Obama is not condescending

The fact is, Americans are smarter than Clinton and McCain suggest. Americans are frustrated that their government supports corporations at the citizens’ expense. People are getting poorer and their educations are getting worse and more expensive. As people get poorer and angrier, they do more readily cling to symbols and superstitions. Under threat or antisemitism, Jews cling more steadfastly to Israel. Just as persecuted gun owners cling to their guns, and fundamentalists cling to their gods – especially when voting.

The more repressed and dejected a population, the more susceptible they are to the hot-button issues that pollsters rely on to keep the populace divided and self-interested.

By calling attention to the fact that politicians can rely on highly emotional hot-button issues during economically stressful times, Obama was actually suggesting that we can and should operate from a higher place when exercising our democratic rights. It’s hard – especially when ruthless, patronizing politicians are telling us that our guns or bibles will be taken away from us – but these are the sick, emotionally based appeals we have to reject if we are to resist the fascism at their heels.

By labeling Obama the elitist patronizer, Clinton and McCain are attempting to preserve the elitist, top-down, manipulative politics of the past (and present). They want to make sure they can continue to manipulate uneducated and poor people living in small and big towns alike. It is they who seek to maintain their cynical hold over poor people’s emotions.

It’s all so sick, and the mainstream media mostly plays along. I suspect Clinton will soon achieve her goal of preventing any Democrat from taking the White House until she can regroup for 2012. But by then, the rest of the world won’t believe that we don’t really support the neoCons we repeatedly elect.