2,470,000 Google hits for elitist Obama

Friday night a friend nearly choked on his Spanky’s BBQ beef brisket as he ranted about how a man who grew up in modest circumstances, and who owns just one house and one car, was getting slapped with the “elitist” tag — relentlessly! — while another man who married a young heiress and now enjoys several houses in several locations doesn’t get smeared that same way. Here’s my How to Be Useful-inspired explanation. I have to number these points because I’ll get lost in the fog otherwise.

1. Americans love the idea that we live in a classless society. In other words, that class distinctions don’t matter much here.*

2. Right alongside this belief is a yen for meritocracy. A meritocratic system fast-tracks its smartest and most talented citizens to the top, where they run both government and business.

3. As much as we like the idea of meritocracy, we shy away from its uglier implications. Say you think the U.S.A. is wonderfully meritocratic, and yet you’re struggling financially. Does this mean you’re not that bright? And if your I.Q. is low, does that mean you deserve to be poor? That you’ve earned your low-status…well, because you’re just not good enough? The notion that a meritocracy was going to be tough on the majority of people’s self-esteem was embedded in the concept from the beginning.*

4. For someone staring at a tall stack of credit card bills, it’s an uncomfortable thought. How can you reconcile your lack of power and money (grating enough as is) with the (even more painful) doctrine that the people at the top are “the best and the brightest”?

5. It’s a dilemma. Someone like Obama — he’s smart! he stayed up late, working hard! and now he’s on the road to the White House! — is unsettling. No one (except maybe Geraldine Ferraro) can claim he got lucky, or was born on third base. He really did hit a triple.

6. Strangely enough, this is why many people feel more comfortable with high-class folks who aren’t, frankly, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Witness George W. Bush. Born a member of the nation’s social and economic elite, and yet…it doesn’t seem he would have made it on his own. This, given the competitive pressures people feel, actually comes as a relief. They suspect that if there were a level playing field, W. wouldn’t be much competition.

7. In this jumble of ambivalence, the worst thing you can be is Al Gore. Born into the elite (indeed, with a background much like Bush’s) but also an overachiever. That’s just obnoxious.

8. So when people pull out the “elitist” smear, they’re really talking in code. They’re talking elite in the Jeffersonian “natural elite” sense. Here’s the thought process: “Gosh, Obama’s got talent. And he seems to think that’s worth something.” And to those for whom hard work has not paid off nearly as well, it adds insult to injury.

9. Bottom line is, if you believe we live in a classless society, and you believe at the same time that we’ve a fully functioning meritocracy, you’ve erected a big, big psychological obstacle for yourself. Unless you happen to be doing very, very well.

10. As someone who’s experienced not doing very, very well, I can suggest…when the Spanky’s waitress asks if you want to take your uneaten black-eyed peas and candied sweet potatoes home with you, say yes. Leave a big tip. Then, on the way home, admit to yourself that class matters, this is not a perfect meritocracy we live in, and that’s o.k. You’ll figure something out.

*Pop sociologist Vance Packard wrote about this in the late 1950s, and he traced the “classlessness” idea to a U.S. production boom that began in the early 1940s. Thanks to the G.I. bill and a strong manufacturing sector, middle class ranks swelled. Widespread prosperity was such a happy change from the Great Depression — still very much on people’s minds — that it was easy to believe that social class distinctions were withering away. Advertising helped this along, Packard claims in The Status Seekers: “…the director of a market-research organization announced his discovery that America was becoming ‘one vast middle class.’ Meanwhile, a corporation in paid advertisements was assuring us that ‘there are more opportunities in this country than ever before.’ Whatever else we are, we certainly are the world’s most self-proclaimed equalitarian people.”

**The phrase comes from a 1958 book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Written by British Labour minister Michael Young, it was actually intended as a cautionary tale. Young wanted to show how, “if the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.” And likewise, how ordinary people who “have less worldly goods and less worldly power than a select minority” can, if they subscribe to the notion of a meritocracy, “can be damaged in their own self-esteem, and generally demoralized.”

Politics and Bad Editing

Every time I see a statement by Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton, I wince the way I do when confronted with emails written to loves lost five years ago. The unease hits fast, like a drag off a Marlboro Red. Then irritation settles in.

My first thought was that Burton’s sentences were too long. He just needed an editor. Read the rest of this entry »