Aug 21 2008
Wait…which presidential candidate is the elitist one?
Painting the Democratic candidate (in any election) as the latte-drinking, arugula-eating, out of touch elitist is old hat for the GOP, so it’s no surprise that the McCain has been making those claims against Obama for a long time now. However, as with many issues in this campaign, the candidate has been bringing the hypocrisy of those claims to light quite a bit, especially in the last five days.
First there was his appearance at the Saddleback church this past weekend where he responded to a question about how he defined being rich in this country and his response was that rich begins at $5 million. I remember the good old days when being a millionaire meant you were rich, but apparently John McCain doesn’t think so.
However the real kicker was yesterday when Politico asked him how many houses he owned.
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”
Seriously? I mean, I know McCain’s been doing a wonderful job of playing the old guy who doesn’t remember anything and has a hard time keeping things straight and thus can use that to avoid any responsibility for changing my positions or not knowing the facts about integral policy issues, but he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns! You’re trying to say that Obama is out of touch and elitist and you can’t even remember that you own 7 houses (that was the figure his campaign staff eventually submitted to the press).
The Obama campaign has been quick to jump on this little gem. The candidate himself mentioned it mere hours after McCain’s response to the question reported and they’ve already generated an ad that highlights the comment.
The McCain campaign has responded thus far by saying that because Obama owns one million dollar “mansion” (complete with a nice reference to Tony Rezko), made $4 million last year (a drop in the bucket compared to Cindy McCain’s fortune) and spent his vacation in Hawaii (because it’s not like that’s where he was raised or where his grandmother lives), that he has no place to talk about houses and elitism. But since the Obama campaign released the above ad after the McCain camp’s comments, their response on this issue seems to be, “Game on.”
