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• Thursday, September 11, 2008 09:49 PM

  "considerable"

  Okay, maybe I shouldn't have used that word. "Barack Obama spent a portion of his youth in poverty," how's that?

  Because yes, damn it, if your mother has to apply for food stamps to keep you fed, you are poor. You may not be as poor as some other people -- poverty is always relative; most poor people in America are rich by comparison to what passes for the middle class in much of the world -- but you need food stamps, you are not middle class and you are damn sure not rich.

  Rich, as in John Sidney McCain III. Who had his Annapolis appointment handed to him on a silver platter because of who his daddy and granddaddy were, who couldn't fly worth a damn and who was only given a flying post because of his lineage, whose incompetent piloting gave him the opportunity for his oh-so-heroic POW experience (after he had already crashed four planes!), who dumped the wife who waited for him through the years of his captivity so he could marry from "comfortably wealthy" up into "obscenely wealthy." Who can't remember how many houses he owns. Who thinks that if you make four million dollars a year, you're middle class.

  And yes, any poor or middle-class person who thinks this coddled aristocrat is somehow more like them than a man who worked his way to the top, a true Horatio Alger story of the type conservatives claim to love but clearly loathe (remember what they did to a guy named Clinton?) is beyond hope.

  —Daniel Dvorkin Read Daniel Dvorkin's other letters
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