My millionaire candidate can beat up your millionaire candidate

I've been hearing all this noise lately about Barack Obama the elitist, and I'm confused. We are talking about the black guy, right? The guy who is fighting to lead a nation that hasn't mustered the courage to elect a nonwhite president in 219 years of representative democracy? The guy who moved from household to household in poor African and Indonesian cities while he was growing up? The guy who worked his way through college on scholarships and dedicated his early life to helping the poor in the slums of Chicago? The guy who is roughly $39 million poorer than John McCain and isn't fortunate enough to have a ranch in Arizona and a vacation house in Connecticut? I'm to believe this is the elitist in this race?

The fundamental problem is that conservatives have a poor understanding of elitism. To them, elitism is drinking expensive coffee, being educated at top-notch schools and voicing well-reasoned ideas about how to make America a better place (God forbid anybody assume America isn't a perfect free market paradise that is immune to change). This view of elitism infects conservative America to the point of absurdity. Consider Jonah Goldberg this week, talking about why Obama hasn't been polling so well:

Indeed, perhaps there’s no mystery at all, and Obama’s problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.

Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat — I mean workers — and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”

What a convenient lie. Goldberg has succeeded in lumping all liberals into one stereotype -- the chai-drinking, Ivy-League-school attending, opinionated, secular know-it-all. Unfortunately, stereotyping is useless in any serious discussion about social trends. Surely these people exist, but certainly not universally. For instance, I share many of the same opinions on social matters as Obama, yet I attended the run-of-the-mill University of Oregon, I fucking hate chai and I say "fuck" a lot. I wonder: Am I what Goldberg has in mind, or is my personality not convenient enough to fit his ludicrous vision?

Conservatives are so drunk with ecstasy over the idea of fighting the haughty liberals who are trying to overthrow the nation that they can't take a look in the mirror. Sure, for Jonah Goldberg, the pinnacle of elitism is drinking herbal tea and going to a good school. But for my money, I'd say elitism is assuming the American standard of democracy is the purest form of government, and then invading other nations to force it down their throats. Or how about telling one segment of the populace that they aren't good enough to marry who they want. Or telling women they aren't up to the task of deciding whether they need the morning after pill. You want to talk about elitism? Let's talk about George W. Bush spending the past eight years subverting the Constitution, as though he's above such democratic foolishness. And I have no doubt that somewhere out there, a neocon is enjoying a fresh cup of herbal chai tea, while a Harvard frat boy majoring in Sociology is doing a Budweiser keg stand.

The point is that it doesn't fucking matter what you drink or where you go to school or even where you work. What matters are your actions -- and for the past eight years, Republicans have destroyed this nation with secretive spying programs, discriminatory laws, illegitimate wars, and handout after handout to corporate America. What is so elitist about seeking to end an era of government that has spit in the face of everything decent and good about America?

In the end, all conservatives have against Obama is his Harvard degree and his hope that a Democrat can salvage the steaming mess left behind by the Republicans. And, what the hell, I bet he even drinks regular coffee.