What is it? The takeoff point to understanding it is embodied in the negativity some voters bear toward Senator Barack Obama, in that he does not impress them as a "full-blooded American."
This seems to be about more than his mixed race. Senator Obama's mother was herself a "full-blooded" (in her case, white) American. She was of no particular religion but had great respect for all religions, meaning that she herself was a freethinker, already out of step with mainstream American religious values. Most American religions tend to be more close-minded, truth be told. Obama's father was a Kenyan, a black African, whose religious background was Muslim.
This also seems to be about more than economic strata, since Obama does not come from wealth.
And it is not much about gender, since Democrats who are fleeing the uncertainty they feel about Obama are running to the supposed safe haven of ... Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What is it about? Parker puts it this way:
Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.
True enough, but it's a culture divide, too. Obama got into trouble for talking about disaffected working Americans who assuage their bitterness by "clinging" to their religion and their guns. At root, the dispute was over cultural differences, not just differences about patriotism.
Obama was likewise in trouble several months ago with African Americans who worried that he's "not black enough." That criticism seems to have died down for now. Yet it pointed to the same kind of anxiety as felt today by working class whites: will this man listen to us?
Or is he too much of an elitist?
It seems to me, the oldstyleliberal who writes this blog, that I myself have been too much of an elitist of late, too inclined to think in terms of wonky positions on issues like health insurance or the war in Iraq, to recognize that my fellow Americans are crying out from their respective communities and armed camps for some unifying national leader to take them seriously and pay them heed.
Meanwhile, the elites are urging upon us an enlightened, multicultural, manifestly relativistic agenda for sweeping change: bold strides along the "information superhighway" into an uncharted future. In that bright future as the educated elites see it, we will all be able to just get along because we will have put aside the benighted, old-fashioned, insular, absolutist beliefs to which we used to cling so desperately.
There are two kinds of American today. One American clings to the old absolutes (never mind that they may be different absolutes, depending on what group he owes his allegiance to). The other American sees all truth as relative, slippery, changeable.
For the old American, the prime value is just that: constancy of allegiance. For the new American, allegiance is itself negotiable.
The American whose constant allegiance is to the old ways is Bubba. Bubba thinks no one up there is listening to him ... and he's right about that. For the bright elites, listening to Bubba would just derail the glorious future they want to hasten into existence. The bright elites must pretend to listen to Bubba, of course, since they need Bubba's vote. But once in office, they'll have their own elitist agendas to see to.
That's why Bubba is so wary of Barack.
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