The worst I felt the whole campaign was over the weekend, when the conventional wisdom had it that Hillary, a rich suburban woman, had successfully remade herself as a populist, and her gas-tax holiday was going to
give her momentum out of Indiana and North Carolina.
I couldn’t believe
the down-home outfits she was wearing as she had the gall to bash Wall
Street standing alongside a daughter who works as a volunteer in a
hospital in Nairobi–sorry, works for a New York hedge fund. The
pundits said that Obama’s out of touch with working people. Only elites
are for Obama. They love how smart he is, but elites aren’t hurt by the
gas prices, and you can’t win an election with elites. It’s working
class and middle-class people, who vote pocketbook issues, not Iraq and
energy policy. I’d loved the fact that Obama had shown true leadership
on gas prices a few months ago. Now I felt elitist and stupid. I
worried that Obama was about to fold on the gas-tax, and do what he
needed to do to win the election, and then I feared what was he going
to cave on next. I felt sick to my stomach, and thought, I know nothing
about democratic politics, to boot.
Well, Obama held his ground. And the new conventional wisdom is that
Hillary’s craven proposal of a gas-tax holiday worked out for Obama in
Indiana and North Carolina. That it came off as pure political
pandering, and Obama seemed wiser about the economy. So Hillary’s
pastel-pantsuit-populist act failed.
Maybe Americans really want a smart leader.
