New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen (who is like me a declared Obama voter) has had some great observations all this election season on the Democratic primary and how it reflects American culture. He has a new column this week about the “elitism” issue, in which he argues, among other points:
Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks (hello, George Stephanopoulos!), instead of copping to the “elitist” sensibilities they obviously share with [Obama] (and the Clintons and McCain)—we travel abroad and read books, we have healthy bank accounts and drink wine; so shoot us—reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign’s faux-populist talking points about Obama’s condescension toward the yokel class. But pandering to the yokels, pretending to share their tastes and POV? That goes pretty much unchallenged. If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days? Naked disingenuousness apparently isn’t as off-putting as, say, failing to pin a tiny metal American flag to one’s lapel.
Leaving aside the obvious less-than-neutrality toward Clinton, there’s a great general insight here about politics and the media’s internalized anti-intellectualism. In American elections, [Update: in the eyes of the political press] it’s fine to be Ivy-educated and extremely smart—but only if you’re willing to show the requisite shame for it by recognizing, politically, that you must pretend to be regular folks. Being smart, successful and highly educated and not trying to hide it, though: that’s snobby. You can have your big brain (and your big bank account) as long as you’re willing to treat them as a liability.
Of course, I’m a critic, so I also have something to criticize in Andersen’s column, in which he analyzes the Obamaphilia of much of the media, but throws in a big generalization:
[A]lmost as much as geography is dispositive in spectator sports—if you live in New England, you’re bound to love the Red Sox and hate the Yankees—demography is dispositive in this year’s Democratic race. And the great majority of media people are members of the same (white) demographic cohort that has rejected Hillary and voted for Barack—educated, more-affluent-than-average [my italics] residents of cities and suburbs.
More affluent than average? Well, I’m pretty sure this is true of Andersen, who has founded businesses and run magazines, consulted for Barry Diller, published novels and hosted a public-radio show. And it’s generally true of his particular media circle—that is, high-ranking staff at big national media (including, say Time magazine, although I’m fairly confident Andersen could buy me many times over).
But the media in general? The notion of affluent, Starbucks-drinking media professionals is widely repeated, ironically, in the media itself, but it ignores the fact that for a vast section of everyday media workers, it’s adamantly untrue: local newspaper reporters making low-five-digit salaries, broadcast production drones, freelancers, pretty much anyone working in radio except execs and big-name talent—and almost all of them face a job market that’s more threatening by the day. Their situation is about as opposite to “elite” as you can get.
It’s not really fair to pick on Andersen, who has forgotten more about the media than I will ever know, but it’s a good example of a trap that people writing about the media—myself included—fall into all the time: using the term “media” so broadly as to make it useless, when we really mean a more specific set of media. In his case, he really means the smaller subset of the most successful and decision-making of national journalists, whom he happens to know best. But at a time when politicians have made a cliche of “the elitist media,” it’s worth remembering that many people actually working in the media are closer to Starbuck workers than stereotypical Starbucks consumers.
Oh, and in more important New York magazine news, the mag visits Sarah Jessica Parker on the eve of the Sex and the City movie premiere, and most important of all, finds out what Scott Speedman—and his mom—are up to.