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Hell, Yeah, I'm an Elitist
I grew up on foodstamps and government cheese. I'm an elitist. My mother raised us on tips from her job at Denny's. I'm an elitist. I put myself through college by working at a grocery store. I'm an elitist. I used my education to become a college professor. I'm an elitist. I've lived in apartments all my adult life, and now, at 41, have finally purchased my first home. I'm an elitist. My mother and stepfather just came to visit me for the first time since I left California. We played Hearts and watched the Evening news. I'm an elitist. I'm voting for Barack Obama. I'm an elitist.
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Comments (35)
In addition to being an elitist, it sounds like you are bitter, too! Me, too! Hey, we may be part of an exciting new microtrend. Quick, call Mark Penn!
April 14, 2008 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bitter Elitists. Probably a subgroup of Penn's "Impressionable Elites" he seems to hate so much, I'm sure.
April 15, 2008 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I like your style, Brian. I am both elite and bitter, and Obama is my candidate.
April 14, 2008 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is that why you chose that screen name?
April 14, 2008 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Arugula is a bitter, elitist leaf, unlike the ever-so-humble and sweet iceberg, the tasteless lettuce of the masses.
April 14, 2008 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mama mia! I giva you credit for you good research!
However, I am Iowa-born, raised in the farmland heartland where great arugula is raised. I speak out against those who call Obama elitist just because he noted to Iowa arugula farmers how the price of us has risen. I ask all: just where do crops come from but from farmland? Of course great Iowa farmers know who we are!
This is my peppery side showing. I get hot under the leaf when elitists accuse Obama of being elitist. Hillary and her 109 million friends have no right to attack Obama. Her elitist roots are showing. Her salad days are over.
April 14, 2008 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Holy cats! I didn't know the background of the "arugula" theme. Joe Klein was peddling it the other day.
April 14, 2008 2:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Holy cats indeed. What a travesty of journalism. It just goes to show you what baloney gets sliced up and tossed around when there's too much time between primaries. Elistist indeed. MediaMatters.org has the good scoop on why this myth being perpetrated on Obama is a Myth with a capital M. Apologies for not knowing how to make a link a link.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200708280009
April 14, 2008 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow. It made it a link all by itself. Good new software they've got here.
April 14, 2008 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Didn't the Sunday talk show pick up the Myth too?
Is anyone doing research anymore?
Gah. Makes me hate the media.
April 14, 2008 5:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeaah, I missed that one too, thanks for the link. I don't watch Glenn Beck, the talking head that fell out of Rush Limbaugh's ass.
April 15, 2008 12:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
i used to be an elitist, but no longer. Nor am I bitter (not to say I have a high opinion of how things have been run). But I do see Obama the best choice. Does it make me elitist to think that the pres should be intellectually superior (in several categories) to myself.
April 14, 2008 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just saw Hillary speaking to a group of union types in Pittsburgh. She tried to bring up Obama's comments, and people in the crowd started shouting, "No! No!" The talking head who analyzed the scene (who was there) said the crowd didn't want to hear it, they are over it. She got no applause, no agreement. The bitter have spoken.
April 14, 2008 1:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure love to see video of that!
April 14, 2008 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
And here it is (thanks to observer2:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/14/need-headline_n_96578.html
April 14, 2008 3:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Me too! I'm an elitist!
But wait, I'm also bitter.
Now I'm confused.
Here I thought I was organic baby spinach, and I find myself arugula instead. Damn.
April 14, 2008 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Welcome to the field.
April 14, 2008 3:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Eliterate here. What do you teach professor ? My guess is Quantitative Bittery.
April 14, 2008 4:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, man, I went to a magnet high school. I'm, like, elitist off the charts. Still no house, though.
April 14, 2008 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not one of the Elite. That is why I should never become President.
I want some one who is among the best and the brightest to lead the nation. In other words; someone with Elite qualifications. Hillary says that she does not meet those requirements, so you should only hire her if you crave more of the same:
"Some one you would like to have a beer with"
Well you got him folks, for the past seven years. How has that worked out for you.
Hillary, Shot and a Beer, Clinton is running for Bush's third term.
Hillary thinks that the American Voters are so stupid that they will keep falling for the same Bullshit over and over.
Will you? Hillary believes that you will.
Are you really craving for George W. Bush in a Kevlar, sniper defying, Pantsuit!!!!
April 14, 2008 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just ate a Kroger brand Dill pickle.
April 14, 2008 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're an elitist unless you got it at the Wal*Mart.
April 14, 2008 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Discussing the relative bitterness/tastiness of salad greens is not only elitist but dangerously French.
Its as though people here don't recognize that salads are gateway foods. Don't forget: Lattes lose elections!
April 14, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Loving the story of the arugula avatar!
Without a doubt, I too am an elitist. It's true that Clinton's "cottage" is bigger than the house I grew up in, but I live on the West Coast. I've been known to drink a lattes while driving my Prius to work at a university.
I drink beer, though -- could that be my nonelite saving grace? Ah darnit, but I'm a beer snob. The beers I like are imported -- from Belgium. That's practically France! Sometimes I even drink bitter. No wonder I support Obama ...
April 15, 2008 1:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
er, "a latte." Where's that edit function I need so badly?
April 15, 2008 1:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes - the arugula story is a favorite of George Will's. He repeats it endlessly Someone needs to call him out on this. But then, I am of Italian origin and bitter myself.
April 14, 2008 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Arrrggghh! George Will! Don't say that! True, he admires me, but I'm no fan of his!
April 14, 2008 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Baby arugula!
April 14, 2008 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd hate to have some snooty elitist as my president.
That's why I'm writing in Larry the Cable Guy. And Junior Samples as VP.
GIT-R-DUN!
BR-549!
(If you understand the last reference and know where it comes from, then you might not be an elitist!)
April 14, 2008 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Junior Samples.
Of course he always did come across as the elitist on that show, and appeared to look down on Grandpa Jones, and Roy Clark.
April 14, 2008 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the HuffPo link, Boomer! That was hilarious.
Obama: "... both of whom spent decades in Washington, saying I'm out of touch." Crowd laughs. "It's time to cut through the [pause] rhetoric," Big laugh. (The pause obviously meant "bullshit".)
Clinton: "I know that many of you, like me, were disappointed at some of the remarks that he made," [Crowd: "No! No!"]
I hope these reactions are widely shared in PA ...
April 15, 2008 1:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the clip of this that was shown on NBC Nightly News last night has better audio - and the boos are very much louder than the HuffPo link.
Shocking, isn't it, that those small town rubes aren't fooled by a few gun-toting stories and hard drinkin' moments. Imagine them caring more about jobs, the war, and gas prices than the important stuff she wants them to care about.
You could almost call it elitist.
April 15, 2008 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Clinton is in a fever to persuade the gullible media that something that the Bill component of the incarnation Clinton has said on multiple occasions, in effect, remarking on the relationship between people’s circumstance and their attitudes, as in “white people scared to death” is condescending.
A statement to that effect, maybe using the term “elitist”, has become a staple of the Hillary component’s stump speech.
What Obama’s remarks seem to amount to, drained of local emotional content, is pointing out that people are especially conservative in economically hard times.
Isn’t that what he said? Or isn’t it a specific instantiation of that general thought? Gods and guns standing for conservatism. “Bitter” standing for pissed off. Or have I missed something?
It was a remark of the general class of “there are no atheists in “foxholes” which was first advanced as an argument for God, i.e. in a foxhole you will be close to the elemental and know the eternal verities, and then advanced by atheists as a statement against God. Either way it was a statement that points that that there is, in fact, a relationship between your circumstances and your thoughts of and attitude about God. (Would I get nailed for being irreligious I wonder? Better check my St. Augestine or St. Paul or ho all the way to jesus.)
In taking that line, the Clintons are like are two people whose balloon arrived in Oz a few day before yours, and who are pointing out that you can’t talk “that way” about Munchkins. (Or if put in the true spirit of this brouhaha that “happen to be” Munchkins, or, in full Clinton speak, “the wonderful upbeat, patriotic and hardworking people who, through no fault of their own, happen to be Munchkins.”) If you talk about the Munchkins the wrong way, they will let you know, you will be judged elitist. You don’t say that the size of thing “dwarfs” another for example. You certainly don’t accuse anyone of being “small minded.”
Now I would certainly admit that what Obama said was “indelicate” . Maybe even insensitive. Certainly ill considered given this is a political campaign.
But condescending? I thought the word “condescend” means “to behave toward other people as though less important or less intelligent than you are.” (The Microsoft definition, which knows a thing or two about condescending.)
Given that, I would think it is not Obama but the Clinton who have been condescending.
Try an keep the idea of “behave toward other people as though they are less intelligent” in mind as we wander through this building here just inside the gates of Clintonia.
First of all, I assert the very claim that Obama was condescending, is condescending. They assume you are not smart enough to figure out what it means.
Let’s pause now at the tableau just inside the entrance of this first building. There she is, in effigy, the 30 year liberal (not counting her college days when she was conservative) depicted talking about her duck hunting idylls in the Scranton uplands. And her love of guns. (Good Munchkins, you know, all like guns.) It is only by the sheerest mischance that she hasn’t joined the NRA. Or gone out to the blinds with Dick Cheney.
In the next one she is drinking beer in a bar for the TV crew. Watching her you think maybe she even has a Munchkin dress being saving for the grand finale, which will prove she REALLY gets what being 3 foot six is like.
You don’t find that condescending ? If not, what do you find that. Maybe we ought to startwondering about the word “phoney” insteas of “elitist.”
And as though the Munchkin had no other properties.
The problem with Obama was he was being Obama and speaking of them as peers. The condescension was not in the words themselves but in the views of the commentators who thought a certain delicacy was required..
And no-one, well almost no-one, was struck by the incongruity.
With her affluent childhood, and her full tuition stint at Wellsley, and her post-college bee-line for the board room, and her line of chatter about all the important people she knows, there she is, standing at the deck of the A deck of the cruise ship, with her Tiffany jewels, her alligator checkbook, and her Munchkin phrase book (do not use the word ‘dwarf”) looking at the quaint natives across the lagoon (Munchkins if you don’t want to mix metaphors) talking about how she learned to harpoon herself as a girl and pointing out someone born on that island and who returned to that island by choice, whose constituency has always been that island, is an “elitist.”
I figure she must Obama’s background so she must assume that her audience doesn’t. Or the media is too cowed by assertions of double standard to react
The building of course, whose wonders we have barely scratched, is the Bill and Hillary Museum to Condescension. I can tell you one thing. If I were a Munchkin on the beach I would be pretty bitter, harpooning being the way its been lately.
April 15, 2008 8:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is some serious stream of consciousness writing there, cglobek, but I've gotta hand it to you, this is a jewel:
April 15, 2008 9:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
What keeps running through my mind is that they're characterizing the black guy as snotty and elitist. Isn't this progress, kind of? And the woman candidate is way too macho. Doesn't this somehow show that we've moved beyond stereotypes in this great land of ours?
The whole thing's beginning to look like a Coen brothers movie, if they ever put black people in their films. It would be freakin' hilarious if a McCain presidency wasn't the obvious denouement.
No wait, Marx Brothers. Not Frank Capra. Is there a more apt comparison? H'mm.
April 15, 2008 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
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