Bill Kristol Previews GOP Attack On Obama: He Thinks He's Better Than You
February 25, 2008 -- 11:30 AM EST // //
Let it be noted that Bill Kristol's column is not entirely useless. Today's effort, for instance, neatly offers us a preview of what Barack Obama will face from the GOP attack machine and its media enablers this fall, should he become the Dem nominee.
Kristol manages the neat trick of wrapping up not one, but two highly dubious anti-Obama smears into his first few grafs -- the bogus flag-pin patriotism story and Michelle Obama's claim that she's really proud of her country for the first time.
That's to be expected, of course. But what interests me is the overarching theme he uses to tie them together: They both show, he suggests, that haughty and elitist Obama thinks he's better than you and the average Joe. We saw these exact same attacks lobbed relentlessly at Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, of course.
Kristol reaches this "conclusion" by pointing to Obama's claim that he stopped wearing the flag pin because it "became a substitute" for "true patriotism." This, Kristol said, was tantamount to Obama saying that "he was too good" to wear the pin...
Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?Consider yourself warned. Presuming Obama wins the nomination, the Dem will be cast among other things as haughty, patronizing, effete, and disdainful of traditional American values, unlike his salt-of-the-earth GOP opponent, who doesn't presume to be better than you. Sound familiar?It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself.
Speaking broadly, in 2000 and 2004 the traditional news orgs and pundits were more than happy to play along with this bogus narrative. Will it happen again? For all sorts of reasons the media dynamic may prove different this time around. Obama is far more rhetorically dexterous than either Gore or Kerry. There's a more robust liberal web presence hitting back at this sort of media nonsense than there was four years ago. And there are plenty of signs that many media figures are far more enamored of Obama than they were of either of his predecessors.
Nonetheless, this is a hint of what's coming, and our elite journalistic institutions and top-shelf media figures have proven more than happy to play along with it before. So Obama needs to be ready for it.
The comments section is broken and currently undergoing repair. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.