“Go to the nearest Wal-Mart, line up 100 people and ask them whether they can relate to a man who owns eight houses and whose wife is a gazillionaire, or if they can relate to a man who represents the American melting pot — a man who just recently paid off his student loans — a man who was raised by a single mother — a man who is (shock horror!) still happily married to his only wife. Then tell us that Barack Obama is the more exotic or elitist of the two candidates.
“Irrespective of what white, upper-class Republicans or Mark Penn or Mark Halperin or Pat Buchanan might think, Senator Obama quite literally looks like 21st Century America. Mixed-culture, mixed-heritage, middle class roots. Senator Obama, in terms of his racial composition and family history, has more in common with average Americans than just about any modern Republican presidential nominee.
“The only way he’s not is if somehow we’ve been transported into an episode of Leave It To Beaver — or if by ‘America’ the Republicans and the barbecue media mean to suggest ‘Kentucky.’ Even with that as a qualification, half of Senator Obama’s racial composition is rooted in rural Kansas. His parents were divorced. He barely knew his biological father.” — from Mike Cesca‘s 8.13 HuffPost piece titled “The Exotic Candidate Is The One With Eight Houses.”