Matt Zeitlin

Helen Rittelmeyer of the delightful Cigarette Smoking Blog has a response to my righteous screed on what an elitist John McCain is:

As John pointed out, there’s a difference between being an elitist and being part of an elite, so McCain’s actual income is only one of many factors determining his Elitist Quotient. Just as important is, say, whether he reacts to the sound of Harleys revving their engines with contempt or by saying “That’s the sound of freedom.”

I’m willing to cut the left some slack and say that they probably don’t realize the extent to which their contempt for the gun-toting and country-music-listening is a manifestation of elitism. (“Your gun control position doesn’t have anything to do with public safety, and it’s certainly not about personal freedom. It’s that you don’t like people who like guns. You don’t like the people.“) It’s a little like the conservative party line on the disintegration of the black family; we look at the statistics and assume our case is strong while ignoring the fact that telling the black community they’d be fine if they all stopped being so dissolute is deeply insulting.

So elitism has less to do with how many houses you have and more to do with whether or not you think everyone who listens to Toby Keith is a buffoon.* By that standard, Democrats are more elitist than Republicans. That was the bottom line I reached in the post I wrote last night.

So clearly me and Helen are talking about two different types of elitism – or at least two factors that make up what it means to be an elite. Helen isn’t totally wrong in her point – the daughter of a college professor who does Teach for America is arguably more “elite” than a sucessful car salesman who may have dropped out of a state school after two years. Both money and more inexact cultural factors make up our cultural hierarchy. But the question is “which type of elitism is more relevant when we’re discussing presidential candidates.” In the case of Obama vs McCain, as far as their actual performance as President, it seems like gross financial elitism could very well be more important.

Let me a bit more clear. When it comes to things the president does: formulate policy, run the federal government etc, it really doesn’t matter if they like Toby Keith or not. Politically it does – the president has to be able to communicate his message well, and he won’t be able to do so if he can’t connect to people – but it doesn’t “really” matter. Or at least it seems to pale in comparison to the fact that John McCain’s tax plan would give him and his wife $373,000 in savings, while Obama’s would net them about $6,000 dollars.

That’s real money that denotes a very real policy difference with large implications for just about everyone. McCain wants to shift the tax burden downward and greatly increase the wealth of the richest people, Obama wants to tax the richest people more (makes sense, seeing how their incomes have exploded in the last eight years) and have everyone else pay less in taxes.

In some Platonic sense, the respective incomes of McCain and Obama don’t matter. If Obama were to switch wallets with Bill Gates, still supported the same tax plan, I wouldn’t care. But McCain’s extreme wealth when combined with his tax policy, makes a particularly obnoxious combination. Considering that Republicans always take personal aspects of a candidate – that have nothing to do with policy – and make a big deal about them, it’s totally OK for Democrats to take an undeniably true fact about McCain and connect to a important part of his policy platform.

Also, all this pressure from the left might force the media to report issues of candidates personal wealth in a better way. It seems like if a public figure is wealthy (as nearly all of them are) and promotes downward redistribution, the media will go after them viciously for any alleged slip-up. And so John Kerry windsurfing and John Edwards getting a hair cut become more important class indicators than Bush’s plutocratic origins and lifestyle. If the media could go after rich politicians who look out for rich people as much as they go after rich politicians who express an interest in helping the poor, I’d be happy.

(There’s a more lowbrow version of this argument that can be stated pretty simply. If Obama were super rich and didn’t know how many houses he had… Well, Helen surely knows what would happen. Think of this as revenge for wind-surfing. Turnabout is fair play)

On a more personal note, both Helen and James Poulos prove what may become a personal maxim. Conservatives are great when discussing political theory. No comment on what they are in any other situation.