David Sirota dismatles Melissa Harris-Perry column: "arrogant elitism"

[Enrique]

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/news/david_sirota/2011/09/26/white_liberals_obama

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By seeing this record and then explaining away declining liberal support for President Obama as a product of bigotry, Harris-Perry exhibits the ultimate form of both denialism and elitism. It assumes voters (and readers of the Nation) are all lockstep partisans who don't -- and shouldn't -- care about actual issues, public policies and governmental actions, and that they should instead just line up with their party's leaders without question. It further assumes -- without any factual evidence -- that if and when voters don't follow this partisan script, it means that some deeper psychological factor like racism (rather than, say, rational, considered analysis of public policy) is the primary motivating factor in their behavior.

Betraying the arrogant elitism at the heart of such an argument, Harris-Perry declares that the "legislative record for first two years outpaces Clinton's first two years" -- a line that suggests that Obama is automatically more deserving of liberal support than Clinton. Yet, in making this part of the basis of her "electoral racism" allegations, she implies that liberal voters are so ignorant that they automatically believe sheer numbers of bills passed trumps what's actually in the bills. She hopes -- or, perhaps, believes -- that nobody remembers that many of those bills (the Patriot Act extension, the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the bank bailouts, the no-public-option health insurance giveaway legislation, to name a few) were initiatives that many liberals opposed.

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