Sunday April 13, 2008

CLASS WAR CONTINUES. Conservatives are still beating on Obama for his Pennsylvania voter remarks, and all this weekend work (plus the understandable need to distinguish oneself in a crowded filed) has made them reach a bit for angles. At Commentary Jennifer Rubin offers the last defense of Hillary Clinton you will ever hear from her:

Now conservatives might guffaw over her new-found appreciation for the Second Amendment, but there is something inarguably more down-to-earth ( and if not “normal” than at least “ordinary”) about Hillary Clinton than Obama. It has nothing to do with race or class (liberal bloggers want to remind us he was on scholarship to that tony Hawaii prep school) and everything to do with their life experiences. Clinton is a product of middle class, Midwestern parents and has spent a chunk of her adult life in Arkansas. She may not trust Americans to read a home loan document, but she knows them well enough to never let slip from her lips words of cultural condescension.

"Nothing to do with race or class" would seem to invalidate most of her argument, bringing it down to the notion that Clinton is better than Obama at putting it over on plain folks, surely not the Commentary writer's field of expertise.

Over at Classical Values, we find a clangorous attempt at race-card reversal:

At the University of Chicago students and staff are treated like Royalty and the neighborhood folks are treated like servants.

At my son's graduation there last summer almost all the wait staff were blacks from the neighborhood dressed like servants in the Jim Crow South (I lived there as a youth). It had an offensive feel to it. Just the way Jim Crow felt offensive to me.

That is the environment Obama was used to. His behavior fits in well with the people he associated with. And how do you behave towards servants? Well you certainly don't get into any kind of personal conversations with them.

Comparing white, rural gun enthusiasts to blacks under Jim Crow is hard to top, but the palm as usual goes to Crunchy Rod Dreher, who slags Obama for "condescension" to the common people immediately after one of his "Benedict Option" posts about going off the grid with a nice garden in preparation for Armageddon. Whatever difficulty Obama may have in explaining his remarks to the good people of Pennsylvania, I can guarantee he would have an easier time of it than Dreher would expounding on the need to "batten down the hatches and keep the family and the community's life and culture together during extraordinarily difficult, chaotic times," with "the dying of the bees" and "the strange weather patterns" as two of the Seven Signs. Unless, of course, Peter Kazlouski left some followers behind.