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."
Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level. Cultural liberalism
is a burden. Haughty cultural liberalism is a disaster in the making. For
good or ill, the presidency is a cultural institution as much as it is a
political institution. And it's fundamentally a culturally conservative one.
Fair or not, many perceive Obama as a cultural outsider. This week, Chicago
Mayor Richard Daley said of Obama's friendship with former left-wing
domestic terrorist Bill Ayers: "They're friends. So what?"
Psephologist and columnist Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that,
with the exception of the black vote, Obama's support within the Democratic
Party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this
intra-Democratic split a divide between "academics and Jacksonians." The
Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics
are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley,
Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern and other successful presidents
in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee.
In this universe, however, you need Jacksonians more than you need academics
to win a general election, which is one reason why no non-Southern Democrat
has won the presidency in nearly a half-century. It's not that voters love
Southerners, either. Rather, Southern Democrats simply seem more Jacksonian
(even so, only Jimmy Carter won with a majority of the popular vote).
Obama may still win, of course, proving that America is not only ready for a
black president, but a cultural liberal as well. If he loses, though, you
can be sure Democrats will claim he lost not because he is a black and more
charming Michael Dukakis, but simply because he is black. Because liberals
are never wrong.