Obama has run all along as the candidate who would take us beyond conflict on race and class and provide a new common ground for our politics. That was key to his ability to attract independents and even Republicans.

In his magisterial speech in the wake of the Wright flap he explained his inability to walk away from his church's crackpot preacher as an act of deference to older black men -- a previous generation who had put up with the indignities of Jim Crow and mass imprisonment. They were entitled to their anger on account of their what they had suffered, even if Obama and his generation don't share that anger, indeed, are determined to overcome it and the confrontational style of politics associated with it.

With the "bitter" comment Obama takes his particular brand of "healing" politics into the arena of economic dislocation and class difference. Populist working class anger is being treated here the same way as racial anger in the Wright case. Obama would like to be seen as someone who's confronting the divisiveness that underlies so much political debate in our country by acknowledging it but refusing to allow it to determine his policies.

In so doing, however, he runs the risk of sounding patronizing, the way liberals always do when they build their whole persona around the need to "rise above" confrontation. They tend to sound as if they're pooh-poohing the reasons why people get confrontational in the first place when, in fact, people often have perfectly good motivations to feel "bitter" about things. Hence, rather than make statements that sound like reproaches to people for allowing themselves to fall into unpleasant attitudes (anger, bitterness, alienations, "malaise") liberals would do better to take anger seriously as an expression of political sentiment and confine themselves to criticizing the social and economic developments that put people in a nasty frame of mind. Otherwise, they just end up sounding naive and a little distant.

But before we lambaste Obama for his "elitism," we should also keep in mind that at the end of the day our political culture doesn't make much space for people who wallow in negativity. Our American psyche almost demands some kind of uplifting twist at the end of every political analysis, no matter how desperate the underlying situation. Considering how much justifiable anger there is out there in the country about how things are going, how else would we expect our Presidential aspirants to address the national mood?