Penn got this right out of the Rove play book. Just as Rove took John Kerry's greatest asset -- his military record -- and lied it into a negative, so Penn takes Obama's -- his biography -- and tries to do the same.
The difference is that the tactic won't work with Obama. The patrician Kerry did not know how to deal with guttersnipe attacks. He was so utterly unused to them.
All African-American men are used to them, especially one who made it to Harvard Law, the US Senate and a Presidential candidacy despite his race, his name, and his exotic heritage.
In politics, it is an advantage to come from nowhere and nothing. You learn how to push back. Hard.
I guess this person never read about St. Paul, where Kerry was a very picked on minority: not super-rich, a Democrat, and a Catholic.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/06/opinion/main610517.shtmlJohn Kerry, Teen Outcast
...
According to most newspaper profiles, Kerry is the ultimate establishmentarian. "Mr. Kerry fit right in with the Northeastern elite," John Tierney wrote last month in The New York Times. On paper, this is certainly true. Kerry's middle name is Forbes, as in the Forbes shipping fortune. Winthrop blood ties him to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And, at every stage in life, the establishment has seemingly renewed his membership ...
But, for all these patrician trappings, Kerry has never been fully accepted into the blue-blood world. In fact, during his time at St. Paul's, a cradle of the old WASP aristocracy, Kerry was an outsider: an unwelcome Catholic among high-church Episcopalians; the son of a Foreign Service officer and, thus, a relative poor boy; an earnest liberal among rock-ribbed Republicans. "He felt like he didn't fit," says Kerry's best boarding-school friend, Daniel Barbiero. In response to his estrangement, Kerry followed the pattern set by generations of immigrants. He became an ambitious, hard-working striver -- the opposite of the ideal of effortlessly achieving aristocracy. Douglas Brinkley writes in his biography of Kerry, Tour of Duty, "Given class-consciousness of St. Paul's School, Kerry felt especially compelled to prove himself."
...
Under most circumstances, and in most U.S. settings, Kerry's shabby gentility would not have disadvantaged him. But St. Paul's was an extremely status-conscious place. As Brinkley writes in his biography, "At St. Paul's, unless you had a lot of money and wore the right clothes and had parents who belonged to the right clubs, you could be made to feel inadequate, born on the wrong side of the tracks." Fitting in -- to be a "reg," or regular guy, as the St. Paul's kids said -- meant having the right pair of loafers, the right Brooks Brothers suit, and the right ring belt. Kerry certainly dressed the preppy part. But there were obvious ways in which he could not keep up. While his classmates summered in Europe (or even took private jets to the Continent for long weekends), Kerry spent his breaks working as a Teamster in Somerville, Massachusetts, for the First National Stores, loading food onto trucks. He frequently borrowed money from friends. And, if his relative poverty weren't apparent enough, Kerry always had richer classmates issuing reminders of their bigger bank accounts. Barbiero recounted to me a symbolic incident. One of Kerry's poorer classmates had carefully compiled a record collection that was his proudest possession -- and everyone in the school knew it. But a rich classmate couldn't stomach the satisfaction felt by Kerry's friend, so he ventured into Concord and bought out the record store. According to Barbiero, Kerry empathized with the collector. "John was upset about this and thought it was a nasty thing to do."
Kerry's lack of wealth wasn't all that separated him from his classmates. As a child, Kerry had been deeply Catholic, serving as an altar boy and toying with joining the priesthood. At St. Paul's, it wasn't easy for Kerry to keep his faith. On Sunday mornings, he would take a taxi into Concord for Mass -- and then have to return to attend two mandatory Episcopal services at school. In other words, every week, he was forced to remind his classmates of his religious affiliation. And, given his classmates' attitudes toward Catholicism, Kerry would probably have preferred to keep his faith to himself. When Bobby Kennedy attended St. Paul's in 1939, his mother, Rose, pulled him from the school after only a month because she couldn't stomach its anti-Catholic ethos. While that attitude atrophied somewhat, it hadn't entirely disappeared by the late '50s. Barbiero told me, "There were jokes about Catholics. I had more than one classmate tell me that 'those people' had their own clubs and own societies, and they weren't part of our society."
Not that I mean to hijack this thread on Obama, but it is frustrating how little people still know about our last nominee. All the info was out there, yet people still cling to what they THINK is the truth, instead of the actual truth. And no, being a Catholic minority is not as bad as going through life as an African American, but in the microcosm of the situation, that didn't make it any less painful.
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