Jack & Jill Politics

It worked temporarily for Clinton and McCain so apparently Karl Rove is among those pushing the theme we’ll entitle: Those Uppity Obama Niggers Think They’re Better than You. Here from the Edmonton Sun:

For former Bush mastermind Karl Rove to portray Obama as a Gatsby-esque smoothie, as he did to a group of DC Republicans the other day, was a fascinating piece of race and class voodoo. “Even if you never met him,” Rove said, “You know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

No wonder his wife’s so mad.

Rove’s comment translates in tactical terms as the weirdly implausible, “If we can’t portray him as an angry black man, what the hell — we’ll portray him as a privileged, elitist, white man.”

I mean, LORD – it’s so twisted! I read Rove’s statement and had to say “Huh?” Is this about Barack Obama or about your own insecurity around black people as equals in your space?

The Obamas as well-educated, successful, affluent African-Americans is very confusing to conservatives and complicates their messaging. Chris Matthews on Hardball has repeated a theme that Barack Obama can’t appeal to working class whites but only the well-educated or African-Americans. Matthews has said stuff like: Is Obama “too University of Chicago or too South Side Chicago” for working-class voters? When the fact of the matter is that Barack and Michelle Obama actually grew up a whole lot closer to the struggles that working class whites experience than did John McCain (son and grandson of admirals) and Cindy McCain, the rodeo queen and professional heiress.

I mean how could this be a story.? Or is it just part of the pattern? Oliver Willis, who used to work at a mortgage company, noted that the discount Obama got for his home is fairly normal for the size of the loan he was getting. The Post alleges no illegality or wrongdoing in the story, and manages to mention that the McCains don’t have mortgages on their homes without mentioning that they are so rich they forgot to pay taxes on one for four years.

In fact, the information from the story comes from public records disclosed on Obama’s website. So despite the efforts of the Post to drum up a sense of innuendo, the reality is that this story was only possible because the Obamas disclosed their financial records in an effort to be transparent. Meanwhile the McCains haven’t released theirs in full.

The story is basically an opportunity to list the Obama’s assets and drill up white resentment about how “wealthy” the Obamas are. It functions only at the level of suggesting that these people are excessively privileged for being who they are, and so don’t deserve to live the comfortable life they’ve achieved. More fodder for the charges of “elitism,” which I think at this point we all recognize as charges of being uppity. Case in point:

When the Obamas secured the loan, their income had risen dramatically. Obama assumed his Senate seat in January 2005, with an annual salary of $162,100. That same month, Random House agreed to reissue an Obama memoir, for which it originally paid $40,000, as part of a $2.27 million deal that included two future nonfiction books and a children’s book.

Around the same time, the University of Chicago Hospitals promoted Michelle Obama to a vice president and more than doubled her pay, to $317,000.

The couple wanted to step up from their $415,000 condo. They chose a house with six bedrooms, four fireplaces, a four-car garage and 5 1/2 baths, including a double steam shower and a marble powder room. It had a wine cellar, a music room, a library, a solarium, beveled glass doors and a granite-floored kitchen.

Meanwhile, there haven’t been many stories noting that the McCains would stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars from the tax cut he is proposing. Furthermore, while the folks on the news will go on endlessly about how folks are suffering in the mortgage crisis while the Obama’s got a better than average interest rate, they won’t discuss the candidates’ policies for ending the crisis. Obama has one position, McCain was having trouble making up his mind. Which makes sense, considering one of McCain’s top advisers is Phil Gramm, is a lobbyist for Swiss bank UBS which made bundles off the mortage crisis and is now under investigation for having dodged paying the U.S. taxes it is owed. They’re seeking to put their friend McCain in the White House, but of course that matters far less than the Obamas’ solarium and 5 1/2 baths. (eyes rolling)

This theme of punishing the Obamas for daring to be successful by conservatives and the media is truly repugnant and contrary to the ideal of the American Dream. In America, if you’re smart and work hard and dream big, you can be anything you want to be. Any boy or girl can grow up to be president, we’re told as kids. It’s disappointing to see the media struggle with the American Dream come to life rather than celebrate it.