Obama takes the truth serum:

"It's not surprising [the proles] get bitter,

they cling to guns or religion or antipathy

toward people who aren't like them

or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment

as a way to explain their frustrations"

We need to get away from uplifting, idealistic vintage-1968 latte-liberalism, focused on anti-war activism, ecology and other elitist concerns.

We need to get back to that dirty old back-room Democratic machine politics that supports unions, addressed working class people's concerns and benefits them economically.

The Clintons couldn't get a healthcare plan through because they were fighting a conservative congress and widespread conservative sentiment.

The next Democrat who gets in--whether Hillary or Obama--will have the wind at their back and be able to get it through.

There really isn't much difference between their policies, though Hillary's health care plan is a little better.

It's all style, and this "youthful charm" and idealism turns me off. It's elitism, just more latte-liberalism that, rightly, turns off the working class. These are the toys of the privileged.

The irony is that Obama groupies are the ones reliving the sixties. Yet they claim to be the 'next generation', the 'agents of change.'

Obama is a reincarnation of that whole middle-class, transcendental, hippy thing. Obama is a black Eugene McCarthy. Check that one out.

The Republicans will wipe the floor with Obama's constituency if he wins the Democratic nomination. Just as they did with John Kerry in 2004. They will paint Obama followers as elitist, privileged, well-heeled lefties.

Backlash Against Obama Elitist Comments

Barack Obama made these comments before some mega-rich donors last Sunday in San Francisco that has the internet in an uproar and many saying that his candidacy may be in trouble.

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.

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

“It comes off very badly,” Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers said of the small-town America remarks.

“They are things that I think in a liberal world sound totally normal, and outside of that world I don’t know that he appreciates how it sounds. And it just sounds very elitist, and it sounds like he’s looking down on people.”

The question is will this kill his campaign? John Hinderaker of Powerline thinks so:

"Barack Obama's arrogance has been evident for some time, and it's no shock, perhaps, to learn that that he shares this bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in "small towns." But to actually express it, in public, at a campaign event, is stunningly stupid."

Whether Obama is through or not, we are now aware of how he sees the people he wishes to govern; as props in a grand stage play with Obama as the star and the people as worshipful extras.

That is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats in November.

The Curse of Middle-Class Progressives

They're not an official category of voters whose tally is measured in exit polls, like whites or blacks, women or men, old or young. And since they're not an official category, we may never really have the evidence.

Call them "high-information Democrats." So-called middle-class 'progressives', both white and black, who turned out to vote for their new-found hero.

It is important to remember that western democracy is, essentially bourgeois democracy. It is the bourgeoisie who vote in large numbers. "Democracy' is run for the benefit ot the middle classes.

One of the questionable benefits of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s was the emergence of a well-defined black bourgeoisie.

Needless to say, bourgeois and reactionary go hand-in-hand. Obama is the 'shining' example of an African-American, middle-class, conservative, high-information Democrat. A member of the chattering class - privileged and self-important.

These are the people who follow all the ins and outs of the contest. They read The New York Times.

They watch cable television, probably Keith Olbermann first and foremost. They read blogs. They know every twist and turn, every thrust and parry.

"Obama", the brand, is a way for liberal and moderate whites to “pat themselves on the back for not being too prejudiced.”

Obama’s candidature has encouraged a lot of “progressives” not to do their homework on him or on the U.S. political culture he reflects.

Of course, it’s all premised on Obama being a "good bourgeois and right-acting black" – one who promises not to actually confront white supremacy in any meaningful way.

Like the white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer and ally Oprah Winfrey, Obama expresses and capitalizes on whites’ partial transcendence of “level-one” state-of-mind racism.

At the same time, he reassures them he will honor their refusal acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” state-of-being” - societal and institutional – racism in American life.

Barack Obama is a Great White Hope. He is perfectly suited and crafted to wrap establishment corporate politics and the related American Empire Project in rebel’s clothing.

He advances the use of race (albeit in a new and “post-Civil Rights” kind of way) to advance the top-down business-class agenda.

The Mass Media Embrace Obama

The rhetoric of bipartisanship has played a major role in the corporate media’s embrace of Barack Obama. There has been a frenzied media campaign over the last month or so to transform Obama into an unstoppable front runner.

Obama is a conventional bourgeois politician, dependent, like his rivals, on lavish financial support from corporate interests and the wealthy.

He is not the product of any sort of genuine movement from below in American society, but rather the latest in a long line of demagogues employed to foster illusions that the big business-controlled political system can serve the interests of ordinary people.

It is noteworthy that leading lights of the Republican right have joined in the praise for Obama.

The editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times’ Republican columnist David Brooks and such conservative media pundits as Peggy Noonan, William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh have all had good things to say about him.

On the Republican side, the promotion of Obama is motivated in part by calculations that he will be easier to defeat in the general election than Clinton.

No one should doubt that the Republican notables who are currently hailing the rise of an African-American candidate as a vindication of American democracy are prepared to conduct an unofficial campaign of virulent racism against him, especially in the South, should he win the Democratic nomination.

Those representatives of the Republican right who have sought to boost Obama have praised, in particular, his attack on what he calls “the politics of division.” Similarly, the senator’s call for bipartisan unity figures prominently in the media hype of his campaign.

The New York Times, in an extraordinary editorial postmortem of the New Hampshire primary headlined “Unite, Not Divide, Really This Time,” lashed out against Clinton, accusing her of unfairly attacking Obama and sowing divisiveness.

“The last thing they [Americans] want,” the newspaper wrote, “is for either party to drag out the old playbooks of division and anger.”

There is a common thread in the efforts of the media to promote Obama’s call for bipartisanship. The politically explosive question of an unpopular war has been joined by a deepening economic crisis that is fueling growing anxiety over jobs, prices and living standards.

A majority of voters in the super Tuesday primaries said their chief concern was the economic situation.

With unemployment sharply rising, food and gasoline prices soaring and home foreclosures at a record high and expected to hit another 2 million households over the next year, the ruling elite fears that a sharply contested and protracted election process could become a focus for rising social discontent.

It wants, in the name of “unity,” to suppress any real discussion of the social crisis.

The NYT editorial shows that the American oligarchy is seeking to lay down the law - to delegitimize any critique of the establishment political consensus behind militarism and imperialism, and proscribe any challenge to the ever-greater concentration of wealth at the very top of American society.

The campaign for bipartisanship thus has a distinctly antidemocratic and sinister aspect.

It is an effort to discipline the political squabbling within the US ruling elite in order to face a far greater danger: an eruption of social conflict produced by the increasingly desperate conditions facing the vast majority of the American people.