By elitist, politicians do not mean simply those with money, since Ms. Fiorina is a wealthy former corporate chief executive herself, but those who control the state and the culture, including news media outfits like The New York Times. (Katie Couric of CBS News, the bête noire of Sarah Palin supporters, probably did not help last week when she talked to the Daily Beast about visiting “the great unwashed middle of the country” in the Midwest; she later said she meant overlooked people who are politically in the middle.)

Elitist or not, the thesis of Mr. Obama’s remarks in Boston does reflect a certain frustration on the part of the president and his team that, in their view, the public might not be listening. Rather than entertaining the possibility that the program they have pursued is genuinely and even legitimately unpopular, the White House and its allies have concluded that their political troubles amount to mainly a message and image problem…

Advisers like Ms. Dunn said that’s not elitism, but a reasonable reaction to what they call a Republican fear-based campaign. “The president I don’t think has an elitist bone in his body,” she said. “The fact that Republicans claim that we’re the party of elitism doesn’t mean that it’s true or that everyone believes it.”