How Can She Fool Everyone?

Hillary has managed to convince, it seems, the entire nation. Again and again, working class whites are voting for her, because she's one of them. She speaks of not accepting money from large donors. And she has convinced the nation that Obama is an "elitist".

But this is a woman who regularly accepts money from lobbyists, unlike Obama, who everyone acknowledges is the first viable candidate in American history to accept money only from small donors, and never from lobbyists (except as individual contributions).

This is a woman who, with her husband, is worth 100 million. This is not to say Obama is poor- but being worth millions is different from being worth tens of millions. Indeed, Obama is the poorest of all the top Democrat and Republican candidates in the race to date, and got his millions only in the last few years. I'm not saying Obama is poor, or even close to it. But how does a woman who has 100 times the money get off saying the less wealthy guy is less in touch with the working class?

Perhaps it's their histories. Perhaps one of them grew up poorer, and that's how Hillary is able to say this.

From Wikipedia:

She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago, and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.[1] Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a child of Welsh and English immigrants who managed a successful small business in the textile industry.

Not a wealthy lifestyle, to be sure. Not poor either. More...middle class.

How about Obama?

Obama wrote his first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, before he was in politics. Lest you get confused, the inheritance he gets has nothing to do with wealth.

He states:

A few months after my twenty-first birthday...the apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

Later Obama shares of growing up in Indonesia, where the family was not the poorest of the poor, for they had their own house- but certainly would be considered poor by American standards. He describes the people around him:

I didn't tell [Grandma] and Grandpa about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind -- the terror that danced in my friend's eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away.

Obama's experiences are not that of a typical American, middle class or even working class. Perhaps some in New Orleans can relate, but for most of us, what he's experienced, what he's seen, is a level of poverty far lower than the poor of America. Obama may be out of touch, not because he is too elite, but because most Americans have experienced and seen less extreme poverty than he has!

And not to take delight in his relative poverty, but if Clinton is going to take out the measuring stick, does she have some sort of comparable experience in poverty when she was also nine years old? Or at any time growing up in suburban Illinois, is there something that would help her more greatly identify with the plight of the poor and working class?

I have no disagreement with the concept that Hillary did not grow up in the upper class. I affirm that she's solidly middle class in upbringing. And Obama is working class, in upbringing. Sadly, in this election, as in all others, we again and again hear about the needs of the middle class, and the working class, who do not vote in as large numbers, get ignored. And so Hillary can get off with saying she is in touch with voters and not elitist, because she grew up middle class.

What about his experiences makes Obama elitist? What could Hillary possibly be referring to?

One gets a sneaky, very disturbing feeling that it's because of where Obama went to school - Harvard (like Hillary's Yale). That's a fairly elitist school. But if so, then what she objects to is when those of the working class pull themselves out of their situation through hard work and education.

Long before this controversy came up, I liked Obama for many reasons. One was that, for the first time in a long time, I felt like here was a candidate who could identify with the situation of the lower class. I'm lower class, and proud to be so. I want a candidate who can understand it. I want a President who understands what it's like to try to make ends meet. I want a President who has a heart for the poor and the disenfranchised. I do not want a candidate who tries to put one over on the lower class, thinking we are all rubes, and will believe her when she says she's in touch with us because she grew up with more money than we're likely to have, and now has tens of millions more money than we'll ever have. I do not want a candidate who will call me elitist because, though I grew up in poverty, I went to a good school. Hillary Clinton, start speaking Truth.