As someone who spent a decade and a half idolozing Hillary Rodham Clinton, and fiercely defending her from ridiculous and vicious right-wing smears, I've been reeling from a series of consecutive heartbreaks these past months. I've been devastated as she has crawled into bed with slime like Mark Penn, virtually campaigned for McCain, then assumed the very same empty, nasty, divisive right wing attack strategies so long and so unfairly leveled against herself and her husband.

Early in the campaign, Hillary's centrist and DLC tacking pushed me toward Edwards, but I was more than ready to stump for her in the general. But by now, I've been casting about for ways not to hate this woman with that special, thousand-white-hot-sun heat that only the faithful who've been jilted and betrayed can feel.

And I think I've found it.

Was amazed to log on and find a slew of diaries and comment's attacking Barack Obama for pointing out that regular people - you know, working class and hard-pressed middle class folks are having a tough time in today's economy, and are bitter about it.  Actually bitter, IMHO is too soft a word; pissed off and angry, worried and frightened is more like it.

Was almost amused at the attacks on Senator Obama for being an elitist, except it isn't really funny.  Of the three people running for office, only one has known economic hard times;  Barack Obama.  Granted, he is now upper middle class, but certainly can't be counted as part of the multi-millionaire crowd.

Made me curious about who posts here.  Hence the poll.

There has been a mini-riot this afternoon over Barack Obama's comments at a fund-raiser in elite, unAmerican San Francisco. I'm sure you know it by heart at this point:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

More about this below:

Since at least the 1960s the American political establishment has wholly accepted as it's operating system the "elitist theory democracy". Consequences include a woefully disconnected pundit class, shrugging acceptance of stolen elections and voter suppression campaigns, demoralized voters, unchallenged corporate political power, and dread of the rising netroots and the return of popular democracy.

"Elitist democracy" enables a frighteningly myopic and selfish insider class of journalists, consultants and other courtiers. The elite attend the same cocktail parties and self-congratulating media orgies like the Sunday talk shows. They thrill at their commitment to public service while maintaining an economic and political Berlin Wall between themselves and The People, the people who are supposed to be in charge in classical, popular democracy.

The netroots and renewed emphasis on popular democracy represent a serious challenge to this worldview that has dominated political life for 40 or 50 years. The anger and vindictiveness of the ruling elite toward the netroots (and the netroots' sense of outrage, revolutionary calling and urgency) is evidence that we are engaged in a conflict of deep belief, more like an era of religious Reformation than political reform. We shouldn't underestimate the source of the ruling elite's anger. We're heretical. We're telling them their forms of worship are wrong, that their god no longer exists.  

There's a lot that could be said about Matt Bai's NYT Mag profile of Mark Warner, which unsurprisingly says as much about Bai as about Warner.  Bai's faith in the conservatism of the average American, and the culpability of the uber-rich liberals in wrecking the Democrats' appeal, will be familiar to anyone who read his chiding critique of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book for considering structural obstacles to Democratic resurgence when the problem was obviously those liberal Hollywood celebrities and crazed bloggers stopping the party from offering Americans what they actually want.  What struck me most on reading the article was the way that Bai's choice of anecdotes reinforces his narrative - which may also be a reflection of Warner sharing anecdotes that reinforce a similar one.