The misery election

Barack Obama has broken David Brooks's heart, it seems, by revealing himself to be, deep down, an Ivy League latte liberal. Excerpt:

A few months ago, Obama was riding his talents. Clinton has ground him down, and we are now facing an interesting phenomenon. Republicans have long assumed they would lose because of the economy and the sad state of their party. Now, Democrats are deeply worried their nominee will lose in November.

Welcome to 2008. Everybody’s miserable.

Ain't that the truth. I read John McCain's big economic speech earlier this week, and it was just depressing as hell. Bosh and flimshaw, basically; with no serious recognition of the fiscal catastrophe the country is sailing toward. You get none of that from Obama either. We'd thought all along this would be a change election, but as it becomes clearer which nominees we're going to have, we see the change is only going to be cosmetic, that both McCain and Obama are shaping up to be far more conventional Republicans and Democrats, respectively, than we might have hoped -- and that we certainly need.

An aside, maybe interesting to you: I spoke to a small community group in Dallas yesterday morning, a group of men, mostly retirees, or older businessmen, who gather in a neighborhood diner for breakfast once a month. Good bunch of fellows. After I finished speaking, several of them lingered to talk about politics. One of them, apparently a retired high school teacher and coach (I'm guessing from the context, and let me add that everybody was white), said he wasn't bothered by the Jeremiah Wright stuff with Obama. He's about Jeremiah Wright's age, and talked about growing up in a small town here in the Dallas area, and about what he saw of segregation. He spoke movingly of the way blacks were treated in his town, and of the injustice and cruelty of it all. He said Mike Huckabee was right to say that white people ought to give people like Jeremiah Wright a lot of grace, given what that and previous generations of African-Americans were put through. And he, the Coach, doesn't believe for a second that Obama shares Wright's views on race (Coach also shared a pretty moving story about how his father, who was the principal of his high school, taught him to be respectful and kind to Mexican immigrants who were moving into the town back then, in the 1950s).

But, said Coach, he finds it a lot harder to dismiss Obama's "cling" comment. It's not hard to see why this is, though I didn't ask, because we were all trying to get out the door. I think I know why it is, though. Obama revealed in that remark that he looks down on people like Coach, and their values. I found this conversation revealing, because it showed me a white man, Coach, who was open to Obama, even through the Wright thing, and also resistant to the kinds of views about Rev. Wright and immigration that are fairly common among white men of his generation around here. It was Obama's cultural condescension, though, toward small-town and rural white people that started closing that door. I have no idea how Coach will vote, but I did find it interesting that the Wright stuff had no effect on his view of Obama -- because he too remembered segregation, and its evil -- but the "cling" stuff did.

Peggy Noonan takes this up in her WSJ column this week:

Sen. Obama seems honestly surprised by the furor his the-poor-cling-to-God-and-guns remarks elicited, and if one considers his background—intense marginalization followed by the establishment's embrace—this is understandable. He was only caught speaking the secret language of America's elite, and what he said was not meant as a putdown. It was an explanation aimed at ameliorating the elites' anger toward and impatience with normal people. It's a way of explaining them, of saying, "You have to remember they're not comfortable and educated like us, they're vulnerable and so we must try to understand them and feel sympathy for and solidarity with them." You could say this at any high-class dinner party in America and not cause a ruffle. But America is not a high-class dinner party.

Noonan also happened to hear a good Hillary Clinton speech this week, but said it's too late for her:

Mrs. Clinton is transmitting, but people aren't receiving. She has been branded, tagged. She's been absorbed, understood and categorized. People have decided what they think, and it's not good.

It took George W. Bush five years to get to that point. It took her five intense months. Political historians will say her campaign sank with the mad Bosnia lie, but Bosnia broke through only because it expressed, crystallized, what people had already begun to think: too much mendacity there, too much manipulation.