Elitism – is it Based on Education and Class, or Money?

First of all, a little clarification as far as how many houses, or apartments (the term “homes” is part of the jargon used by real estate peddlers) John McCain really owns.

The McCains own 10 residential properties, including three beachfront condos in California. The combined value of their properties is estimated at $13.8 million. John McCain wears $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins. He and his wife are major shareholders in Anheuser-Bush and own the third- largest Anheuser distribution company in the world. This American beer has now in fact become a European import for the American beer guzzlers and John McCain did nothing to stop that sale. His campaign uses a corporate jet owned by his family’s beer distributorship. The flights, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars, have been reported as a violation of the campaign finance standards.

Anyway you slice it there is no doubt that the McCains, largely due to Cindy McCain’s inherited wealth are quite rich. Some estimates actually put Cindy’s worth at about $100 million. I guess that fact must have had an influence on John McCain’s response to a question: “Where do you move from middle class to rich?” The Arizona senator defined being rich as: “If you’re just talking about income, how about five million?” That kind of remarks, combined with former McCain campaign leader Phil Gramm’s statement, who said that Americans worried about the economy have become “a nation of whiners” only show who we are dealing with here.

At the same time the Republican Party machine has been trying to portray Barack Obama as an “elitist”. We wonder how they could possibly justify that label. A single mother, who was forced to rely on food stamps, raised Obama and McCain was raised in a fairly prosperous household. His father was a U.S. Navy admiral and his grandfather, great-grandfather and many more predecessors have served in the U.S. military as far back as the Revolutionary War. McCain’s great-great grandfather William Alexander McCain owned a plantation, along with some 52 slaves and later died during the Civil War as a soldier for the Mississippi cavalry. Except for the slaves and such, I suppose it is a noble family history, one that many would call “proud” and “distinguished” and “elitist”.

Nothing wrong with McCain’s, or his family’s history, or achievements, but why in hell would they feel justified to call Barack Obama an elitist? Would that have to do with Obama’s noticeably higher educational achievements? After all, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama became the first black to be elected president in the 102-year history of the prestigious student-run law journal. Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. John McCain graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy not quite at the bottom of his class, but close. Cindy McCain grew up in affluent circumstances. She got a Masters in special education from USC.

We’ll leave it up to our readers to judge, who is the “elitist” here and why, but in our mind the term “elite” has always been a positive, rather than a negative one and if the Republican camp can come up with a truly negative connotation of being elitist, based on someone’s superior educational achievements, let them be. I suppose that it must be either desperation, or their often-proven stupidity. Let’s just hope that they do not convince enough of their either poor, or rich, but usually under-educated voter base to bring about Bush’s 3^rd term in the upcoming November presidential election.

Filed under: Just Stupid • U.S. Politics • U.S. Presidential Elections

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