Oh “Boy”: A Case for Elitism

As has been the case since Barack Obama’s candidacy took off last year, there is too much material this week for us to analyze in depth. Here’s what happened:

1. Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke at the funeral for long-time Chicago civil rights activist Judge R. Eugene Pincham. Despite requests from the family for no media to be present, the Chicago Sun-Times streamed Wright’s eulogy on its website.
2. Tavis Smiley seemingly ended his 12-year relationship with the Tom Joyner Morning (radio) Show amidst audience outrage over his continual criticism of Obama. Smiley explained that he was not quitting, but merely scaling back his involvement to make room for other projects.
3. Among a host of offensive remarks at a Northern Kentucky Lincoln Day dinner, U.S. Senator Geoff Davis referred to Obama as “boy,” to very little media attention. (Davis since apologized -- read about it and listen to the audio here.)
   
4. Obama explained to supporters at a fundraiser in San Francisco that working class whites are “bitter” as a result of all the economic hardship and empty promises that they’ve experienced over the past few decades. The comments were met with cries that Obama is an elitist and out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Only an African American could be accused (with straight faces) of being too unsophisticated one day and an elitist a few days later. When the Jeremiah Wright controversy surfaced, Barack Obama was characterized as someone who was so unsophisticated that he was tabula rasa for a “hate-mongering” minister who filled his brain with ideas that he was unable to filter or process. This week, he is accused of being out of touch with ordinary Americans because he is an elitist.

As Jon Stewart noted Monday night on The Daily Show, though, we might prefer someone who is “elite” to lead the country.

Since this is a blog on language, we need to make sure to be clear that there is a distinction between being “elite” and being an “elitist.” The latter refers to someone who believes in the superiority of, and supports rule by, a small class of people. There is an argument to be made on both sides of this, provided that the leadership is selected through democratic processes. The so-called pluralist model of democracy, for instance, acknowledges the existence of an elite ruling class, but argues that ordinary Americans can influence those elites, primarily through representation by interest groups. There is a rich political science literature on this theory, but we present it here to set up a different type of argument.

Despite Stewart’s bashing of Stephen’s homeland (joining Sienna Miller, who recently dissed his hometown, too!), Stewart raises an important point. What do we want in a president? We predicted in December of 2006 – in our very first blog to mention Obama – that he would not win the Democratic nomination. We might very well still be wrong (certainly looks like it), but the questions that have come up are very similar to those we raised regarding Democrats’ perception of his electability because of his race.

No one knows exactly what to make of this guy. He’s black, but we spent months wondering if he was “black enough” for black leaders. Once he began to show his electoral prowess, skeptical black leaders rallied around him. At that point, he started to look too black (enter the Jeremiah Wright clips), so white commentators such as Dennis Miller began to speculate about his “street cred.” Just when it appeared that he was striking a balance between being smart enough to do the job and sensitive enough to understand how folks were feeling, he is attacked for being an elitist.

All candidates, particularly those running for president, face scrutiny that seems beyond “fair” at some point. But Obama is not any candidate; he’s the first truly viable black candidate, and these attacks are not new. In the 1990s, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina ran an ad against his opponent, African American Harvey Gantt, pointing out that Gantt attended a fundraiser in San Francisco – a code for “too liberal” (and maybe even gay!). The fact that Obama’s remarks took place at a San Francisco fundraiser helped to give this story legs.

Middle America is bitter. We know it, and the folks living in those situations know it. But to them, it’s not okay to have a black guy say it. This is the quintessential example of an “uppity” black man – who is he to call them bitter?!

The remainder of the comment, of course, was that these bitter folks cling to guns and religion and antipathy toward people different than themselves. A close examination of the media criticism will reveal numerous pundits explaining that people liked guns before bad economic situations, and they were religious before them, too. This is used as an explanation of how out of touch Obama is. But here is his quote:

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

(Of course, completely ignored was the very next sentence where he explained that only some folks in some communities are like this.) But this was a very thoughtful answer. He paused throughout his answer. He was chose his words carefully. He is explaining what is happening and why folks feel the way they do. They are bitter (for good reasons, he explains) and they cling to these things “as a way to explain their frustrations.” What, exactly, is elitist about that comment? He is pointing out that it is perfectly natural for us to make sense of our world in ways that are comfortable to us. We don’t have to agree with those ways, but they are coping mechanisms. Obama did not condemn people, but rather empathized with them and attempted to explain to his admittedly elite liberal audience why folks feel the way they do. They may have laughed during the explanation, but he didn’t. It is very similar to the way he tried to explain white and black resentment during his speech on race a month ago.

Do we want someone in the head executive position who understands the complexity of the world? Maybe not. George W. Bush is quiet intelligent (despite rumors to the contrary), but he is not an intellectual. Being an intellectual has proven to be a liability in electoral politics in America. We are skeptical about what we don’t understand, and intellectuals attempt to understand the world in sophisticated and complex ways. Obama is certainly an intellectual. We accepted it with Bill Clinton because he could mitigate it by putting on the Southern drawl (which, wrong as it may be, is not considered as sign of intelligence or intellectualism). Obama’s blackness cannot mitigate his intellectualism in the same way. For white folks who are not comfortable with African Americans at all, the effect is quite the contrary.

In short, rural Pennsylvanians, along with many other middle-income and working-class whites, may very well be looking for a reason to justify not voting for Obama. The norm of equality prevents them from not voting for him just because of his race. They can find psychological comfort, however, if there is another reason. For some it will be that he’s too unsophisticated, and for others, it’ll be because he’s too sophisticated. In any case, race is at the root of the issue of why this “boy” still has an uphill battle for the nomination.

P.S. Yinz better root for the Stillers 'n at!