A version of the same strategy is what helped bring Al Gore down in 2000.

You just distilled a large amount of the warfare between the two political camps into seven words. Nicely put.

It's one of the reasons Obama picked Biden.
No one could argue he hasn't struggled in life.

Years ago, I saw a theater adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring the fantastic actor Harry Lennox, who happens to be black, in the title role. Now, I never did learn much about the production history -- exactly how and why they came to use a black actor in the role. And the production was very faithful to the book. But they did seem quite aware that having a black actor play Gatsby would put new undertones on the whole new money/old money distinction, and I thought it worked quite well.

Sometimes this election reminds me of that production. My conservative father thinks Obama is an elitist for going to Columbia and Harvard Law. He doesn't think of GWB as an elitist for going to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School (and being born into a pile of money.)

Of course, GWB could put on a hat and pretend to be a cowboy, and lots of people (and press) played along. Obama can't do that, because people don't instinctively trust that he deserves a place on that stage.

It is pretty amazing how Republicans want to argue in favor of a meritocratic society (except for legacy children and anything that privledges wealthy white people with connections) but when actually confronted with someone who has passed those tests with flying colors decides that person must be portrayed as wholly different from common people and therefore a worrisome figure.

I would add though that I'm not convinced the Republicans have decided against using a racial strategy entirely, I think they may be biding their time. They've already inserted race into the campaign in discrete and oblique ways. If the race stays very tight then its a risk I don't see them taking...but, if McCain is trailing by 5+ points two weeks before the election and feels desperate enough to go after a few crucial swing states at any costs then watch out because it could get very ugly.

I believe one reason the Obama campaign has been struggling recently is because they expected, like everybody else, that McCain would come at them with the high heat (Jeremiah Wright/race-baiting/Muslim-smear), and then

McCain threw a knuckleball. Obama is ... a celebrity! Just like Britney!

What? Who saw that coming? It may look obvious in retrospect, but when people worried about Obama's electability during the primaries, this was not the vulnerability they had in mind.

There's a difference between "explicitly racialized" (which we don't have yet) and "A racial strategy" which by all means is a significant part of McSame's current message.

Matt, the attack on the Obamas being "wholly different from common people" is based in the assertion that they are, essentially, "common people" who have no business rising as high as they have. That makes them different and bizarre. This has elements of the "uppity" attack, but it's also essentially an argument that the Obamas "think they're better than us" because they came from "us."

McCain and Bush have the benefit of coming from a class of people who are perceived to have deserved their stature, so it's ok. They're "elites" whom the public "allows" to rule, so it's ok.

Good post.

How to combat it? Obama needs to break out more of his failure stories, like the one about his first organizing meeting where only 3 people showed up. And the hard work stories, like his work on the filming interrogations bill.

Or his death march through the Appalachian primaries...

What lampwick said or, say, how about mentioning how many times he had to ask Michelle out before she said yes ?

Obama knows. He's going to eat humble pie all the way to the White House. He's smart very smart, scary smart.

I notice that Ezra didn't dare write "intellectual elite" or note that Obama is smarter than 99.99% of voters ooooh no better not mention that.

He did miss one aspect for obvious reasons. Obama might be elected President, and he is younger than I am, and when there is a President younger than me, I will be old and a failure. Notice the age gradient in support for Obama ?

I for one am not ready for a President younger than me (just you wait Ezra it will hurt). I mean I am because I am uhm mature and will do what I can to get him elected (damn he is also more mature than me).

This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- r fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite?

People are trained to resent social elites more, so the GOP has a built-in-- and carefully cultivated-- advantage. After all, anyone can become an economic elite if they hit the Powerball, but it's not very likely
that most will become smarter or more generally appealing than they already are (which is why stories like Pygmalion are so much more compelling than those of lotto winners, but I digress).

I understand your point about the social elite, the one that's built on resentment of Ivy League degrees and all the rest, but the racialized attacks in this campaign will come. The McCain team may have decided that overt attacks are too damaging to their own brand. But the week before the election, you'll see a whispering campaign about Obama having either raped or impregnated a white woman in his youth. I guarantee it. McCain has enough of a residual sense of dignity not to sign on to this, but it's coming. Miscegnenation's the key, and not just the vague hints, as in the Harold Ford "Call Me" attack ads. This one will be done by email.

um...
Robert said: "I notice that Ezra didn't dare write "intellectual elite" or note that Obama is smarter than 99.99% of voters ooooh no better not mention that."

Ezra said:
"Obama isn't an economic elite, but he is a social and intellectual elite"

Anyway... you're on a roll today, Ezra. Great post, and I liked your convention musings as well.

I entirely agree that there is a natural tendency for some to denigrate people with certain obvious god-given gifts, in order to blunt there own feelings of inferiority. It's the same impulse that leads one to assume that the super-pretty girls in high school must be stuck-up, whether one knows that to be true or not. The burden then falls upon these blessed individuals to go out of their way to show that these preconceptions about their "attitude" are misplaced. Any small slip that tends to reinforce those preconceptions is immediately siezed upon as evidence.

The Obamas are not particularly rich, but they are obviously cultural elites who despise, absolutely despise, working-class people and their culture, as is typical among leftists these days (so much for the party of working people, at least working people who happen to be white). Michelle has the extra burden of living down earlier remarks that many regard as offensive. All people who attend an Ivy or similar university are elitists, whether they were admitted because of the manifestly unjust system of legacy admissions (Bush et al.) or because of the manifestly unjust system of race quotas (Michelle et al).

Let's remember the very perceptive commentator who Rick Perlstein highlighted a week or so ago. I'm paraphrasing:
"An elitist [to a Republican] is somebody who won't let people say 'nigger'."

The very set of supercharged talents and qualities that allowed Obama to levitate past the boundaries of race and class make him different than those who haven't rocketed upward on the strength of their intelligence and charisma and charm.

What talents? What qualities?

This is the idiocy at the root of your whining. Obama has graduated from law school, wrote a book about being black (an offer he got solely because he was black), sat in a law office and did nothing of note, got elected to the state legislature by kicking everyone else off the slate, lost a Congressional race and then got elected to the Senate by running against, literally, a madman.

Wow. Let us all bow to his greatness.

As someone who has significant personal investment in friends and family who are to some extent or other right of center I can tell you exactly how they'd describe the difference between the two elites. The "social elite" will tell you how you should think about the world and the "economic elite" will not.

And they're pretty much correct.

"The "social elite" will tell you how you should think about the world and the "economic elite" will not."

Really? My experience of the local businessmen who make up the economic elite in most towns and small cities is that they're more than happy to tell people what they should think -- what they should think about unions, about taxes, about workers' comp, about foreign competition, about people who don't speak English, about being tough on crime, about political correctness, about how much better things used to be, and so on. Businessmen have been the backbone of the Republican party for the past century -- you really think that's because they don't want to impose their views on the rest of America?

"Obama has graduated from law school, wrote a book about being black (an offer he got solely because he was black), sat in a law office and did nothing of note, got elected to the state legislature by kicking everyone else off the slate, lost a Congressional race and then got elected to the Senate by running against, literally, a madman."

It just eats you up inside how much more talented and acccomplished than you Barack Obama is, doesn't it, "Cal" ?

they did seem quite aware that having a black actor play Gatsby would put new undertones on the whole new money/old money distinction, and I thought it worked quite well.

I think The Great Gatsby's a really interesting story to draw upon here, and it's a testament to Fitzgerald, because there's that genuine discomfort it can generate in the reader: at times we feel we're Nick Carraway, at times we're Gatsby, at other times we're Tom Buchanan. Because none of them are caricatures, it blurs. Race and status envy blur too: it's the American way.

Anyway, it's nice to see the troglodytes out in force, desperate to claim their McCain-branded BBQ set before Labor Day.

As for 'Anti-Elitist Pete', who is most likely a College Republican frat asshole called Duff Muffington VII trolling for the lulz: I'll bet good money that what you know about working class culture wouldn't fill the back of a gum wrapper.

Wake up Ezra,

Race is a metalanguage and it subsumes every other discourse in America.

Atwater has claimed as much. When you talk taxes you are implying ni**er, as in: the money you are taxed may in some way support lazy ni**ers. In more homogeneously white states the benefits flow more freely.

Many white people only know blacks as people who serve or entertain them. Or, they are the underclass, the prison population, the Other.

The Obamas perplex them. Many resent them. How could it be that I live in Livonia, MI in this crap job and this fancy ni**er is running for President. It is not supposed to be this way!

White American identity is predicated on superiority (maybe not to Asians--that's more complicated). How many white people do you know who, if they were being honest, would not acknowledge feeling superior to black people. It is ontological. Being white means Being better.

What the Obamas are attempting is nothing less than challenging EVERYTHING that white working class Americans (and some middle & upper class ones too) think about themselves and where they fit into the world.

I grew up in working class evangelical background. When those types of people get together they talk about their jobs, their kids, their new pet, the most recent vacation, etc. Politics is barely mentioned.

I transitioned into a world of people with high percentages of post-graduate schooling and atheism and the difference is quite stark. Large portions of the the conversations I have their revolve around politics and around what the little people should think, IN THEIR PERSONAL LIVES.

Public policy regarding things such as workers' comp is about public things, not about personal things.

Yup. "That nigger thinks he's better than you." Seen it coming since the Clintons rolled it out last spring.

This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- r fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite.

I fear you're right. If you are, if the Obama campaign allows the campaign to be about that, he will lose. Rich guy who's one of us always beats Mr. Smarty Pants trying to show off.

The election already is that kind of contest. And it should be noted that there was originally a third kind of elite in the race that voters could have chosen: the political elite, Hillary Clinton.

Asher. Public policy about workers' comp IS about personal things--it determines how well you can take care of your family if you get ill due to work, and it determines whether or not you have to work sick. It doesn't get much more personal than that.

There. Now, have I just "told you how to think?" Seriously.

Sorry, that's not what we mean by telling people what they should think. Arguing for a postion is something completely different. Consider the two following comments:

Comment A:
"You should support lower taxes because I tell you so and I'm a better person than you"

Comment B:
"You should not think that there is any innate difference between men and women because I'm a better person than you and because I tell you so."

The first is unthinkable. The second is something commonly said by "social elites".

Now, I'm not what you'd consider any sort of orthodox right-winger, and I often argue with pretty much anyone. That being said I almost never hear "because I said so" from conservatives but hear it all to often from leftists. You are doing that irritating little thing that so often happens on the left: confusing reasoned arguments with ipse dixits.

The problem with the social elite is that their preferred method of arguing for a position is to argue from the assertion of superiority, sort of a reverse ad hom.

I'd LOVE to vote for a black president. I think Obama is a great orator. Charismatic. Michelle seems solid and strong.

But, dammit...

He's too inexperienced.

Even Jackie Robinson had proved that he could play the game before he broke the barrier.

You guys expect me to vote for Obama before he's proven he can play.

It's not about black or white, for me and my vote. It's about total lack of experience.

Show me the resume.

Pseudonymous in nc: "As for 'Anti-Elitist Pete', who is most likely a College Republican frat asshole called Duff Muffington VII trolling for the lulz: I'll bet good money that what you know about working class culture wouldn't fill the back of a gum wrapper."

FYI, pseudo, I grew up in a very working class home, my father a cook at a hospital (before illegal immigrants took all those jobs) and my mother having worked mainly on her girlhood farm. Neither parent could finish high school due to economic circumstances, but they had plenty of common sense (it's not just a cliche) were modest, hardworking, relatively happy without ever fetishizing happiness. Salt of the earth. The kind of people who do most of the living and working and dying in America and elsewhere. I've had hordes of relatives who fell into the same category--people who loved family life (even if a few relatives were difficult to get along with) and were immensely devoted to their families, people who loved God and tried to obey him more than they obeyed their human overlords, people who would take govt. handouts only if their children were starving, people who would be ashamed not to work if any honest work were available, people who fought the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists or, more ambivalently, fought the North Vietnamese. People who were justly proud of their families and their ability to support them. In short, the kind of people who are despised by leftie elitists, the kind of people those totalitarians want to completely liquidate like kulaks.

Yes, I went to college but only because my parents worked hard enough to send me. And I was never a "College Republican"; I voted for Dukakis and Clinton (and really regret doing so in hindsight). And no, I didn’t go to an Ivy. None would have taken me given their elitist attitudes and my unworthy family background.

Because I come from "real people" who have been consistently enslaved and killed by elites since the beginning of the species, I have no great love for said elites, who are, as a rule, vile and selfish and profoundly inferior. I only acknowledge the legitimacy of elite status earned through ability and virtue. Haven't seen any of that on this website, however, where bigoted snots lord it over the real people.

Now tell us about your working-class bona fides, pseudo.

Asher you write

"...

Comment B:
"You should not think that there is any innate difference between men and women because I'm a better person than you and because I tell you so."

The first is unthinkable. The second is something commonly said by "social elites"."

Since you use quotation marks, you assert that you are quoting at least one person word for word. Since you write "commonly" you are asserting that you are quoting many people. If you are arguing honestly, you should be able to name at least two of them and provide the context for your quote.

I would hasten to inform such people that there are innate differences between men and women -- for example men have testicles and women have ovaries. The fact that the claim which you ascribe to "social elites" is absurd tends to reinforce my suspicion that you haven't heard or read it frequently.

My personal guess, for what it's worth (nothing) is that at least one person who is "not what you'd consider any sort of orthodox right-winger, and [who] often argue[s] with pretty much anyone." argues by making claims of fact knowing they are false, that is argues by lying.

I don't claim to be better than you are and I don't expect you to agree that quotation marks should be used only for quotations just because I say so. Instead I ask you to imagine what would happen to political debate if people used quotation marks the way you do.

Your dubious quotation is not a minor matter. Your argument is based entirely on a claim that "social elites" argue in a different way than advocates of lower taxes. That may be so or it may be your perception because you are more irritated by "social elites". Your evidence is entirely made up.