The Unbearable Lightness Of Obama's Alleged Elitism

One seeming paradox of the Obama candidacy has been the way charges of his elitism parallel charges of his mere celebrity and lack of depth. No amount of exposure or recitation of facts seems adequate to overcome certain voters' susceptibility to such charges. We hear simultaneously that voters don't know enough about Obama and that they are tired of hearing about him, and, as Thomas Edsall has observed in the Huffington Post, those complaints can come from the same group of people. Yet, to most observers, the "elitist" and "celebrity" charges seem absurd. After all, here is a black American raised by a single parent who rose to become president of Harvard Law Review and a University of Chicago lecturer in constitutional law. Here is a man who chose community organizing over a highly lucrative law practice, who paid off his student loans with the proceeds of his book sales. His campaign rival, John McCain? McCain is a white American man from an established military family who graduated at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy and whose wealth, earned through a second marriage, tops 100 million dollars.

There are, of course, some covert racists in the population who are eager to seize any explanation of Obama's unsuitability for the presidency that does not expose their socially unacceptable attitudes, but Obama was never going to get their votes, and it is probably a waste of time to worry about them.

A more subtle answer to the paradox lies in voters' inability to fit Obama into the readily available media-supported stereotypes some people use to understand the world. He is no fawning Stepin Fetchit, or blowhard George Jefferson or movement activist Jesse Jackson. Some people proved ready to assign him to the category of "angry Black man" like Louis Farrakhan or H. Rap Brown. But that doesn't fit Obama's cool persona either. In fact, many voters seem annoyed that Obama doesn't even match their own anger or, as I argued in a previous column, resentment. The Republicans are working hard to prevent them from settling into the comfortable conclusion that he is Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby. Consequently, many voters still have the feeling that they don't yet understand what Obama is about or what kind of person he is.

Those with enough exposure to blue-collar workers may recognize another syndrome. It is by no means universal, and it would be unfair to tag every white worker with the stereotype. But there is a subset of blue-collar and clerical workers who believe their station in life is largely attributable to favoritism shown to welfare recipients (primarily African-Americans in their minds) by the government. Following the Civil War, southern plutocrats were able to break up the populist threat by inducing poor whites to believe that the real threat to them came from African-Americans, who were even lower on society's totem pole. Analogously, in our day, many working-class whites have become convinced that African-Americans or (for different reasons) immigrants are their primary threat, even though it is corporations, corporate managers and "conservatives" in the political system who have guaranteed that wealth flows away from lower middle and working classes and ever more disproportionately to the very richest segment of society. Figuratively, such workers still believe in Reagan's "welfare queen," and they lap up anything Rush Limbaugh has to say. Anyone who sympathizes with the classes below such workers is suspect, and, if well-educated or relatively well off, can be tagged as an "elitist," for lack of a better word, who can only have those sympathies because he doesn't recognize the worth of the real workers. Obama, therefore, can be categorized as an elitist partly because he worked as a community organizer in a mostly black community. This is an extremely hard thing to overcome, because it requires overcoming a whole worldview that people have adopted to explain their place in society.

There is plenty of room for armchair strategists to critique the effectiveness of the Obama campaign, and it is entirely understandable that so many commentators and bloggers wonder why Obama has been unable to open a wide and consistent lead over McCain. A fair assessment of the racial and class attitudes Obama must overcome, however, will lead to a better understanding of his chances and a deeper appreciation of his accomplishments thus far.