Neither Moderate Nor Centrist - Forbes.com

Neither Moderate Nor Centrist - Forbes.com

Peter Robinson, a speechwriter in the Reagan administration writes:

"'To see what is in front of one's nose,' George Orwell famously asserted, 'needs a constant struggle.' Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks....

"[A] deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite. Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

"Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative. Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. 'Just what evidence do you have,' Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, 'that he's anything but a hard-left ideologue?'

"The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind."

(Via Melissa Clouthier.)