It's amazing how a bunch of columnists who never venture beyond the Beltway think only THEY know what "real America" thinks. These guys with their fifty-dollar prime steak lunches think that those of us out here who get paychecks to actually do things, and those who WOULD be out here actually doing things if the people the fifty-dollar steak guys were so busy fellating from 2000-2008 hadn't driven the national economy off a cliff, don't know jack; that only THEY can relate to the truck driver and the waitress and the hotel housekeeper. (I wonder how many of these guys actually TIP the hotel housekeeper and the waitress?)
The whole notion of "elitism" has been twisted so that being educated, knowing what you're talking about, not pulling stuff out of your ass and calling it fact, and being able to construct a coherent English sentence, is now considered "elitist" by guys with Ivy League educations who construct English sentences for a living.
One of the best recent examples of conservative condescension is the infamous Salad Bar at Applebee's fracas, in which David Brooks, one of the most condescending of conservatives, said on MSNBC:
Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there. He has to change to be more like that Applebee‘s guy and as he‘s done that he‘s become much more transactional. Much more, I‘m going to deliver this and this and this to you on policy.
Of course it didn't take long for those condescending liberals to make a few phone calls and find out that THERE ISN'T AN APPLEBEE'S IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY THAT HAS A SALAD BAR.
But of course, Bobo isn't condescending because he has one of the primary qualifications for being non-condescending -- he just pulls stuff out of his ass.
You'd think that the "real Americans" guys like Brooks and David Broder (who like many middle-aged men, is getting a late-life woody at the mere thought of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office and I have NO desire to even begin to imagine what p0rn movie is playing in their heads on that one) think they're talking to would speak up about being misrepresented, or at the very least, weigh in on the fact that Applebee's doesn't have a salad bar. But then, those guys are too busy trying to keep food on the table and a roof over their families' heads in an economy wrecked by the very guys Brooks and Broder and Joe Klein and Chris Matthews were busy fellating for eight years until they went straight again once they got a glimpse of an aging pageant queen from Alaska.
So who's really being condescending here? Is this just yet another example of conservative projection? Joan Walsh thinks so:
I'm tired of self-hating liberal elites lecturing other liberals about how out of touch we are with real America. Lots of real American voters may well like Sarah Palin, admire her moxie or her mothering, and still know she'd be a terrible president.
In fact it's the Beltway anointed who underestimate the American people. Does Joe Klein honestly think "real Americans" admire the way Palin's gone after 19-year-old Levi Johnston? I don't see that, unless you think real Americans are petty and stupid and believe it's a good idea to pick public fights with the teenage father of their grandchild. Then there's Pat Buchanan: We were set to debate Palin's appeal on "Hardball" Thursday (until we got bumped by the Clinton news). Pat loves her. Apparently it doesn't bother him that, in her charming interview with Chris Wallace, she confused the anti-interventionist Buchanan with the neocon world conquerer Daniel Pipes. Palin cited a Buchanan column as suggesting Obama could get out of his current political fix if he decided to "declare war on Iran or decided to do whatever he can to support Israel, which I would like him to do." In fact, that was Pipes' point of view, which Buchanan was criticizing in the column.
But I guess our next president doesn't need to know the difference between neocons and anti-interventionists. Buchanan told Talking Points Memo that critics were misunderstanding Palin's misunderstanding him, but his answer made no sense. On "Hardball" I wanted to ask Buchanan, one of the nation's foremost Israel critics, what he thought of Palin's blind support for Israel, or her wearing the Israeli flag on her lapel Saturday night. Maybe issues like that don't really matter. Boy, conservatives must be desperate.
Or at least Beltway conservatives. That same Washington Post poll showed that only 45 percent of conservatives believe Palin is qualified to be president, down from 66 percent at the end of 2008. A majority of Republicans say she'd make a bad president. Of course Palin has plenty of time before 2012, but so far time has not been on her side. The more time Americans get to know her, the more they see her as divisive and poorly informed. And her poll numbers look worse when you compare her to other outsider candidates: A year before they ran in 1988, Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson were judged more qualified by their respective parties than Palin is today. And back in 1996, during Buchanan's second run for the Republican nomination, "only" 47 percent of Americans said they thought he would not make an "effective" president -- way better than the 71 percent who say Palin's not qualified.
It's still entirely possible Palin can surprise us. FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver looked at the electoral map today and hacked out a state by state path for her to get the Republican nomination in 2012. But as Silver acknowledged, it was predicated on the primary and caucus schedule remaining in the same order it was in 2008, which isn't likely. And it also presupposed no more major gaffes or career-ending stumbles by the former Alaska governor.
But at this point, given Palin's abysmal standing with American voters, I think Beltway insiders anointing Palin the candidate of real America are the ones showing contempt for real Americans.
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