No, Obama's not an elitist

The bottom line is that the ultimate sign of elitism is aristocracy, not meritocracy. And it’s a miracle of modern spin and single-minded partisanship that the grandson of a senator and son of a president escaped the ‘elitist’ tag while the inter-racial son of a teenage single mom in the ’60s gets tarred with it. But that’s the power of hyper-partisanship—where you stand is a matter of where you sit—objectivity gets suspended and fairness ain’t anywhere in the room.

The overall partisan game plan, now in full force, is to damage perceptions of President Obama through a death of a thousand cuts.The “limousine liberal” attack has been part of the fault lines of partisan politics since at least the late 1960s. It fit John Kerry, but it’s a real stretch for Barack Obama. The RNC’s reflexive reach for that playbook shows a degree of intellectual exhaustion, especially when they have substantive points of disagreement like an unprecedented multi-trillion-dollar deficit. The irony is that when these hyper-partisans retreat to pumping up the latest round of Mustard-Gate, they are the ones who are condescending to the American people.