Which presidential candidate is most elitist?

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Which presidential candidate is most elitist?

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were educated at Ivy League schools. John McCain is the son of an admiral and the husband to a beer heiress. All three are United States senators. By any reasonable measure, all three are part of the elite. Yet the presidential candidates are doing their mightiest to tar their opponents -- and their critics -- as "elitist." Obama has taken perhaps the hardest hit because of his notorious "guns and religion" comment.

The most recent incident came this week when Hillary Clinton defended against criticism that her "gas tax holiday" was an obvious -- and ineffective -- political pander. "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal. "We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

What's wrong with elitism? And which candidate is most guilty?

Ben likes: Snobbery

Daniel Larison/Eunomia

Snobbery and the resentment of snobbery (and it is really snobbery, and not elitism as such, that we have all been discussing) are always going to exist in societies with significant upward social mobility. The more opportunities available to people through merit (or at least largely through merit), the more pretensions the arrivistes will put on to demonstrate that they do, in fact, belong in their new status group. Snobbery may not be limited to arrivistes, which is to say those who have succeeded in making their own way, but I suspect it is most obvious among these people, because they are the ones who most have to prove that they have adopted the mentality associated with their new status and their new peers.

Evidently, there are a lot of people on the left who find the controversy over Obama’s San Francisco remarks absolutely infuriating because he ”told the truth” and is being punished for it, but for everyone else the remarks were not just condescending–they were insulting because they were false. More than that, a politician presumed to know why people did or believed certain things, when he probably cannot know their motives and, more importantly, shouldn’t care. In an election, it is the politician’s motives, his beliefs, that are at issue. The pol is the one who is supposed to be scrutinised by the voters, not vice versa.

Joel likes: Those awful "elites" and their dreaded facts

Steve Benen/The Carpetbagger Report

Clinton’s disgust for “elite opinion” is not only entirely out of character for her, it’s a textbook George W. Bush move. There’s just no excuse for any Democrat, especially one as sharp and knowledgeable as Clinton, to do this.

Indeed, the fact that Clinton can make these remarks with a straight face is rather disconcerting.

Seriously, “elite opinion” has been the driving force behind Bush’s failed policies? Since when? Reality shows the exact opposite — the policy experts have been warning everyone since Day One that Bush’s economic policy, his foreign policy, his environmental policy, his judicial policy, etc., are a disaster and a recipe for failure. In fact, Hillary Clinton has been citing these experts for years.

“Elite opinion” hasn’t been “behind policies that haven’t worked well for hard working Americans”; elite opinion has been pushing in the other direction. Bush hasn’t been operating with the support of policy experts; he’s been blowing off policy experts as liberal eggheads who think too much. And now Clinton appears ready to join him. I suspect by the end of the week, Clinton will be railing against “The Man” who’s always “trying to keep us down.”