Pigeontrack: Obama’s Cultural Hurdle

Interesting post over at Right Wing Nation.  Here's a short excerpt:

Obama and his worshippers are essential, even prototypical Cosmopolitanists. Like all Cosmopolitanists, they insulate themselves by living and associating only with other Cosmopolitanists; this is essentially what Bernard Goldberg calls the liberal bubble. Cosmopolitanists not only despise Jacksonians; they fear them. This fear is the real root of the Cosmopolitanist love for gun control, although that’s another topic for another article.

Jacksonian realism is based on the very sharp distinction in popular feeling between the inside of the folk community and the dark world without. Jacksonian patriotism is not a doctrine but an emotion, like love of one’s family. The nation is an extension of the family. Members of the American folk are bound together by history, culture and a common morality. At a very basic level, a feeling of kinship exists among Americans: we have one set of rules for dealing with each other and a very different set for the outside world.

- Walter Russell Meade, The Jacksonian Tradition

Obama’s cultural problem is that he is a Cosmopolitanist. He not only has a cultural disconnection with the American character; he fears and despises it. We saw this with bittergate and arugulagate. We saw this with the “Why I don’t wear an American flag lapel pin” statement, and the pathetic attempts later to spin it away. Obama is out of touch, and it appears that he doesn’t even realize it.  CONTINUED