Though Republicans hypocritically accused Obama of starting a class war, it was Republicans who began that war in 1978 with Howard Jarvis's so-called 'tax revolt' (a euphemism for the refusal of rich people to pay their share of the tax burden). Their target was, and is, our public school system -- the cradle of democracy in the United States.
Republicans, who have always hated democracy, wanted to create the caste system that exists in the most wretched Third World nations -- a system in which a tiny minority of wealthy individuals live off the labor of the deeply impoverished 98%, and maintain their stranglehold through a corrupt military dictatorship. This pattern, which prevailed in most of Latin America throughout the 20th Century, with strong support from corporate America, is one for which Republicans have always secretly yearned. Hence Republican policies have consistently pushed us toward it -- bolstering the military, concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands, shifting taxes from the rich onto the poor, and seeking, with considerable success, to make education a privilege of the wealthy rather than a right for all Americans.
The 'tax revolters' reason this way: "I'm sending my kids to private schools (so they can get into college whether they're bright or not), why should I pay taxes to educate other Americans (who would then compete with my kids)?" This is a genuine concern -- if rich students played on a level playing field, they might well take a beating, despite their many social and intellectual advantages. When I was teaching at Harvard there was an 'affirmative action' program benefiting rich white students: The college admitted 50% public school and 50% private school candidates; if they had been chosen on merit, an admissions dean told me, the ratio would have been 75% public school, 25% private school. Some of the stupidest individuals I've ever had the misfortune to encounter were part of the so-called 'gentleman C' contingent at Harvard.
'Tax Revolters' and others of the 'I've-Got-Mine-To-Hell-With-The-Rest-Of-America' persuasion have campaigned relentlessly to destroy our public educational system, once (despite all its flaws and horrendous racial bias) the envy of the world, now a national embarrassment. Our schools are brutally under-funded. They often lack the basic supplies taken for granted by European children. Our teachers are so underpaid most young teachers can't afford to teach more than a few years. Our textbooks are so bowdlerized by reactionaries, bigots, and prudes that students can get a high school diploma and still know next to nothing about the arts, the sciences, or the social sciences. And our schools are so crippled by the 'No-Child-Left-Behind-In-The-Race-To-Mediocrity Act that children emerge from school capable only of psyching out multiple-choice tests and utterly unable to think for themselves.
So what kind of self-obsessed monster would deny a small child a decent education? Perhaps these 'I, me, mine' folks are perennially angry that their unremitting money-grubbing and frantic consumption of material junk hasn't made them happy. They want to blame somebody, so why not the government, which has the audacity to provide services for all Americans and not just the greedy self-centered ones?
(In his inauguration speech, Obama talked of a whole new way of doing things. To understand the cultural paradigm shift that engendered this change--the shift that both the neocons and the Taliban have resisted so fiercely, see my website for information on THE CHRYSALIS EFFECT: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF GLOBAL CULTURE).
This would explain how "W" got into Yale...