Mary Beth Schneider, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article on Barack Obama’s conversation with reporters in Indianapolis. I take exception to the opening of her article that attempts to frame Obama’s campaign in terms of the artificial narrative being ginned up by the cable news media personalities and other “journalists” too lazy report on issues of substance. These disparaging remarks aren’t meant to characterize Schneider directly because she’s done a lot of fine reporting over the years. But to open with a Matthews-esque suggestion that Obama has a problem with elitism (whatever that means) absent any evidence that Hoosiers view him as putting on more airs than Clinton or McCain and absent evidence that Pennsylvania voters actually changed their opinion of Obama in response to the media tempest over “bitterness” is irresponsible. The fact is, Pennsylvania voters started with an overwhelming preference for Senator Clinton. Obama cut that to single digits and there isn’t any evidence that voters moved away from Obama because they thought he was “elitist.”
Responding to this nonsense:
“I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas, where the dinner table would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana — a lot of pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds,” he said.
Obama said he “doesn’t want to go out of my way to sort of prove my street cred as a down-to-earth guy.”
He laughed about his image being anything “elitist.”
“I basically buy five of the same suit, and then I patch them up and I wear them repeatedly. I have four pairs of shoes,” he said. “Recently, I’ve taken to getting a haircut more frequently than I used to because my mother-in-law makes fun of me.”
But, he said, “I will be fighting as hard as I can to make sure that people understand why I got in this race in the first place, how I got where I am today, and then when they understand that, I think they’ll recognize themselves.”
In the journalists’ defense, it’s a lot easier to report on this stuff than on tax policy or foreign policy or economic policy or policy on civil liberties or on any of the dozens of things that are going wrong with this country. Probably sells more papers too.
It’s truly the stupid season again, when the only one without a $100 million plus net worth is the “elitist”.
Reminds me of when the one guy in the race we wanted to have a beer with was a known alcoholic.