Final Election '10 Obama Portrait

…Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Obama had not connected with popular discontent. “A lot of people have never been to Washington or New York, and they feel people there are so out of touch,” he said. “When you’re unemployed and you’re sitting in your living room and you hear the president say, ‘You don’t understand what the problems really are — you’re just scared,’ that makes people really, really angry.”

from Elitism: The Charge That Obama Can’t Shake (NYT WIR)

Building a portrait around the thoughts of top Republican operatives Michael Gerson, Mark Salter and Ron Bonjean, as well as unnamed “critics,” the thesis on this election final Week-in-Review profile is that Obama is a “Harvard-educated millionaire elitist” who thinks that people who disagree with him “just aren’t in their right minds.”

With one day to go before this critical mid-term election in which front groups, backed by largely unidentified special interests, have invested huge sums to elect conservatives who are either not-so-intellectual, I guess, or just smart enough to hide it better, one would have expected a little more, no?  But then, who could think of a greater threat than reason and intellect both to these vacuous mid-term elections and to this deep thinking President — so much so that the accompanying photo (from such a high-minded news source, no less!) connotes Obama doing his typical thing, which is looking down on the anonymous and obviously unfocused American voter.

Lest you think this is a full-throated defense of Obama, however, it’s just as clear the President is being used as a straw man in an election in which deeper thinking has lost out to stupid.