Obama's limousine liberalism

Columnist Marie Cocco's teeth are set on edge by Barack Obama's limousine liberalism. She recalls his earlier speech about race, at the height of the Wright controversy earlier this year:

Nonetheless, five seemingly insignificant words in it struck me: "As far as they're concerned." This is how Obama prefaced his remarks about whites of immigrant stock whose experience is that, "as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything" and they've grasped whatever success they've achieved on their own.

It is an awkward qualifier, suggesting that this is a perspective or a belief, and not necessarily the truth. My immigrant grandparents, though, found truth in the pre-dawn cold when they left each day for their jobs at a shoe factory. I saw truth in my father's frosted whiskers and soaked flannel shirts when he arrived home after a night of plowing snow.

Now Obama has given another sociology lesson. The subject is how working-class Americans living in small towns are bitter about their economic stress, and so they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." The professor has tried to talk his way out of this jam in part by pointing out that clinging to religious faith is a good thing.

But what of those he says cling to "antipathy to people who aren't like them"? The word for such people is racist, and Obama knows it.

Cocco is from Boston, and recalls the violent reaction white South Boston had to busing -- and what that has to do with Harvard Law grad Obama:

Were the people of Southie racist? Indeed, many were -- violently so. But they were not only angry about busing. They raged at the way privileged whites -- the judges and the Harvard professors and the liberals who watched the rancor on television from the comfort of their suburban living rooms, looked down their snooty noses at them. Hicks, the matriarch of the anti-busing movement, capitalized on this resentment as much as she capitalized on racism.

Obama is yet another professor who has analyzed the "bitter" white working class. Still, he wants their votes to elect him president. Seems to me he's unlikely to get them.

That's putting in the knife, and twisting it.