He’s more qualified and accomplished than about 99% of Americans.

Excuse me?

Wow. I take it back. He’s not the elitist here. You are.

And Jon, I didn’t say he didn’t work. I said he has no common touch. And he never struggled. He is an elitist. His speeches show it, over and over again. The arugula remark is an example of his elitism.

On a sunlit Friday afternoon in July, Barack Obama stopped by Beverly Van Fossen’s farm in Adel, Iowa, to speak about “rural issues.” It was standard Hawkeye State stumping—until the senator took a stab at sympathizing with farmers whose crop prices have stagnated. “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” he asked. Unfortunately, Adel isn’t exactly arugula country. “Someone near me whispered, ‘What’s arugula?’ ” says Van Fossen, 74. ” ‘You can’t find that in Iowa’.” Same goes for Whole Foods. The closest locations, reported The New York Times that evening, are in Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kans., and Minneapolis.

But you go ahead and keep ignoring my cites and building up more strawmen, Jon. Because that’s the way to debate.

Also, arugala? You’re criticizing his food preferences? It’s elitist to like tasty leaves in your salad? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I speak from experience because I came from a humble background, but attended Ivy League institutions. Those institutions had historical policies of restricting the number of Jews they would accept. They also had historically accepted few candidates from modest means. By virtue of their lifting those restrictions at the same time that they encouraged a more diverse student body, Jews of modest means received a major benefit. As one of those, I met classmates whom you might have been ready to knock down a peg as beneficiaries of affirmative action.

But they were plenty smart enough and accomplished enough. In fact, they were typically far more impressive than the “legacies” (2nd and 3rd generation and beyond) who benefited well beyond their competency level from the operation of the “old boy” form of affirmative action. Yet it was typically the legacies with their family connections who had far higher expectations as to what they supposedly deserved.

Drew

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., a black Kenyan of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a White American from Wichita, Kansas.[2] His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student.[3] They separated when he was two years old and later divorced.[4] Obama’s father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.[5] After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro’s home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.[6] Obama’s mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years and then back to Indonesia for her fieldwork.

I’m missing the heartland farmer part of the equation there.

But it’s moot. His words and deeds keep showing how he has no common touch. He never had to struggle from paycheck to paycheck. He never had to worry about latchkey children, or where the rent was coming from, or how to find the extra money for rising gas prices.

He’s a poseur.

As for Harvard Law, well, Affirmative Action was alive and well when Obama applied. I’m not saying he wasn’t smart enough for it. I’m just saying that it was a factor, and you and I both know it.

It’s a factor right now. He would not be in this race if he were white. He would have been knocked down as inexperienced and told to go home and grow a little before trying again after Hillary was done.

Obama never worked his way up from anything?

Go ahead and criticize Obama’s policies and positions. Tell us that McCain would make the better Commander in Chief. Explain why you find Obama condescending, patronizing, or elitist *in his attitude and/or statements and/or POV*. Tell us why he is an *intellectual* elitist. All of that is fair game, for sure. While many will disagree, there are certainly arguments to be made that Obama has forgotten his common man roots. Go for it, as is your right.

But saying that Obama “went from privilege to privilege” and “never worked his way up from anything” goes well beyond rank cynicism and partisanship to blindly ignoring the facts and history and choosing to create a new narrative. Fact: Obama’s grandfather on one side was a third world goatherder. Fact: His grandfather on the other side was an American heartland farmer. Fact: Obama grew up in modest circumstances with no elite connections.

Doesn’t arguing about exactly when and under what circumstances Obama’s mother collected food stamps pretty much wipe out the “privilege to privilege” argument pretty effectively? Or is being “solidly in the middle class” enough to make the “privilege to privilege” claim? Or do we start the clock upon Obama’s graduation from Harvard Law and forget all the prior history (now there’s a tactic we should find familiar)?

Not everyone gets into Harvard Law School. And very few make it to become Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review there. But I have heard nothing from anyone to indicate that family connections, money, or anything other than merit and hard work were behind the Horatio Alger story of Obama’s graduation from Harvard Law.

Drew

Obama is pulling this working class crap. It’s the hypocrisy, not the fact that McCain came from a more privileged background. It’s Obama’s elitism, and his pretense that he’s not elitist–not McCain’s fundraisers.

The guy’s a poseur. Common man? Common touch? Common bullshit.

He’s elitist because he eats Arugula, but McCain is not even though he cannot answer how many homes he owns

Actually, the situation that you describe is because Senator McCain does not deal with the investments in his family. His wife owns the homes and takes care of the family investments. As a result, the Senator is careful not to be involved so that he will not have any conflict of interest problems. This is the exact opposite of the situation with Senator Obama who has used sweetheart deals to pay for his mansion and steered cash to unsavory characters in response.