Found via Liberty Peak Lodge, Thomas Sowell writes, "Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects ‘stereotypes’ when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about ‘a typical white person’ or ‘bitter’ gun-toting, religious and racist working class people":

However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."

Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.

Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told "thinking people" were for him, said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority," and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. "Stevenson," Barone says, "was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture--the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting," and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: "Halp us, Jon Carry--We R Stuck HEAR N Irak."

After their unexpected loss in 2004, Democrats were much too impressed by Thomas Frank's treatise What's the Matter With Kansas? which complained that they lost because middle-class voters were too stupid to vote their 'real' interests (which were presumably served by the Democrats), because conservatives wickedly played on their fears. ('Fear' is the Democrats' answer for every vote they don't get.) Whether middle-class interests are better served by liberalism is an open question--they did so much better, after all, under Carter than Reagan, and the Clintons did so much to help them get health care--but condescension remains an unpromising strategy. There is, it appears, not muchthe matter with Kansas. Obama's mother, he says, did come from Kansas. But the matter with Democrats, and with Obama, seems to be Thomas Frank.