I am a liberal, I am an Obama supporter, and I like his style as well as his substance. I guess that means that I am also condescending and elitist. I don't mean to be, mind you, but it is an inescapable fact that to be a liberal is to, on some level be condescending and elitist.

I really wish that I could be one of "the folks", as Bill O'Reilly calls them. I mean, I work two jobs & my car is about to give out for good. I fix heavy equipment at environmental cleanup sites, so I definitely have a shower-after kinda job. My wife and I are saving up to get a place of our own, until then we're staying with my parents. But, sadly, I don't qualify to either be a "workin' man", a "working class white voter", or one of "the folks", because my political views are left-wing and Pro-Obama. I know that anyone reading this is already sickened by how I'm looking down my nose at them. The fact that I'm convinced people who think like me are totally better and smarter than everyone else must be shining through by now. Please, stop reading this, go find something written by a God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth right-wing supporter. They are the real Americans, I am just an east-coast latte-sipping, volvo-driving, trust-fund-spending, idealist, out-of-touch, elitist snob, or so I'm told, over and over again.

Also, here's hoping that none of the real Americans ever have to be subjected to some egg-head President who will have the audacity to think that he or she knows anything more about key issues than they do. Here is further hoping that the majority of Americans continue to decide who should be President based upon which candidate they'd like to have a beer with. Then America can continue on the trajectory that President Bush has set it on. Oh God, there I go agaain, thinking that the conservative President is not smart. Trying to fight the elitism, but, I just...can't. Is there some kind of medication I could take, to make me a real American?

You have quite a bit of company, Big Dan. I'm descended from generations of tenant farmers. They all voted Republican, out of unshakeable Midwestern habit. I finally gave up on my father after asking whether he had Ever voted for a Democrat for president. When I discovered that he had voted for Alf Landon in 1936, I gave him up as a totally lost cause. (One small triumph, though: I gave him a copy of Kahin and Lewis's How The United States Got Involved In Vietnam. He actually read it, and conceded that if what they said was true, we never belonged there.)

Me, though, I got student loans and went to the state university. (I was admitted to elite MIT, but no scholarship and so no go.) There I read Orwell, and G.B. Shaw, and, well, even Marx and Lenin. (I also read Friedrich Von Hayek, Arthur Koestler, and Milovan Djilas.) And now I know too much to swallow the bilge coming out of the Bush administration. Not sure that makes me an elitist, though -- just a member of the 49% minority that voted against him in the last election, and the 50.2% majority that voted against him in 2000.

Somehow we have to retake the political vocabulary. Liberal used to mean conservative, in the manner of Adam Smith and J.S. Mill. Now it is read as "communist." I am heartened, though, by the May 1 event in the West Coast ports. The ILWU guys and girls stood up and said, "We support the troops and we want the damn war ended." We need more of that (and less of Medea Benjamin).