Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, assessing the new redesign at the Wall Street Journal, notes more than just the changes in aesthetics - there's actually a conscious effort to bring some left-of-center ideas to the opinion pages. One such newcomer to the Journal is Thomas Frank, whose book, What's The Matter With Kansas, is an oft-cited piece of source material for Senator Barack Obama's recent "bitter" comments. Frank doesn't shy away from the kliegs, jumping right into the heart of the matter with an editorial entitled, "Obama's Touch Of Class."
And don't prejudge the piece by its title. Far from a piece of candidate flattery, Frank quickly gets to the heart of his old argumentative stomping grounds, reclaiming his 'Kansas' thesis and renewing its vitality amid the endless campaign hype:
In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.
But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama's gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.
Frank briefly parses the way the labels "elitist" and "authentic" can get kicked around with relative ease and without respect for the larger issues. And he catalogs a lot of phoniness, from candidates to parties to the media. But there's a larger lesson to be learned, and Frank states it with a fine-tuned succinctness:
But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?
That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.
Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.
Now that's some fresh, free-range truth, people. And in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, no less! The whole piece is worth your time, and Frank is worth making a regular read - especially if he plans on continuing writing like this:
If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.
In concurrence with the rest of the internet, I'll nominate this as the best concluding paragraph of 2008.