Conversation | 04/21/2008 9:22 am
Does a Little Obama 'Elitism' Go a Long Way in Politics?

WHOOPI: If they tell the truth.
LESLEY: It’s not impossible because it’s been done. And that’s what the vetting and the running for president is all about. I think that anybody really skilled needs to find a message that can bridge all of the differences. Obama started out with his message of hope, with the intention of doing that. And this new line of attack on him is meant, obviously, to portray him as somebody who doesn’t have the strength, the manliness, whatever it is – you know, he’s too "limp wrested" – to be able to lead us all. But I do think that a skillful politician can speak to everybody in the country, if they find the right message.
WHOOPI: Well only if you’re not listening to people like Rush Limbaugh. This is a guy who’s saying, "Let’s go vote for this woman so we can beat her." I mean, come on, this is a very specific kind of attack, by people who have fucked it up to start with, and won’t admit it.
LESLEY: No, but this attack isn’t coming from them. This attack is coming from inside the Democratic party.
WHOOPI: No it … it’s coming from everybody. It’s coming from everybody.
LESLEY: Well, at the moment, we’re talking about the primaries and what’s going on within the circle of the Democrats.
LIZ: You know, Lesley, it’s like two people get up and they start slugging it out. And they’ve been slugging it out now for so long that they’ve kind of turned into skeletons. And they’re still slugging it out. I mean, we have these two sort of fleshless creatures who are Democratic choices, and we’re so fed up with both of them and so fed up with the process, I think, that we’ll listen to anything. There are elitists in America, but there was a very famous one named Franklin Roosevelt, and he managed to get elected four times.
LESLEY: I know, but Obama – he wasn’t like Franklin Roosevelt, raised with a silver spoon. He had a single mother. They lived on food stamps for a while. So this is a guy who …
WHOOPI: Everybody knows that and yet this is still happening.
LESLEY: I know.
WHOOPI: Everybody knows it. And it’s because they can’t say: "Listen, we’re nervous about this guy because he’s black and we don’t know if this is going to work." They can’t say that. So they think, "Oh, well here’s what we can say …" It’s kind of like patting somebody on the head and saying, "You’re so articulate."
LIZ: Exactly. Go on, Whoopi.
LESLEY: But I don’t know if that’s what it is. I don’t. You’re saying that it’s all a substitute for racism?
WHOOPI: I think it is, a bit. And particularly, and this is going to sound crazy for angry women, angry black people, it’s all the same thing. We’ve never, ever dealt with this, so we don’t actually know what it is. We’ve never been able to have this discussion. If it was three white men, we’d know how to deal with it. But we don’t.
LESLEY: My problem with that, Whoopi, is that it’s the same attack that they made on the white guys.
WHOOPI: Yeah, but we accepted that. We accepted it. Listen, nobody said “boo” when they went after John Kerry and swift boated him. Nobody said “boo.”
LESLEY: No, I’m not talking about swift boating. I’m talking about the ridicule when he did the windsurfing. That’s what we’re talking about that’s synonymous. You know, that’s elitist.























320 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment