The Linear Canvas

As the Clinton campaign nears the end of its life, as a last-ditch hope, they have made an issue of some recent remarks by Barack Obama as proof that he is some sort of intellectual or financial elitist. It is humorous that the two other candidates for president in 2008, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, would make such a charge against Mr. Obama. This issue has been curiously repeated by the McCain campaign after the Clinton campaign made an issue of it to start with. Obviously both Republican and Democrat national committees consider Mr. Obama a threat and are in apparently some kind of sync.

As far as being a financial elitist, if you compare Mr. Obama with me, I will admit to you that he is much more elitist than I am. Between his and his wife’s salaries, the Obama’s were able to earn close to $4.2 million last year, mostly from his book sales. On the other hand in the last 10 years, the Clintons earned around $110 million. Quite a bit more.

Mr. and Mrs. Obama both attended Ivy League schools, but both were on scholarships. They financed the rest of their education on student loans that they didn’t pay off until just a few years ago. The Obama’s lived in a three bedroom condo with no garage in Chicago for the first years of their marriage. Condos are expensive in Chicago, but it’s not anything like John McCain’s eight homes. Barack grew up in a single parent family and his family did receive food stamps when he was young.

Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, but married to a completely different woman during that time. He divorced her after his return from Vietnam. I’m not sure if his family was known necessarily as elitists, but they had many military and political connections because of their generations of service in the military.

But Mr. McCain subsequently married an heir to a beer distributor’s fortune. Coincidentally, Mr. McCain became a senator not long afterward. When I say coincidently, I am of course joking. If you needed a way to become a senator, or someone else important, all you really need is to have someone foot the bill. In Mr. McCain’s case that person was his current wife’s family. If I had the same resources and just some of the same experience as Mr. McCain has, I would be able to run for president too.

The fact that he was able to marry such a wealthy woman only made it easier for him to become an elected official. Even with his war experience, he should have had a more difficult time winning his Senate seat, as so many other veterans have before him. He would have had to first begin his political career by starting out as a local official and moving up through the ranks like the rest of us poor people do.

Hillary Clinton, before she was the first lady of the land, herself attended an elitist girl’s school Wellesley College, and Yale Law School. In addition, not just any commoner would have been selected to work on the Watergate hearings staff. It certainly would have taken some sort of political capital from someone connected to Mrs. Clinton’s family or friends to have gotten her to the place where she could be even included in such an important investigation.

As far as Mr. Obama being an intellectual elitist, my only hope is that we could be so lucky for that to be true. Imagine having a president smarter than a walnut.

In my mind there is no way that Hillary Clinton or her compadre, John McCain could convince me that Mr. Obama had any elitist connections as he grew up like they had and is any more an elitist now than either of them. And what if he is an elitist?

So what?