This is the piece that was picked by Rush yesterday:

Is Obama a Snob?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/27/09

Did Harvard’s Professor Gates sink Obama?

Last week on July 21, Dick Morris commented in The Hill that superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power. Then on Saturday, Rassmusen Reports Daily Tracking Poll reported that for the first time 49% of voters say they only somewhat approve of the President's performance. This was the second straight day that his overall approval rating has been below 50% among Likely Voters nationwide. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

Now that Cambridge intends to “open a dialogue” - they love to have this kind of “meta-narrative about race” as one New York Times columnist put it - in the elite college neighborhoods where the president has spent most of his adult life it will continue to grind him down. He’ll be at 45 % by September.

Between July 21, when the Boston papers first reported the arrest of Professor Gates, there was plenty of time for the public to sense that whatever else happened and whatever we would learn in the next three days, this was a classic contretemps between the Two Bostons: Harvard Yard and Fenway Park. And as a classic form of single combat psychological warfare, there could not possibly be a more unequivocally perfect symbolic representation of Harvard in our time than Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. And there could not be a more distinguished representative of Fenway Park than Sgt. James Crowley, an inscrutably honest cop who taught classes on racial profiling and who supported the President “ . . . 110 percent” but refused to back down to him.

Purely from a marketing point of view Obama’s knee-jerk identification with Professor Gates when he didn’t have all the facts was terrible strategy. A samurai would never open a chink that wide for the opposition to exploit. And he took his audience for granted. Just as Letterman did. And it showed Obama’s instinctive identification with a small and cloistered elite and one which William F. Buckley, Jr. considered so self-important and deluded that he said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book.

Obama instantly alienated himself from the vast world of common folk which he so hopes to save. And next week’s trek to Nantucket/Martha’s Vineyard, storied for late night, drug-addicted, burned out Saturday Night . . . types will bring more fuel for scorn. Back in 1977, long before it caught on in Texas and Alaska, the two detached ocean towns actually tried to secede from the boorish, coarse, brutes and Morlocks of Red Sox Nation to form their own fashionably stoned hippie wonderland and overwhelming majorities voted to secede from Massachusetts and possibly the nation. But that was a different time; a time when the generation’s folkloric muse and mentor declared, “ . . . everybody must get stoned,” and half the country, including Obama, was.

It will not make things better for Obama when he goes to bask with the same disaffected Eloi of Harvard Yard at Martha’s Vineyard.

Is Obama a snob? Does he see himself only as a title in caricature and dress up as snobs do? As Kerry does. As Barbara Boxer does. Does he to himself feel he doesn’t belong where he is as snobs do? Is his only talent giving speeches? Why is he so associated with pretenders? Why would he seem uncomfortable with plain, original, solid folk? People like Al Roker or Tony Dungy. People like James Crowley.

I simply can’t imagine him disappearing alone in a smoke-filled Legion Hall and finding his way to the bar to sit and talk to the old soldiers who are drinking already at 10 a.m. as I have seen Wesley Clark do.

Is that why Jesse Jackson and the regular folk Chicago preachers hate him?