Posted by: Jon Henke on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 Matt Stoller is unhappy to find that a Republican who used to work for the McCain campaign is critical of Obama. 'Suspended' McCain Aide Resurfaces Pushing Anti-Obama MessagingI'm not sure what the point is here. Does he think that Dayton wouldn't have been critical of Obama if he hadn't previously worked for McCain? Or is he saying that the McCain campaign should be able to force a former employee to stop being critical of Obama? Or is he saying that this is some secret strategy of the McCain campaign to have some guy start a Facebook group to criticize Obama (as if Republicans would have no objections to Obama if it weren't for the devious machinations of the McCain campaign)? I understand the desire to delegitimize any criticism of your candidate, but this seems absurdly disconnected from any actual argument about why it should not be legitimate. What's more, his attack on the "elitist" criticism pretty much rests on Glenn Greenwald's skills at inferential psychoanalysis... As Glenn Greenwald has demonstrated in his important book Great American Hypocrites, male Democratic candidates must always be presented as feminine, elite, aristocratic, savage, and untrustworthy, for fear that substantive arguments will actually present the electorate with a choice on larger questions of national direction.When did Democrats decide that painting somebody as an elitist or questioning their toughness was a dishonest tactic? This must have occurred sometime after they rode "The Wimp Factor" to victory against George H.W. Bush in 1992. It apparently wasn't operational in 2007, either, when Stoller quoted Pete Stark calling a Republican "a little wimp" and "you little fruitcake" and called him "my kind of Democrat" for being so "tough". And when did Stoller decide that elitism was an illegitimate criticism? Perhaps that occurred sometime after he criticized the "bipartisan elites". He might also ask his co-blogger, Chris Bowers, about his "serious problems with what I perceive to be Obama's insider elitism." I'm also uncomfortable with too-easy criticism of "elites" - at least, insofar as elite status is taken to be evidence of unfitness by populist demagogues...an absurd idea in a meritocracy - but the "elitism" that the Right objections to in Democrats revolves around the fact that these Democrats are presuming to tell people what they want, what they need and how to live their lives. That is the elitism to which the Right objects in Democrats. It is absurd to conflate that with racism, or to suggest that it is illegitimate to object to such presumption. |
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