Barack Obama came under fire a few weeks ago for saying:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama was criticized for making “elistist” comments and being “liberal.” Interestingly enough, I always though those were good qualities, but just to make sure, I looked in a dictionary. Elitist means “one who believes society should be ruled by a certain class or group enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status.” Liberal means “favorable to progress or reform.”

Barack Obama was not wrong in what he said. Perhaps he could have chosen his words better had he been thinking about the political fallout from his statement, but I think it is the truth. After a streak of bad luck people tend to get bitter. In their bitterness, people are drawn to what is familiar to them, something like guns or religion. Then comes the hatred of other people who aren’t like them. Certain people are always looking for someone on which to blame their frustrations.

What got Senator Obama into trouble was not the text, but I think his opponents twisted his words so that it became popular belief that he was characterizing middle America. I can’t speak to what middle America is actually like, but some people are less educated than others and in their frustrations, it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that some of those people may be exactly as Senator Obama described.

This president in particular has turned politics into something ordinary. Instead of the presidency being a job reserved for well educated people and well prepared individuals, the presidency is now an anyone-can-do-it position. My position is that elite is good. The founders had that in mind. Farmers are good at farming, lawyers are good at being lawyers, doctors are good at being doctors, so by letting them vote for people they trust, they can give up the responsibility of being intimately involved with every issue, which becomes a big loss of time. It’s the problem with direct democracy. Instead, we elect people to know the issues, then represent us. The person who makes those decisions should not be the guy you want to have a beer (sorry, a Diet Coke) with. It should be somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

Elite is not a bad word and it should not be used like one. I don’t want my president to be like me, I want my president to be smarter than me. Somehow, being smart and good at what you do has become bad and people want the friendliest guy to be the most powerful guy, even if he can barely tie his own shoe laces. Someone tell me why that isn’t messed up reasoning.