The campaign: Which candidate is less elite?

last updated 8 January 2015

One candidate is the son and grandson of Navy admirals who’s married to a multimillionaire beer heiress. The other went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, and is also a millionaire, thanks to his success as an author. But while both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama are clearly members of the national elite, said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe, they both desperately want the white, working-class vote. So the race is on for each candidate to portray himself as the salt of the earth, and the other guy as an out-of-touch elitist. The McCain camp mocks Obama as an arugula-eating “celebrity,” while Obama repeatedly reminds us that McCain is so rich, he forgot how many houses he owns. It’s an utterly meaningless sideshow, said George Will in Newsweek. Americans should be smart enough to realize that in a representative democracy, “elections decide not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall rule.”

What really matters, of course, is how each candidate’s policies would affect voters, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.Yet, “every four years, every politician in the country tries to act as if he or she went barefoot to school.” Not only does this silliness insult our intelligence, it’s “condescending to those who truly do have to struggle.” It’s especially disappointing that Obama is playing this game, since he has “repeatedly advertised himself as a new type of candidate and as a stranger to the usual idiocy of the partisan cheap shot.” There is a case to be made against electing McCain, of course, but it has nothing to do with how much property he and his wife own.

In fact, most Americans do not resent McCain’s wealth one bit, said the National Review Online in an editorial. But they do think “Republicans are more concerned about the wealthy and about corporations than about the middle class.” And unfortunately, McCain’s tax policy “does nothing to counteract that perception.” While McCain has pledged to extend the Bush tax cuts, which heavily favor the well-off, Obama has actually outflanked McCain on the right by offering a series of tax credits to the middle class. This is where image and policy overlap, said Rich Lowry, also in NRO. “One of Obama’s best defenses against the notion that he’s a celebrity candidate aloof from average Americans is a tax plan that says he feels their pain.” McCain can keep his houses, but he’d better work on his empathy.