SlowpokeBlog

I don't have time to write as much detail about this as I'd like, but to summarize quickly: I think some of the earlier claims about the Clinton campaign playing the race card were overblown; for example, Bill's "fairy tale" comment was in reference to Obama's claiming the antiwar mantle -- not Obama's campaign itself. But something really stinks about the way the Clintonites and the Republicans are portraying Obama as some exotic creature who doesn't fit in with white blue collar workers in small-town Pennsylvania, a milieu I am most familiar with. (Oops! I used the word "milieu!" Subtract ten working-class credibility points.) Not so long ago in America, it was practically unthinkable that a black man running for president would be making the rounds in the mostly-white bowling alleys and sports bars of Pennsyltucky. So he's wearing a suit and seems a little out of place at times. Well, duh! The "elitist" rhetoric as used on Obama strikes me as a socially acceptable way of papering over a more complex historical reality. It's way of saying "that slick urban guy doesn't fit in with you country folk" without explicitly calling attention to race. Hillary could have risen above this stuff, stuck to policy, said "my health care plan is better for the working class." She had plenty of cred right there -- but instead she went for the cheap shot.

The Utz cheese balls in the first panel were taken directly from Maureen Dowd's woefully bad column, "Eggheads and Cheese Balls," about Obama's so-called elitism. Yes, the fact that he did not look natural purchasing a bag of cheese balls was cited as an example. While a valid point can be made about America's anti-intellectual streak, the column did not not stake out a proper distance from that rather silly bias. Rather, it pandered right to it.