NYT columnist Dowd on Obama: “Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances …But his exclusive Hawaiian prep school and years in the Ivy League made him a charter member of the elite, along with the academic experts he loves to have in the room.”

Down on herself: “I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)”

Apparently we’re supposed to conclude that while Obama has become an elitist, writing a column for more than a decade for one of the country’s top papers (and the salary that comes with that) doesn’t qualify Dowd as part of the elite. Uh-huh.

This may seem a trivial point to blog about, but this theme crops up in the press quite a bit: Politicians (usually Democrats) are rich elitists who are out of touch with the common man, while journalists, no matter how highly paid, have their finger on the pulse of Joe Average.

John Kerry, for instance, was mocked as an elitist by one journalist for ordering green tea in a restaurant in the Midwest (apparently the writer considered it an obscure drink unheard of by anyone who isn’t very, very, very rich). John Edwards, as we know, has a really, really, really big house (so does McCain, but he invites lots of journalists over, so apparently that’s different) and pays for expensive haircuts.

On the other hand, we have cable pundit Chris Matthews, who owns a $4.4 million home on Nantucket and recently told an interviewer that “I don’t think people look at me as the establishment, do you? Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so.”

Ann Coulter, who grew up in the suburb where the median income is over $200,000 (IIRC) has proclaimed her spiritual home is in Queens and Kansas City. None of her actual homes are in either place.

And then there’s Dowd, who seems to feel that wealth and success can’t possibly have affected her like they have that snotty Obama.

(While it’s aside from my main point, Dowd’s column is also pretty feeble: She points out that Obama’s mother was an anthropologist to justify that Obama “appears to be observing the odd habits of locals” in rural areas, though she doesn’t offer much in the way of examples).

(Edited from initial post slightly).

The AP, today: “The independent label sticks to John McCain because he antagonizes fellow Republicans and likes to work with Democrats.”

And, of course, because a large chunk of the national press adores him.

At a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (according to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post), “moderators Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, greeted McCain with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. ‘We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we’ve decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride,’ Sidoti explained. ‘We even brought you your favorite treat.’

McCain opened the offering. ‘Oh, yes, with sprinkles!’ he said.”

But hey, McCain invited the press to his big house a month ago for a cookout, so I suppose they had to be nice to him.

As Chris Mathews said, the press is “McCain’s base.”

And it still amazes me that I see newspaper articles that refer to the Straight Talk Express without putting it in quotation marks.

I just finished my article on last night’s tiering-system workshop.

Try as I might, I could not convince myself that I was justified in using “Tiers of a clown” as the story title.

“A 20 year old … was arrested after threatening to re-enact a Virginia Tech style massacre over the Internet.”

He was planning to massacre people over the Internet? I’m pretty sure bullets can’t be e-mailed.

I posted some months back that right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg, in his book “Liberal Fascism,” did his best to ignore or dismiss the existence of American fascism (which is a creature of the far right) in order to prove that fascists had somehow morphed into American liberals.

He’s still at it. British race-car driver Max Mosley was recently caught on videotape in a sex game where he plays a concentration-camp prisoner.Goldberg’s brilliant analysis:

“Mosley’s (Oswald Mosley, Max’s father) sister-in-law Jessica Mitford, one of the Mitford Sisters (natch’), was a committed Communist who wrote The American Way of Death (which by many accounts is a good book I have yet to read). When Hungarian freedom fighters were slaughtered by the Soviets, Mitford said they were “fascist traitors” who had it coming. Jessica married the Stalinist California lawyer Robert Treuhaft (this NYT obit is hagiography), for whom Hillary Clinton worked as an intern.”

A-ha! So it’s all the fault of Communism making Max a pervert, and Clinton’s part of the sex ring … or something like that.”

What Goldberg conveniently omits is that Oswald Mosley was the leader of British fascism in the pre-WW III and (like a number of Americans) opposed the war as serving “international Jewry” rather than Britain.

Hmm, British fascist father, concentration camp … No, couldn’t possibly be a connection. Obviously it has something to do with liberals. And Clinton.

(courtesy of the Huffington Post for the information)

Gene Robinson in the Washington Post, today: “At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century. That is indeed what McCain meant, by the way, no matter how his apologists try to spin it. Those who claim that by ‘a hundred years’ McCain was talking about a long-term peacetime deployment like the U.S. military presence in South Korea are being disingenuous or obtuse.”

Claim? Here’s McCain in January: “We’ve been in South Korea. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me.”

Yeah, why would anyone think he meant a deployment like South Korea, just because he said so?

I’m not a McCain supporter. I thin long-range plans for staying in a peaceful Iraq are planning for something that’s not going to happen. And I think the national press frequently goes easy on McCain, whose ability to massage and charm the media—and they’re willingness to be charmed—has been reported multiple times. Distorting something he said to make it sound worse, however, does not balance out reporters’ acknowledged willingness to cut McCain slack when he says something wrong or off-the-wall. And reporters who reinterpret a direct quote to explain what someone “meant” should be ashamed of themselves.

Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post, in 2006, on why public opposition to the Iraq war is irrelevant: “Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don’t think so. The reason that many politicians are squeamish about hard and fast goals of any kind in Iraq is that there is no simple response or solution—it would have emerged by now. A withdrawal by year’s end carries enormous, very serious implications.”

That would be a valid point if the topic was ordinary Americans lecturing the military on tactics (”Clearly you should use flanking movements and heavy artillery in Basra!”). Stay or withdraw is not a tactical decision, however, it’s a political one: Is what we’re doing likely to produce worthwhile results? Can we afford to flush billions down the drain in Iraq? And that’s something where the public—whether or not I or Murray agree with them—are perfectly entitled to weigh in (civilian control of the military and all that).

Does Murray seriously think the public is showing worse judgment than the White House? Than the administration that decided to attack Iraq without waiting for the weapons inspectors to finish their work, or for our troops to have adequate armor? That claimed conquering Iraq would be the start of turning the Middle East into a democracy? That turned down offers of assistance from Iran when they were still looking to negotiate?

Okay, some people in the public are just as daft: The people who still think Saddam was behind 9/11, for instance. But those are the ones who want us to stay.

Following up from the previous post, one positive thing came out in Somerby’s report: Several of the journalists admit that while they find discussions of policy boring, the public eats them up.

Yep, the American public, the people we’re so often told have no interest in any of that stuff, have a greater interest than the people who report on it. Somerby quotes EJ Dionne, who suggests that may be because reporters covering the presidential campaign have big paychecks, a nice home and lots of health insurance, so they have no stake in candidates’ solutions; a lot of regular folk do.

I’m reminded of a polling session I read about during the 2004 Democratic primaries: When asked which candidate they favored, the Democratic voters in the survey demanded details of their policies, their positions, their plans. The pollster brilliantly deduced from this that the Democratic field must be very weak because Everyone Knows voters pick candidates based on how likable they find them, so if they’re even thinking about policy, that proves the candidates haven’t made enough of an impression.

I admit I’m biased: As someone who covers City Council, I think it’s important to tell people what their government is doing. It may not affect the world, but it can have a big effect on Destin (and if it’s having none, people need to know that too).

That’s why it drives me up the wall to read—courtesy of Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler , a media-watchdog site—how many national journalists think actually writing about policy is too big a snooze to bother with.

In his Jan. 10 post, Somersby recounts pundits and reporters — David Broder, Mary McGrory, Gail Collins—who grumble that long speeches discussing health-care policy, welfare reform, foreign policy, pretty much any policy—put them to sleep. Collins, for example, grumbles about Clinton giving an “extremely boring speech” about HMOs, reducing our carbon footprint and other positions and adds that this and similar speeches “drove reporters mad with tedium.” Broder, in one column, admits he found Clinton’s “swell ideas” on achieving energy independence so boring he didn’t bother to listen.

I will wholeheartedly agree that policy discussions can be less than thrilling. But guys (and women), that’s part of the job of covering government: To pay attention to policy proposals, to explain them as clearly as possible and show how they will (or won’t) affect the public. If you’ve no interest in doing that, stay home and eat yogurt, because you’re not much use in the field.