My favorite moment on the NR cruise might have been when a perfectly intelligent and accomplished man asked me why the Wall Street Journal carries such a bad parody column by Thomas Frank. I had to gently explain to the man that that’s no parody. He really means that stuff.
Frank’s column today on the Gates Affair is particularly poignant. You have to read closely to see that he concedes conservatives have the bulk of the facts on their side. So, Johnny goes back to his one note. Liberals shouldn’t have let themselves get distracted by a culture-war issue. Not when socialized medicine for the prols is on the line!
The Gates incident was a trap that could not have been better crafted to ensnare President Barack Obama, who is himself a loyal son of academia’s most prestigious reaches, and to whom it was immediately obvious, even without benefit of the facts, that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the situation.
Mr. Obama’s way of backing out of his gaffe was just as telling: He invited Mr. Gates and the policeman who arrested him to the White House for a beer, the beverage so often a gauge of a politician’s blue-collar bona fides. One symbolic gesture, hopefully, can exorcise another.
Class is always an ironic issue in American politics, and the irony this time is particularly poignant. We are in the midst of a great national debate about how to make health care affordable; almost nothing is more important to working-class Americans. “For the health of the nation, both physically and economically, we need a system with a public option,” Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, wrote recently in the Huffington Post. “And we need it now.”
But whether working families get it now depends to a large degree on Mr. Obama’s personal popularity. And now comes Gates-gate, this latest burst of fake populism from the right. Waving the banner of the long-suffering working class, the tax-cutting friends of the top 2% have managed to dent the president’s credibility, to momentarily halt his forward movement on the health-care issue.
Umbrage at a Harvard professor’s class snobbery, in other words, might derail this generation’s greatest hope for actually mitigating the class divide.
Frank’s argument is too familiar to engage head on again. But it is nice to see that Frank concedes that the health-care debate doesn’t boil down to the merit or substance of the issue, but rather it hinges on Obama’s personal popularity. It’s also annoying, but typical, to see that Frank cannot get his head around the fact conservatives might actually believe what they’re saying when they exhibit their “fake populism.”
Update: Whoops. I completely forgot to make the point I intended to make. Frank might need to contemplate the fact that Obama’s personal popularity is falling precisely because of the “reforms” Thomas Frank endorses. It’s a nice catch-22. Socialized medicine needs Obama to be popular in order to pass, and socialized medicine is making Obama unpopular.