I did not think it possible that I could ever find myself rooting for That Awful Woman. Indeed, I can’t believe it really is possible.
The person with my face who sat at my desk gazinghappily at the results scrolling across the screen from Pennsylvania late Tuesday night clearly cannot be me, and I hope that whoever she is will go away and let me back into my house.
But never, either, could I have imagined that conservative women could fall under the thrall of That Patronizing Man, and yet I am dismayed to report that many, many of the stalwart Republican women of my acquaintance have, indeed, succumbed.
It is becoming a cause of social awkwardness. Those who have not swooned now find it necessary to say hastily, before criticizing Obama, something like, “I can see his appeal,” or “He certainly is a very powerful speaker.”
Well, yes, Barack Obama is a powerful speaker. For me, though, the tentative little sprinkling of fairy dust that briefly bestrewed his immaculate white shirts and dark suits vanished utterly with his famous “bitter” remarks.
My experience was like Dorothy’s when she takes the ruby slipper off the crushed witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” I heard his words — “cling to guns and religion, blah, blah” — and he shriveled before my eyes from someone impressive into the sort of tiresome left-wing bigot I’ve known all my life.
In the Northeast, where I grew up, nursing a sense of superiority over the multitudes of fried-food-eating, gun-toting, religious people in flyover country is as common as the maple tree. Those people? They’re jingoists, Bible-thumpers, and probably Southern.
This is not merely a regional prejudice, though that exists; what I know intimately is the liberal version of it, with its assumption that Europe, for instance, brims with wise sophisticates, whereas America is packed full of barn-brained yokels who shop at big-box stores and send their sons to the military because they lack the ambition to send them anywhere else.
The elitist charge burns Democrats because the party has a guilty conscience, or should have. I laughed out loud when I saw Hendrick Hertzberg in the latest New Yorker bleating that, “from 1972 onwards, Republicans have successfully deployed the trope of “elitism” against every Democratic opponent except the two winners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.” Can you guess why? Because it’s not a trope, it’s true!
Conservatives may have their privileged, highly educated cadres, but never have I encountered among them the reflexive scorn for “the masses,” or “the common man” found amongst so many left-wingers.
You can see this in innumerable ways; in, among other things, how people talk about Wal-Mart. Liberals love to revile Wal-Mart and the meaty Middle Americans who shop there.
Conservatives tend to defend the megastores — not because they always side with big corporations, but because their notion of freedom is served by even poor families having access to abundant goods.
A man like Obama who styles himself a Christian, yet in private portrays other people’s Christian faith as a crutch to which they “cling,” betrays an almost sinister sense of superiority.
Thus I find myself, or that person who resembles me, rejoicing that Mrs. Clinton has pulled it out in Pennsylvania. You can say many unpleasant things about her, and I often have, but I do not think she is an actual snob.
She and her husband have spent grueling years in retail politics; for that matter, they have spent innumerable Sundays attending churches that do not preach resentment and hatred of American society.
I don’t want her to win in November. But in August, at the Democratic convention? That would be sweet. She’d be winning one for the little guy.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
