President Obama Is Out Of Touch

Remember when President Bush I was shocked about the technology to check out at the grocery store? [Update: That story, reader Mark Urbin points out, was a myth. See Snopes.] Remember when the press made hay over Senator John McCain’s ignorance about email?

They’re out of touch! screamed the headlines.

Well, the Out Of Touch disease afflicts President Barack Obama in a way that is more pernicious than most. It’s not that he doesn’t know how much a loaf of bread costs, it’s that he doesn’t care.

Ace has an excellent description of the constituencies that Obama caters to and they ain’t you and me. Here’s what he says:

That last bit is a sort of interesting observation — Obama abandoned the blue-collar/middle-class Democratic voter in favor of two groups, the lower class, and the, ahem, “Educated Class” about whom David Brooks waxes so poetically.

In essence, Obama caters to those who have so much money that they don’t care how much the government taxes because it won’t affect their bottom line and those who have no money and who hope the government gives out more.

Barack Obama caters to…himself. He has the street swagger and single mother psychology influencing him on one hand and the indulged exclusivity of his education on the other.

His scorn for the middle class family, the backbone of any taxation scheme, is visceral, emotional, and intellectual.

Ace continues:

I really was just trying to explain why it is the very-wealth tend to be much more liberal than the middle class. (Much more left-liberal.) And my point is just that at their levels of income, taxation becomes an abstract sort of issue to them. And they are very willing to trade one abstraction (higher taxes on money they’d have trouble spending even if they really tried) for another abstraction (“I want to see Obama win on this just so he can have his victory”).

It’s not abstract to the great majority of Americans.

Of course. The uber-wealthy deal in abstraction both politically and financially. It’s all a grand theory, Lovey.

But to the families, small business owners and private sector folks making $50,000 and trying to find where to cut and where to spend extra, the price of a loaf of bread matters in a big way. And they want the President to understand why it matters, even if he doesn’t know the cost himself.

The problem presenting the American people, specifically the middle-class tax payer is that they have a President who resents them and their basic values and needs.

He wants them to be quiet while he gives them what is good for them. He wants to tax them while he does it.

Barack Obama simply cannot relate to the middle class reality. The reality he chose was to vacillate between the urban rich and poor worldview–indulged and aggrieved at the same time.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American people don’t fit that reality. They have a much different view of America.

It seems highly unlikely that President Obama’s view will ever mesh with the average American’s view.

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