Maureen Dowd Deserts the Boy Wonder
Obama comes across less like a candidate
in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo
Courting white, blue-collar voters
in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country,
he has often appeared to be observing
the odd habits of the colorful locals
Barry & Michelle aka Darnell & Lakisha
Obama Can't Help Showing Off
Behind closed doors in San Francisco, elitism’s epicenter, Barack Obama showed his elitism, attributing the emotional, spiritual and cultural values of working-class, “lunch pail” Pennsylvanians to economic woes.
The last few weeks have not been kind to Hillary, but the endless endgame has not been kind to the Boy Wonder either. Obama comes across less like a candidate in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo.
His mother got her Ph.D. in anthropology, studying the culture of Indonesia. And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals.
Resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey.
Examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.
He hasn’t pulled a John Kerry and asked for a Philly cheese steak with Swiss yet, but he has maintained a regal “What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they’re blue?” bearing, unable to even feign Main Street cred.
But Hillary did when she belted down a shot of Crown Royal whiskey with gusto at Bronko’s in Crown Point, Ind.
Just as he couldn’t knock down the bowling pins, he can’t knock down Annie Oakley or “the girl in the race,” as her husband called her Tuesday — the self-styled blue-collar heroine.
Obama has still not been able to marshal a knockout blow — or even come up with a knockout economic speech that could expand his base of support.
Obama has a nasty habit of retreating into law professor mode. The elitism that Americans dislike is not about family money or connections — J.F.K. and W. never would have been elected without them.
In the screwball movie genre that started during the last Depression, there was a great tradition of the millionaire who was cool enough to relate to the common man — like Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven in “The Philadelphia Story.”
What turns off voters is the detached egghead quality that they tend to equate with a wimpiness, wordiness and a lack of action.
The same quality that got the professorial and superior Adlai Stevenson mocked by critics as Adelaide.
The new attack line for Obama rivals is that he’s gone from J.F.K. to Dukakis. (Just as Dukakis chatted about Belgian endive, Obama chatted about Whole Foods arugula in Iowa.)
Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances. “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt?”
Michelle Obama asked Tuesday at Haverford College, referring to Barack’s student loans while speaking in the shadow of the mansions depicted in “The Philadelphia Story.”
But his exclusive Hawaiian prep school and years in the Ivy League made him a charter member of the elite, along with the academic experts he loves to have in the room. [Adapted from Dowd's Eggheads & Chesse Balls]
Recommended Reading: Obama: The "Bitter" Truth [Indirectly, He Condemns Capitalism]
Obama Makes the Liberals Feel Good about Their 'Values'
The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening “good” blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America’s persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S.
For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.
The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well.
He’s not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad.
In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he’s not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life.
He’s going to try to ride white America’s self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can — all the way, he hopes, to the White House.
“HE’S NOT ALL THAT BLACK”
Part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.”
Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are calmed by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl.
He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power.
To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.
Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, “multicultural” background and elite, private school education to “act [more classically and stereotypically] black.”
But whites’ racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her “blackness” be qualified.