Maureen Dowd: Eggheads and Cheeseballs

Maureen Dowd, today, parrots the Republican/Clinton-ite "elitist" tag placed on Obama based on her personal biography, first, and Obama's limited comfort-level with blue collar slumming - something Dowd notes Clinton is better at, but fails to point out that it is slumming nevertheless, second.

She suggests that her family's not bitter, had guns, had "a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling" and that her "family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren’t bitter; they were bonding.... They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket."

What she completely fails to recognize is that her (lower?) middle income, legal-immigrant Catholic upbringing in the Washington DC of the 1950s and 60s was a period of extensive economic growth - at least in the aggregate... a period, and place, that in no way resembles the last quarter century of declining blue collar employment in the industrial and rural regions of Western and Central Pennsylvania about which Obama was talking.

Furthermore, in the late 1970s, before the Reagan revolution, middle income citizens of the United States had similar rates and similarly declining rates of church attendance as in Europe - and an almost universal agreement on the second amendment as a collective rather than individual right to bear arms. Since then, the xenophobic neoliberal discourse of "small" government, self-discipline, personal responsibility and "traditional" values have destroyed the confidence working class and middle management types in this country used to have in the stability of their employment. Any number of pundits have, furthermore, pointed out the brilliant conflation of cultural neoconservativism with economic neoliberalism under Reaganism and socially, ecologically, medically and culturally contradictory consequences of folks in the former camp committing themselves to Republican demagogues in the latter camp.

Whatever the cause, however, there is an empirical correlation between the rising economic insecurity of the last quarter century and an explosion - particularly among those in the most precarious economic positions - in church attendance (often, if not always, in or related to evangelical mega-churches which preach the kinds of populist xenophobia Obama was addressing.

Obama never said all religious commitments and political concerns in all places and times are derived from economic insecurity, only that in his experiences in rural and rust-belt Pennsylvania (and Ohio), that was some of what he saw. I expect better from Maureen Dowd, as I do of the Clintons.