As usual, Rush says it best. That's why the radical Left hate him so much, and do their best to silence him. The founder of talk radio didn't get to be the founder of all talk radio for nothing.


OBAMA THE MESSIAH

RUSH: Hi ya, folks, and, Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the commanding officer of Operation Chaos here to report to you that the objectives are being met and exceeded, ladies and gentlemen, bloodletting, blood on the floor at the Democrat Party. It is a beautiful thing to see. Here you have Barack Obama running around and calling all these people in small towns basically a bunch of racists and bigots, phony religious people, they only cling to God when things are going bad. If things are going good, they would cling to government, not God, is what he meant. Then one of my favorite lines in his dissertation, people who have antipathy toward those not like them. Well, hell's bells, folks, who does that describe if not the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his wife? By the way, you want to talk about traditions and values and institutions? What do you think Jeremiah Wright's flock walks out of that church believing each and every day along with the kids that are in that church each and every day? Who is it that's making these people embittered? Who is it that's trying to make them mad? Who is it that wants them filled with rage? It's Barack Obama's pastor. It's Barack Obama's wife.

If you trace this, you go back to before the Jeremiah Wright episode occurred, and what did we have? We had almost a messianic candidate. We had a guy of hope and the future and working together with one another and unity. We had slogans. We had a guy saying nothing better than anybody has ever said nothing in my life. Then the Reverend Jeremiah Wright tapes hit. And ever since then, Obama has been unable to get back on his message of hope and unity and all the other rotgut that it was before this happened. What has happened, ladies and gentlemen, is that we are finding out who Barack Obama is. Now, you Obamaites out there, you can try to spin this all you want, and you can say that people like me are taking him out of context and twisting it. We're just listening to his words. He's the one who has apologized for saying that he said it wrong. Now he's out there trying to fix it with the aiding and abetting of the Drive-By Media. Now, Clinton back in 1991 basically said that white people out there are scared of black people and that the Republicans are using this to divide people and scare 'em even more. Bad as it was, it doesn't go as far as Obama's comment. Obama went after religion; he went after the Second Amendment. He called millions of Americans who he's courting racists because they oppose illegal immigration. And now Obama is saying that Clinton and McCain are out of touch, not him, because they've been in Washington for years.

Now, they may all be out of touch. I have to chuckle when I hear Mrs. Clinton calling anybody an elitist. McCain, they may be all tough touch because they've been in Washington their whole lives, been in government some lengthy time in all of their lives, but it's Obama who said what he said. It is Obama who smeared tens of millions of Americans. John Broder in the New York Times today: "Democrats Wrangle Over Words and Beliefs." This is about this wacky compassion forum that took place last night in Pennsylvania at Messiah College. I mean, how about this? Here you've got Obama sitting in front of the backdrop, Messiah College. And he was trying to portray himself as a messiah and was getting away with it, until Jeremiah Wright hit. "In response to the first question at the forum, Mrs. Clinton repeated her charge that Mr. Obama’s remarks were 'elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.' She said his words helped perpetuate the idea that Democrats looked down their noses at church-going Americans and hunters, an attitude that many Democrats believe contributed to their last two presidential losses."

It's true. Dare I remind you -- yes, I do dare. John F. Kerry, the haughty John Kerry, somewhere in Ohio, wanting to go hunting, ends up dressing like Johnny Carson used to when he was making fun of hunters. He walks into the ammo store, "Can I get me a huntin' license here?" What does that tell you? This is John Kerry. They're all this way. Obama has pulled away the shroud, ladies and gentlemen, that has masked who Democrats are. "Can I get me a huntin' license here?" John Kerry doesn't speak that way, but he thinks all of you who have guns do. This is from the story in the New York Times: "Religion has become a contentious subtext in the Democratic campaign in recent days after Mr. Obama's comments. Before the forum, he began his most spirited counterattack on Mrs. Clinton since the flap erupted over his remarks, saying of her attacks, 'She knows better. Shame on her.' He also mocked Mrs. Clinton's own recent comments courting gun owners, saying she was 'talking like she's Annie Oakley. Hillary Clinton's out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday. She's packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better." Hey, Obama, you don't go hunting with a six shooter! This guy is not who he is made out to be. He is not who he's cracked up to be. The audio sound bites we have now -- and, by the way, I want to go back and let you listen to me. We're going to start audio sound bite 16 Mike. This is me on this program April 8th, and this is what I said would be the case when I first learned they're going to do this stupid compassion forum instead of a debate. This is what I said.

RUSH ARCHIVE: I'll make you a prediction that the morality they discuss is what government's role is. That's how they define morality. If they government's involved in it, it's moral. If the government isn't involved in it, it isn't moral and needs the government involved in it.

RUSH: All right, let's go to the audio sound bites now from Grantham, Pennsylvania, and Messiah College. The moderator out there for CNN, Campbell Brown, says, "What exactly is wrong, Senator Clinton, with what Senator Obama said when he talked about people being bitter?"

HILLARY: The characterization of people in a way that really seemed to be elitist and out of touch is something that we have to overcome. You know, the Democrat Party, to be very blunt about it, has been viewed as a party that didn't understand and respect the values and the way of life of so many of our fellow Americans.

RUSH: You included.

HILLARY: Somebody goes to a closed door fundraiser in San Francisco and makes comments that do seem elitist, out of touch, and frankly patronizing.

RUSH: You've done it, too!

HILLARY: That has nothing to do with him being a good man or a man of faith. We had two very good men and men of faith run for president in 2000 and 2004. But large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand or relate to or frankly respect their ways of life.

RUSH: They didn't respect 'em. She's talking about Gore and Kerry. And Kerry, "Can I get me a huntin' license here?" When these two guys started talking about hunting, it was obvious it was focus group tested and that they were repeating lines that tested well in focus groups. It's not who they are. They have disdain for hunters! They have disdain for people who like guns. They have disdain for people who go to church. Folks, by definition, liberals fear organized religion. They fear the boundaries that it creates. They want people's faith to be in government and in liberals, not in God. Obama was simply being as honest as he could be because he didn't think anybody outside the mansion in San Francisco would ever hear about this. And here's a question for you -- I can answer it for you, too -- but the question, okay, you got a lot of libs out there who just hate hunters, they just despise them, they want guns out of the hands of everybody. Elitist liberal Democrats.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We have one more sound bite from the compassion forum last night. Now, Mrs. Clinton here, in response to Obama's comments in San Francisco, is trying to portray herself as an all-knowing, all-understanding theologian, slash, Christian. She understands that Obama went wrong with this and so by the same token we're supposed to look at her as someone who's devoutly religious with tremendous biblical scholarship underlying her existence. You tell me, after you listen to this, if you think she has the slightest clue what she is talking about. A question from Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek last night: "Senator Clinton, we've heard about HIV/AIDS, many people here are concerned about Darfur, many other humanitarian issues. Why do you think it is that a loving God allows innocent people to suffer?" Now, for those of you who are in this audience who are Christian and religious, what's wrong with the question? The question's premise is totally flawed. Mrs. Clinton could have said that and gone on. She didn't. Here's what she said.

HILLARY: In both the Old and the New Testament, the incredible demands that God places on us and that the prophets ask of us and that Christ called us to respond to on behalf of the poor are unavoidable. So maybe, you know, the Lord is just waiting for us to respond to his call, because this despair, this impoverishment of body and soul is what we are expected to be spending our time responding to, and so few of us do. And it's a personal call, it's a family community, religious call, and it's a governmental call. And we've got to do more to respond to that call.

RUSH: That's embarrassing. That is embarrassing. It's just flat out embarrassing. The question says it all. By the way, HIV/AIDS, Darfur, humanitarian issues, why do you think it is that a loving God allows innocent people to suffer? A loving God, the God of Creation, and the God of free will thus doesn't allow anything. The premise of this question, to me, it is simply shocking. It's no different, had he said, "How come you think God makes certain airplane crashes take place and not others? And how come God decides which people are going to be killed or horribly injured in automobile accidents?" It's not what God does. She turns this question into an answer that says we're not charitable enough, that we haven't responded to God's demand that we take care of our fellow man, which, if she wants to answer it that way, is insulting as it can be.

This is the greatest country in the history of human civilization. This country is exceptional. I don't hear any candidate talking about it, and it frankly irritates me. We don't hear about it from the Republican side, we don't hear about it from these two. This country has done more for the sick. This country has done more for the oppressed than any country in the history of civilization. Mrs. Clinton and Obama both want to sit here and act like we haven't responded to God's call and we haven't done enough, and it's a personal thing, and we gotta do more and they're not doing enough, and they want to use government as this vehicle for doing this. Again, when government does it, it's moral. If government doesn't do it, it is immoral. These answers illustrate that not just Obama, but Hillary, too, still holds these prejudices about dumb hayseed hicks that are devoutly religious. She doesn't understand them at all.


Now, listen to what they're hearing. In 2000 they had to listen to Gore talk about his respect for hunters. In 2004 they had to listen to the haughty John Kerry talk about his respect for hunting. And now they gotta listen to Hillary Clinton talk about how she's out there in a duck blind, and she's a hunter, and she understands that Democrats are a bunch of elitists. This is Operation Chaos on full display. I couldn't be happier, I couldn't be prouder. Look at what we have wrought here, ladies and gentlemen. It's only going to get worse. There's no dream ticket possible. The dream ticket here, it's all blowing up now. Now, Obama was up next later in the program, and Campbell Brown said, "Senator Obama, to a lot of the religious leaders in this room and a lot of decent, hard-working people out there, it may come across as you attacking their values and their religion, suggesting that people are clinging to it."

OBAMA: What I was saying is that when economic hardship hits in these communities, what people have is they've got family, they've got their faith, they've got the traditions that have been passed on to them from generation to generation. Those aren't bad things. That's what they have left. And unfortunately, what people have become bitter about and oftentimes have told me about as I've traveled through not just Pennsylvania, but I was referring to states all across the Midwest, including my home state, is any confidence that the government is listening to them. They don't think that government's listening to them.

RUSH: Man, this is just so frustrating. Most of them, Senator Obama, don't give a rat's rear end whether government is listening to them. You know, they have made their lives, despite the obstacles government has put in front of them. This is classic liberalspeak. People are hopeless, and wandering aimless through the jungle, through the wilderness, unless their government is with them at every step of the way. I admit, there are a lot of sad sacks like that, and it's unfortunate, and they've been made that way by liberalism over the past 50 years. But the vast majority of the people that Obama is talking about in small-town America, these are the people that make the country work, and they're not people that sit around and wait for -- they make opportunities, they make events happen in their lives. They're not sitting around on the couch waiting for things, and if they are, they're liberal Democrats! And so Obama, if he's talking about anybody, it's his own constituency group! Because Obama and his party have made them that way. But that doesn't define the entire population of all small-town America. Next up, Reverend Richard Cizik, I'm not sure how you pronounce his name C-i-z-i-k, said during the Q&A, "How do you relate your faith, personal convictions to science generally, and science policy, let's take an issue like climate and flesh that out or take stem cells, something like that, just give us a little more indication of how you think."

OBAMA: One of the things I draw from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards, of -- of the land, of this incredible gift.

RUSH: Stop the tape a second. I'm getting sick and tired of -- stop -- if it's not on the prompter, this guy can't put two words together, uh, and John Edwards kind of, aaaaaa -- I think John Edwards has rubbed off on this guy -- if you go back and you listen to some John wards in these debates, well, uh, I think that we can do a lot for, uh, poor people, aaaaaa, I believe that we ought to have a lot more poor people getting less poor, aaaaaaa, and I think that Elizabeth has done great work in this cam- -- aaaaa -- Obama's picked that up. Start the tape at the top -- and he has. And it's irritating to me. Guy running for president sounds like an idiot. We need somebody who can Antarctic when he's not reading the teleprompter? How many of you Democrats think that? Ha-ha-ha-ha. Try it again here.

OBAMA: One of the things I draw from the Genesis story is, uh, the importance of us being good stewards, uh, of of the land, of of this incredible gift.

RUSH: Stop the tape. If it's not on the prompter this guy can't put two words together without uh or the John Edwards kind of ehhh. I think John Edwards has rubbed off on this guy. If you go back and listen to John Edwards in these debates, (doing John Edwards impression) "Well, uhhh, I think that we can do a lot for poor people aaaaand I believe we outta have a lot more poor people getting less poor, ehhh. And I think Elizabeth has done great work in this, ehhhh." Obama's picked that up. He has and it's irritating to me. The guys running for president and he sounds like an idiot. We need somebody that can articulate when he's not reading the teleprompter. How many of you Democrats think that?

OBAMA: One of the things I draw from the Genesis story is, uh, the importance of us being good stewards, uh, of of the land, of of this incredible gift. I think there have been times where we haven't been and this is one of those times where we've got to, uh, take the warning seriously. Uh, I know that, uh, that Al Gore was mentioned earlier, uh, by the way, I have to say I think Al Gore won, uh, and has done terrific work since.

RUSH: Stop the tape. Are you a constitutional lawyer now? You ever heard of the Electoral College, Obama? Algore won? Aaaaaaa -- he's done terrific work since? Do you people remember what the question was here? The question from the guy was, "How do you relate your faith and personal convictions to science generally?"

OBAMA: -- to take this seriously. And part of what my religious faith teaches me is to take an intergenerational view. To recognize that we are borrowing this planet for our children and our grandchildren.

RUSH: We're not borrowing anything, Obama. We're not borrowing. We have not borrowed the planet, we have not purchased the planet, we are not even leaving the planet.

END TRANSCRIPT

Is the Candidate-without-scrutiny the Candidate of Illusion? Some people think so. Of course, if he remains the candidate of illusion he is beyond question. The elitist.

April 14, 2008 11:50 AM

Off-the-Record Obama
The Politics of Meaning on steroids.

By Peter Wehner

Senator Barack Obama finds himself in the midst of a controversy in the aftermath of comments that he made at a private fundraiser in San Francisco on April 6, during which he explained his difficulty appealing to working-class voters in Pennsylvania. He said, "It's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. . . ."

Senator Obama's words are significant because they were said off-the-record, meaning they provided a more authentic glimpse into the attitudes of Obama than a carefully scripted event. Nonetheless, his words were not merely careless; his comments were based on a carefully constructed, if deeply condescending, explanation.

Beneath the enormous charm and cool persona of Obama beats the heart of an arrogant man. With increasing frequency, the 46-year-old one-term senator from Illinois orates as though he resides at Olympian Heights. By his presumptuous demeanor, he suggests that he sees what no one else sees, and can do what no other person can do; he is America’s healing balm.

Even his efforts at damage control radiate arrogance. Speaking in Muncie, Indiana, after the story broke, Obama said "Lately, there has been a little, typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my home town in Illinois who are bitter."

The flare-up, you see, happened because Obama is the Great Truth-Teller amidst the masses, many of whom can't handle the truth. Once it dawned on Obama’s aides that expediency demanded an apology, the Senator offered a qualified mea culpa: "Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that."

So if Senator Obama worded things in a way that made people feel offended (rather than worded things in a way that is offensive), well, he regrets that.

And at last night’s "Compassion Forum," hosted by CNN, Obama accused his critics of "misconstruing . . . [his] words" effectively turning the tables on those who take issue with his comments. In Obama's construal, he is the offended party, and any criticism directed at him is a mere "distraction" from the real issues of the campaign. This method of damage control, as that displayed in the Reverend Wright controversy, implies that simply by questioning the candidate, one is out of line, unfashionable, and uncouth.

I suspect these comments will be quite damaging to Obama because they reinforce (in spite of his efforts to equivocate during this campaign) his conventional liberalism. In this case, though, it's not simply a matter of him being liberal on economic or domestic issues; it demonstrates that he is a cultural liberal, which has been a particularly lethal charge in presidential elections. It is another brush stroke on the canvas of a man who burst onto the national scene less than four years ago and about whom we know very little. But with every passing week, it seems, we are learning more about the Man of Hope.

On a deeper level, what we saw in Obama's comments is a glimpse into a particular worldview, one that animates his political philosophy (contemporary liberalism). Senator Obama seems to view ordinary Americans as bitter, often broken, small-minded objects of pity rather than anger, ostensibly in need of instruction from — you guessed it — Barack Obama. The words of Michelle Obama are worth recalling in this context. She has spoken about her husband pushing us out of our "comfort zones," saying "Barack knows at some level there is a hole in our souls" and "Barack is the only person in this race who understands that before we can work on the problems as a nation, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

This is the Politics of Meaning on steroids. If one views Americans as fundamentally needy children rather than competent citizens, one embraces the precepts of the nanny state — the state that (in Margaret Thatcher’s memorable phrase) takes too much from you in order to do too much for you. This provides an enormous opening for Senator McCain, who can frame this election as pitting a candidate who believes in self-government, against a candidate who believes in the nanny state.

Increasingly, Barack Obama appears to be the Candidate of Illusion. He presents himself as post-racial — which is harder to accept than it once was, given his intimate, longtime relationship with a pastor and church that harbor deep and obvious racial anger toward whites. Obama presents himself as post-partisan — even though in his time in the Senate he has done nothing to bridge the partisan divide, which explains why he has been endorsed by the rabidly partisan MoveOn.org. Obama presents himself as post-ideological — even though he was named the Senate’s most liberal member in 2007 by the respected National Journal. Obama is a public critic of free trade — yet his chief economic adviser is quoted by a Canadian official as saying that Obama’s position on NAFTA is politically motivated and insincere. Obama speaks about the importance of religious faith in his life and the life of the nation — yet when speaking to a group of rich liberals, he implicitly denigrates people of faith, pairing them with people who have "antipathy to people who aren’t like them" and who harbor "anti-immigrant sentiment[s]." He paints religious believers as folks clinging to crutches to better deal with their desperate lives — only to insist last night that his words were actually a tribute to people of religious faith. So sayeth Barack Obama, "healer of broken souls."

Early on in this campaign I was impressed with Barack Obama as a thoughtful, inspiring, and admirable (if far too liberal) political figure. As the months have worn on, it's become increasingly apparent that the candidate is projecting mere shadows on the wall. Our Republic deserves better.

— Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Doubting Obama.

"We can't lose, can we?"

April 14, 2008 7:25 AM

The Obamamometer
The perfect candidate breaks from script.

By David Kahane

You know how people talk in this town. Everybody's on a first-name basis with Brad and Angelina, especially if they’ve never met them; everyone takes credit for a movie's success even if he was the exec who passed on the project before that final rewrite turned it into a hit and got him fired; and everybody thinks that his or her opinion about presidential politics really matters. "What I do know?" an executive once sighed to me. "I couldn’t even get my candidate elected."

So the other day, I was having lunch on the patio at Orso's with a fellow screenwriter, and as we watched all the suits making deals that didn’t include us, all the actresses who aren’t going to be in our movies, and all the agents who won’t return our phone calls, this writer leaned over to me and whispered, "Have you heard about the Obamamometer?"

I won’t keep you in suspense. Turns out that this writer knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who went to Harvard Law with B. Hussein Obama Jr., and, the story goes, such was Barry’s monumental capacity for sucking up to his professors that the "Obamamometer" was established to calibrate and quantify the most egregious, shameless brown-nosing, and it quickly became the gold standard of Uriah Heep-dom in Cambridge, Mass. "That was a 10 on the Obamamometer," the Harvard men and women would whisper when someone rose to the unctuous level of Barry at his best. Who knows, maybe they still do.

I laughed in my friend’s face — "you expect me to believe that?" I cried. After all, if you wanted to invent the ideal candidate for a post-9/11 world, you couldn't do much better than Obama: his parents' brave interracial marriage, their tragically broken home, the early years experiencing religious and cultural diversity in Indonesia, then on to a fancy private prep school in Hawaii, Harvard Law, and, for good measure, a dollop of good old-fashioned Chicago machine/ward-heeler bare-knuckled politics. No wonder a first-term senator with no particular qualifications or accomplishments realized that he could run for president!

But my friend had even more surprises in store for me. It seems that at Harvard our Barry was widely regarded as a person of overweening arrogance and a gold-plated sense of entitlement; not only did the world owe him a living, it owed him just about everything. I was so upset I made my buddy pick up the check for our two salads, a shared carpaccio, and designer waters, since he’s working at the moment and I'm not.

Then along came San Francisco. Always eager to display his common touch, Barry tootled up the hill to the modest Pacific Heights shack of one of the sons of J. Paul Getty, said something that everybody on our side knows is plainly true and - whoops! - you’d have thought he'd just rolled another gutter ball while pretending to bowl in McKeesport, or something.

Speaking of the folks in flyover country, he said: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them . . . it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

What's wrong with that? Not that I personally know anybody in flyover country; as the movie mogul, Jack Lipnik, says to the eponymous Barton Fink in the Coen brothers' best movie: "I'm from New York myself - well, Minsk if you wanna go way back." But out here in Hollywood, we’ve had their number for years. In fact, we love making movies about them: beetle-browed, Bible-thumping hillbillies who sleep with their guns and their sisters. Chronically unemployed superstitious malcontents, helplessly buffeted by the winds of change or the Chinese, whichever comes first. Racist losers. You know, like the local yokels who made poor Ned Beatty squeal like pig in Deliverance before Burt Reynolds put an arrow through one of them. We liberals are just trying to help.

But maybe Barry's private remarks didn't come off as helpful. (Have they tracked down the Bushitler operative who recorded his chat and leaked it to Arianna yet? Where’s Alberto Gonzales when we need him?) Maybe they really did sound arrogant, aloof, and condescending — quintessentially Harvard, as it were. Hey, give the guy a break: One of the hardest things about being a liberal Democrat is that, when you're talking to the resentful yahoos whose votes you unfortunately need, you have to pretend to care about them. When you’re trying to sell Hope and Change, you need to give the rubes Hope that the Change is going to be Change they want. Even when you know there’s no Hope of that.

Just ask Mrs. Obama. Quoth Michelle: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

You hear that, people — we’re talking to you!

So I guess now the cat's out of the carpetbag. But you know what? It won't matter. Hillary can show up in St. Patrick's Cathedral with the New Testament in one hand and an Uzi in the other and it still won’t help her. We have the media — half of whom went to Harvard themselves — on our side. We have Hope and Change. We have Bush. We have the Obamamometer, on which our guy always scores a glorious, perfect 10.

This time, we can't lose. Can we?

— David Kahane is the nom de cyber of a Hollywood screenwriter. You can write to him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Just don’t ask him to read your scripts.

Obama thinks he knows what's good for you because he thinks you are not intelligent enough to decide for yourself what's good for you. You are the "bitter" ones who cling to your religion and guns and anti-immigrant and anti-trade feelings. So says the messianic Obama.

Of course, Obama didn't tell you it was his party that squashed the trade deal with Colombia, our staunch ally in the war on drugs and terrorism. He also didn't tell you it was his party who is for illegal immigration and open borders.

Ah, but Obama knows better. Shame on her, he said (talking about Hillary). Shame on you.

George Will: Looking down a liberal's nose

Obama's words about the working class demonstrate his party's shift to condescension.

By George Will
Last update: April 15, 2008 - 12:02 AM

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin D. Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated pr