Outsmarted By The Rubes

Stuart Taylor has a column up about how he was fooled by Obama's rhetoric.

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

The thing is that he was warned by the rubes: Joe the Plumber, (God forbid) Sarah Palin, and a raft of not so elite bloggers.

Peter Robinson in Forbes gets it.

A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.

Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. "Just what evidence do you have," Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, "that he's anything but a hard-left ideologue?"

The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind.

And of course the most important thing for any stage magician is that despite the fact that the audience knows that it is all fakery and illusion they want to believe any way. The nice thing about stage magic is that you pay once for the show and then it is over. We are going to be paying for this bit of governmental magic for generations to come.

But look at the bright side. We are going to be able to teach our kids how socialism works up close and personal. We will also be learning just how big of a black market a country like the USA can sustain.

H/T Instapundit who also tried to warn our elites during the election season and who was frequently mocked for the effort. Not to mention all the folks who assured me that the fact that Obama spent 20 years in the Church of Hate and who's family politics were Communist to the core didn't mean nothin. Despite the fact that I went to an elite school myself I wasn't taken in. To what do I credit that fact? The years I spent hanging out with outlaw bikers. Living with men who will slit your throat for a false move brings a certain amount of realism to one's life.

Cross Posted at Classical Values