Tuesday, June 24, 2008

So Who Does He Like?

Check out this nugget from The Audacity of Hope (recently discussed on National Review's Campaign Spot blog) in which Obama paints an unflattering picture of his wealthy liberal donors:

Increasingly, I found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart,interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment...

Now, I don't find too much to disagree with in Obama's description of these limousine liberals. Consider, though, that this description of affluent Democrats comes from a man who described rural Pennsylvanians and mid-westerners as people who "cling" to guns and religion out of economic "bitterness." So... Obama doesn't like his wealthy urban donors and he doesn't like the "bitter-cling" rural voters.

So who does Obama like?

1 comment:

Ringguax said...

I'm not sure I agree that those comments are elitist, exactly. Is think they're more another example of Prof. Obama's tendency to turn into a social anthropologist. And in this regard, I think that he is actually fairly accurate about his description of limousine liberals, as you say. The problem with his remarks about rural Pennsylvanians was that they totally missed the mark as anthropology.