Why They Don't Get It

Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a must-read analysis of the press corps coverage of Obama and Palin...

It’s hard to imagine two candidates more tailor-made for diametrically opposed constituencies than Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Urban sophisticate Obama is, as Mark Steyn perfectly put it, “the new black best friend they’d been waiting for all these years” for upscale white liberals–a class that includes practically all of the national press corps who spent the last week in a frenzy over Palin. Conversely, Palin the Alaksan hunter looks like Ted Nugent crossed with Margaret Thatcher and your best friend’s mom, with a powerful dose of homespun country-girl sass thrown in to boot. You couldn’t come up with a more diametrically-opposed pair if you tried.

Obama’s eat-your-tofu pretentiousness plays perfectly to a press corps that thinks its job is to educate the rubes, while Palin’s pretentious-as-dirt manner and freezer full of moose steaks couldn’t be more perfectly calibrated to rub an urban New Class reporter any more of the wrong way. Her happy warrior persona also strikes a sharp contrast with Michelle Obama’s angry whining about having to pay back her student loans.

The differences are stark, and the over-the-top reactions from the media are telling. To take one example, Joe Klein and his ilk see a “community organizer” as a valiant leader of the proletariat, but most people outside of government, academia or the press hear “community organizer” and think, “somebody who pesters the government for other people’s money.” For folks who aren’t marinated in elite liberal concensus, the first time they heard that Obama spent several years as a “community organizer,” most thought, “Why didn’t he get a real job?” I’m sure that never occurred to Klein, which is, of course, why he’s having one of his patented sniveling fits over Palin’s speech.

I love that last point about the "real job." There's plenty to admire in the ideal of someone who seeks to go and work within a community to improve it. But there's also plenty of people who have the reaction Will describes, and I suspect that the press really does have trouble understanding it. It's the same reason they have trouble with the perception that Obama is viewed as an elitist -- how can he be an elitist with his background? Besides, he knows the same people we do, and we're not elitists!

This election has been educational and entertaining on so many fronts. I still expect Obama to win (more on that later), but the press' implosion over Governor Palin hasn't helped him at all.