, yet he abandoned using that when he was a POW. Many folks don't realize he could have come home quite quickly, because of his name, but refused.

With Barack Obama we get reminded not of his deeds for and towards others; with the exception of his hazy 'community organizing'; but of what he did for himself. That's a sure sign that you are an elitist.

When you haven't reached 50, but you have written two books, about yourself, it's hard not to be seen as an elitist snob. And he wonders why he's having a hard time connecting to Mr & Mrs Middle America.

In not too many weeks we'll be holding an election. The Democrats should be worried that the middle class they want to appeal to so badly, mostly through bribes and giveaways, will decided that they like the idea of a war hero and moose hunter better than the editor of the Harvard Law Review and a 35 year Washington insider.

Mr. Middle America probably used to dream of flying fighter jets, and shooting moose. His wife probably knows the pressure felt when trying to raise a family, hold a job, and still get dinner on the table, all the while dealing with the neighborhood gossip mongers.

None of them probably thought of getting a Harvard Law degree and being stuck in the Senate for 35 years.

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Update from Yesterday's Post on ABC's Palin Interview.

Time Magazine's online poll question today is

Do you agree with Sarah Palin that the US should go to war to defend Georgia if necessary?

This, as was much of the Gibson interview, is a distortion of her actual position, and takes the answer to a hypothetical question and turns it into an absolute position.

Remember, she answered that IF Georgia was admitted to NATO AND Russia attacked, yes we would be required under the treaty to help defend them. Here actual position on circumstances as they are now is that economic pressure is the best way to get Russia to back off.

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Paglia Defends Palin

Camille Paglia, noted (but strange, imho) feminist has come out in defense of Sarah Palin in her latest Salon column. She doesn't defend her to the point of endorsing the McCain-Palin ticket, but instead by claiming that Palin represents a new kind of feminism that has to be approached and applauded by the uber-left feminists on the Gloria Steinham end of the spectrum.

She skewers the democratic party, and the partisans that are attacking Palin as the folks who will bring the party down, not save it (or us) from the 'evil right wing'.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

I'd suggest the Democrats may not be able to adapt. The party has become so rigid in it's identity politics dogma, that any change is seen as abandoning a certain group and a slight to it.

While the pick of Joe Biden made sense in a foriegn policy sense for Obama, the women in the party are outraged that Hillary, who got as many votes as Obama, was left off the ticket. That doesn't mean that 90% of her female supporters are going to jump on the McCain-Palin bandwagon because there is a vagina on it, but a few will. Enough and it costs Obama the election.

Paglia makes another point about Palin, she represents something that many of the urban chic women of today don't get, but the folks who cling to god and guns do:

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

If someone has spent their life in Boston, New York, LA, or San Francisco this doesn't matter, it's a quaint story of "Americana" that those women don't understand. It should matter to the Democratic party, because the area that Barack Obama needs to make the most inroads is in rural white America. This is where Paglia's recollection of strong women is more the norm than thinking a pantsuit and Harvard Law degree is a sign of strength.

Or, as Paglia puts it:

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism
-- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Paglia is correct, and on point with that statement, but unfortunately that same rigid dogma of identity politics she hates will keep Palinesque women out of the feminism tent.

The specific litmus test; pro-choice; which she alludes to has so much of the feminist movement's energy behind it; and has for 4 decades; that to allow a pro-life woman under the tent would probably destroy it; at least in Steinham and Co.'s eyes.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma,Democrats have committed political suicide

While I disagree with Paglia on a lot of topics, and nearly all the time, she hit the nail on the head on both how to expand feminism, and save the Democratic Party with this column.

For those who doubt that, just consider the McCain-Palin ticket. For months we've been told that the 'religous right' wouldn't embrace a ticket with McCain on it. Now they've not only embraced him, they've become some of Palin's biggest advocates.

McCain himself fails half of the "Limbaugh Litmus Tests", but has suddenly energized the GOP. Limbaugh himself; self important gasbag that he is; has had to grudgingly accept his own wrongness on the idea of McCain getting killed by Obama in this race.

If the GOP, and Dittoheads can get behind a McCain type candidate, imagine what the Democrats, and feminists, could do if they ever got behind a strong, pro-life, woman. They might actually be able to win the White House, with a woman.

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Palin The Hun?

So the Gibson interview with Sarah Palin has started getting into the press. A couple of thoughts, ABC's press release headline of "Palin: War Possible if Russia Invades Again" is designed to get people thinking one direction before actually listening to (or reading the transcript of ) what she said. (Quotes taken from the Chicago Tribune, I give attributes the first time I use them, Barack)

"Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help,'' Palin says in the interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson (in which she acknowledges that Georgia is not yet a NATO member, but says that, like Ukraine, it should be.)

Now, if you go to the Tribune, and read the comments, you find that a lot of folks were duped by the headline, and not the substance of the answer, in fact most missed the question (which already established IF Georgia were admitted to NATO):

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

Worse would be if they weren't duped; which would mean many folks believe that we should dump allies as soon as something we don't want to get involved in happens. Then again, considering how the left was talking about NAFTA this spring, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Read the entire excerpt from the interview, and you find out that political and economic pressure on Russia is Palin's preferred method of getting them back into line, along with McCain's idea to toss them from the G-8. But most of the lefty commenters missed that part of it, they were already too fired up over the idea of her taking us to war against Russia, even if it was a hypothetical situation conjured by the interviewer.

Many commenters are also up in arms about the idea of allowing countries like Georgia, Ukrainia, and other former Soviet satellites into NATO. Following their logic, just like in the UN Security Council, Russia should have a veto power over who is admitted to NATO.

They don't want their former satellites in it, so we shouldn't allow them. That's a foriegn policy designed to gain friends (well, friend, Russia) and influence no one. Of course that follows the whole retreat to isolationism that the left has been advocating for the last 7 years. Don't upset anyone; well anyone important like Russia or France. Screw other democracies, like Georgia, and Ukrainia, and Poland, they aren't as well heeled as the French, so they aren't important enough to get involved with.

Think of the message that sends to those countries, who's people who spent 50 years trying to get out from under the oppressive thumb of the Soviets. Now they find the group that helped get them out is going to shove them right back under that thumb, lest they tick off the Russians? So much for US and NATO credibility in Central Europe.

Reading the comments from the lefties over at the Tribune makes clear to me why when pressed on foriegn policy, the left keeps coming up short.

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Running Scared

It's getting fun to watch as "The One" finds out that he may need to scratch January 21, 2009 out of his anointment appointment book.

White women and independents are flocking over to the McCain Palin ticket, and Joe Biden won't be helping by telling people that her being elected would be step backwards for women.

Barack Obama is in full defensive mode, not knowing how to react to the media that's suddenly being somewhat warm to the opponent, and realizing that a novice senator with no record, and a 35 year Washington insider aren't exactly "change agents".

The problem for him is his lack of a record is starting to show. While Palin can claim some legitimate (and some questionable) reform victories in Alaska, and McCain has a record of bucking his party, Obama's campaign folks claimed are grasping at straws for anything that might look like reform.

Sunday David Axelrod got caught with his pants down by Chris Wallace of Fox News, when he claimed that Obama's support of ethics reform and nuclear non-proliferation were items that "went against his party". Wallace was kind enough to point out to him that both of those items were passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, no roll call needed. That's not reform, that's following the herd.

While Obama has decided that Alaska keeping the "bridge to nowhere" money is bad; even if it's now being used for needed infrastructure improvements instead of the bridge; he voted for that money, twice.

My guess is that in the next 3 to 4 weeks we'll start seeing McCain ads about earmarks, that Obama will have to defend himself, and fellow Democrats against. Remember that in 2006 one of the hallmarks of the party taking over congress was that earmarks would get cut down.

Instead, last year Obama asked for $330 million, including money that went to the hospital his wife works at and companies represented by Joe Biden's lobbyist family members.

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Can Sarah Survive?

So, this weekend's big Kos created controversy, Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter has all the headlines today.

For those who missed it, and I don' t know how you could, I think the weather channel interrupted hurricane coverage to talk about it; Daily Kos writers claimed that Sarah Palin's youngest child is actually her daughters child.

Turns out it's not true (like much of anything you read on Kos is), and that Palin's daughter is in fact pregnant right now. The moonbats on the left, have gone nuts screaming about the hypocrisy of a "family values" person having a pregnant teenage daughter. Which is actually funny. Hypocrisy would be if she encouraged her daughter to have an abortion. Helping her daughter deal with an obvious mistake, and not tossing her aside is the definition of family values.

Keep in mind the folks who are screaming kicked John Edwards off of the platform in Denver when he admitted to his affair. And replaced him with Bill Clinton. That's hypocrisy, and a hilarious twist.

Back to Palin. Do I think this is something that could torpedo her as the VP choice? No. In fact, I think if the far left isn't careful those pissed off Hillary voters are going to take 3 steps to the right and defend Palin.

These are folks who were horribly indignant about the treatment Clinton got during the primaries, labeling a lot of it sexist, some of it rightfully so. They were more ticked off when the agent of change picked a 35 year DC insider white male as his running mate.

Now, as they watch the party try and attack another woman and destroy her, enough may get ticked to swing the election the "right" direction. Barack Obama, to his credit, knows this and has told his campaign the Palin daughter, and all children, are off limits.

In fact one slip of the tongue on the subject would flash up so many bad memories of the primaries for women in the Democratic party that Obama would probably have to behead the offending person to calm them down. Joe Biden, are you listening?

There is in fact, a new blog out there, the Sarah Palin Sexism Watch devoted to tracking the sexist remarks in the media about the Governor. It's already quite lengthy, with such luminaries as Campbell Brown going insane over the "choice" of Palin to raise a family and run for VP.

By the way, if you think it is okay to ask Palin why she's running for VP with young children and a pregnant daughter, make sure you ask Joe Biden why he didn't resign from the Senate when his wife died and he was left to raise two young sons.

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McCain's Pick

I'm sure that John McCain's VP pick, Sarah Palin, isn't the most qualified person he could get on the ballot this year. What I am sure about is that she scares the hell out of liberals. All you have to do is start reading their editorials about her pick, and you can see by the speed at which they degenerate into name calling they are bothered.

Gail Collin's of the NY Times thinks that Joe Biden now has the throw away line of the year "I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton". The problem for Biden is that Palen may well respond to that line, with something like "You're right, Senator. I've held real jobs, didn't carpetbag my way to a Senate seat, and never made $100,000 in one day of trading."

Liberals are afraid because, as they know, Joe Biden is a gaffe machine. He might have been able to get away with a cheap shot at Mitt Romney's religion, or hair, or whatever. But if he produces another 'Indian's at 7-11' shot towards Palin he may find himself on the bitter end of 150 million scorned female tongues.

Liberals are bothered because McCain could already run on a platform of being bipartisan, and reform minded, and has legislative accomplishments to back it up. Obama can talk about change, but has no legislative record to show that's what he is about. Palin brings that reform spirit, a record to prove it, and an outside the beltway presence that Joe Biden can't fake, or plagiarise.

The Democrats are making a big deal of her lack of foreign policy experience, which is valid, and claim it negates any claim that Obama is too inexperienced. The problem with that is Obama is the guy in the decision making seat on their side of the fence, Palin isn't. Biden's "experience" consists of chairing a committee that doesn't make policy, it second guesses it for the most part.

The other side of that coin is Palin holds executive experience that none of the other 3 have. No, it's not a great deal of it, but it's more executive decision making experience than her counterpart, who's been holed up in the Senate for 35 years.

Palin's also done something that neither Obama or Biden has, she's stood up to the party big wigs. Senator Frank Murkowski put her on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and she promptly started an ethics investigation into the state's GOP chair. She also took on the GOP's Attorney General in the state, who ended up resigning.

Say "Ethic investigation" around Obama and he suddenly knows nothing about anything and never met anyone. If you say ethics around Biden he says the plagarism wasn't his fault.

Palin may not be the person most of us were thinking of as a running mate, but she may well prove to be a good one.

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