...The Promise of the American Dream Lies in the Hope of an Upward Climb

[babylonsister]

Elite Smear Clashes with Tradition
The Promise of the American Dream Lies in the Hope of an Upward Climb

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (WDCpix)

By Sridhar Pappu 06/13/2008


It took one simple word for Sen. John McCain to rush forth images of Sen. Barack Obama as a man surrounded by gilded towers, someone far from the concerns of the common man. Standing before a town hall meeting earlier this week, McCain, a graduate of Annapolis and the son and grandson of admirals, presented himself as just one of the common folk. "My friends," he said, "we're going to get on the bus and we want a lot of you to come with us and we're going to travel all over the state of Pennsylvania, and we're going to go to the small towns in Pennsylvania and I'm going to tell 'em I don't agree that they cling to their religion and the Constitution because they're bitter."

By now, we're all aware, McCain was referring to that Obama speech in San Francisco when he used that term "bitter" -- and also, of course, the stinging outrage against Obama as an "elitist" that followed. But it is McCain's (and, before, him Hillary Rodham Clinton's) claim to a kind of authenticity, to blue collarness against all distractions, that very much strikes against who we are as a nation.

Why? Because such boasts and stances seem to run counter to the promise of the American Dream. People from modest upbringings (my own father left home to work after high school to put five brothers and sisters through college and beyond) do the jobs, perform the tasks they do to ensure that their children have a better life. To want something better, to advance in life—that’s what we’re supposed to want. We should want, like Obama, to rise from modest beginnings, get the best education possible and afford a life to provide the best for own children. We should want to be the elite, not loathe them.

Elite in America has always been a fluid notion, in any case. We are not a landed society, with vast entailed properties, passed down through the generations. In the New World, immigrants, and then pioneers traveling West, could re-invent themselves, re-envision themselves. It was not about family or heritage, hard work and the benefits of education were all you really needed.

So this attack on Obama -- who was not born to a political dynasty, or to great wealth or power; who did not spend his afternoons eating in the dining room of Marshall Field's in Chicago or summering in Southampton -- strikes not to his upbringing and wealth, but to his education. It is an attack on what the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, who has examined the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, John Adams and Harry S. Truman, calls the upward climb that is rooted in the very beginnings of our nation and what we once aspired to.

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http://washingtonindependent.com/view/elite-as-smear