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By BERRY CRAIG
MAYFIELD, Ky. – Sen. John McCain wants us to think Sen. Barack Obama is an elitist who looks down on working stiffs.
McCain’s shtick is as phony as blueblood Bush Sr. munching pork rinds and Dubya doing the Daytona 500.
McCain started slicing the baloney about “Obama-the-snobby-egghead” before the Pennsylvania primary. Obama had said years of lost jobs and unmet promises from Washington had left some working class Quaker State voters “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion.”
That sent the McCain spin machine revving past the red line.
Ever since, McCain has tried to portray Obama as a fancy-pants who is out of touch with “real Americans.”
McCain called Obama’s pre-Pennsylvania primary remarks “elitist.” Joe Conason of The New York Observer said they were “silly,” but added that McCain’s response was “standard-issue rhetoric, designed to insinuate that Obama disdains traditional American culture and religious piety (although he probably attends church at least as often as McCain).”
It was plain to me what Obama was taking about, though he later admitted he said it poorly. He was alluding to the old Republican social issues sucker play.
To hide their anti-worker record and split the working class vote, Republicans like Bush and McCain pander to what a union brother of mine calls the “The Three Gs – God, guns and gays.” (Read What’s the Matter with Kansas ? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank.)
McCain’s the real elitist in the presidential race, but don’t take my word for it. Check out his voting record.
If I regularly voted to shaft unions and make rich people richer like McCain does, I’d be working overtime, too, to pin the elitist tag on Obama, characterizing him as a Columbia and Harvard-educated toff who gobbles organic grub and doesn’t care a whit about working class voters.
I’m a working class voter -- a union member and a community college teacher. I don’t care where -- or if – a candidate earned a sheepskin. It doesn’t bug me if he or she prefers sushi to fried catfish or Merlot to Miller Genuine Draft.
What matters to me is how candidates vote on my issues. McCain almost never votes my way. Obama almost always does.
McCain hopes working class folks won’t look too hard at how he votes, says Jeff Wiggins, a Steelworker and president of the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, an association of regional unions.
“McCain is smart,” Wiggins added. “He’s Dick Cheney with a brain. But he’s not fooling us.”
Organized labor has McCain’s number. The Steelworkers and other unions are spreading the straight stuff about the “straight talker” in person and via cyberspace.
Go to the AFL-CIO’s Internet website: http://www.aflcio.org/. Click on “McCain Revealed.”
“Sen. John McCain is clearly not a fan of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits,” “McCain Revealed” says. “He has spoken out against unions and consistently worked against collective bargaining rights for workers.”
Even so, McCain wants working class voters to think he is a different kind of Republican. He loves it when the “liberal” media helps by calling him a “maverick” and a “moderate.”
But this dogie never strays far from the right-wing GOP herd. McCain votes the Bush party line almost 90 percent of the time – 95 percent in 2007, according to “McCain Revealed.”
The senator has voted “right” on labor bills only 16 percent of the time, says the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. Few lawmakers in Washington are more anti-union than McCain.
Obama’s COPE rating is 98 percent.
McCain is against the Employee Free Choice Act. Obama supports it.
McCain is for right-to-work. Obama is not.
McCain voted for NAFTA and CAFTA. Obama opposed CAFTA. He wasn’t a senator when NAFTA passed, but he has promised to make the trade deal better for U.S. workers.
Anyway, I teach history. One of our greatest presidents – a Republican and a hero of mine – supposedly said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
That quote is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, a native of my state. Sen. McCain, you’re no Honest Abe.
When it comes to politicians, I don’t define “elitist” by bank accounts, cars, clothes, houses, where somebody went to college or what’s for dinner. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Harvard man, too, and one of our wealthiest presidents. But nobody who ever occupied the White House did more for the working class than FDR, another of my heroes.
McCain is a millionaire. But that’s not what makes him the elitist in this campaign. How he votes does.
McCain has a bus he named “The Straight Talk Express.” But when it comes to the working class and our issues, McCain’s a double-talker in the anti-union mold of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes.
You ... you're good!
I was reading this, again, today. I began to say aloud, "You, you're good..." The famouly funny line from Analyze This ... Analyze That, do you know it?
I absolutely dig this stuff:
If I regularly voted to shaft unions and make rich people richer like McCain does, I’d be working overtime, too, to pin the elitist tag on Obama, characterizing him as a Columbia and Harvard-educated toff who gobbles organic grub and doesn’t care a whit about working class voters.I’m a working class voter -- a union member and a community college teacher. I don’t care where -- or if – a candidate earned a sheepskin. It doesn’t bug me if he or she prefers sushi to fried catfish or Merlot to Miller Genuine Draft.
What matters to me is how candidates vote on my issues. McCain almost never votes my way. Obama almost always does.
As you know, I cross-posted this to a password protected Teamster site yesterday. I strongly believe that our membership will get as much out of this as I did....
Keep up the excellent work, sir.