John McCain is the real elitist running for president
By BERRY CRAIG
PADUCAH, Ky. – Sen. John McCain wants us to think Sen. Barack Obama is an elitist who looks down on working stiffs.

McCain’s shtick is as phony as blueblood Bush Sr. munching pork rinds and Dubya doing the Daytona 500.

McCain started slicing the baloney about Obama before the Pennsylvania primary. Obama had said years of lost jobs and unmet promises from Washington had left some working class Quaker State voters “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion.”

That sent the McCain spin machine into overdrive.

McCain called the remarks “elitist.” Joe Conason of The New York Observer said they were “silly,” but added that McCain’s response was “standard-issue rhetoric, designed to insinuate that Obama disdains traditional American culture and religious piety (although he probably attends church at least as often as McCain).”

It was plain to me what Obama meant, though he later admitted he said it poorly. The Democrat was talking about people getting suckered by Republicans who pander to social issues. One of my union brothers calls them “The Three Gs – God, guns and gays.” (Read What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank.)

Republicans like McCain have a hard time shaking the “elitist” label for good reason. It usually fits.

So the McCain campaign is trying to turn the tables, portraying Obama as the elitist – a Harvard-educated fancy-pants who gobbles organic grub and doesn’t care a whit about working people.

I’m a working class voter -- a union member and a community college teacher. I don’t care where -- or if – a candidate earned a sheepskin. It doesn’t bug me if he or she prefers sushi to fried catfish or Merlot to Miller Genuine Draft.

What matters to me is how candidates vote on my issues.

McCain almost never votes my way. Obama (like Clinton) almost always does.

McCain hopes working class folks won’t look too hard at his record, says Jeff Wiggins, a Steelworker and president of the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, an association of regional unions.

“McCain is smart,” Wiggins added. “He’s Dick Cheney with a brain. But he’s not fooling us.”

Union leaders have McCain’s number. They are spreading the straight stuff about the “straight talker” to the rank and file, in person and via cyberspace.

Go to the AFL-CIO’s Internet website: http://www.aflcio.org/. Click on “McCain Revealed.”

“Sen. John McCain is clearly not a fan of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits,” “McCain Revealed” says. “He has spoken out against unions and consistently worked against collective bargaining rights for workers.”

Even so, McCain is trying to hide his record as a union-buster. He’s running as a “maverick” Republican.

But McCain votes the Bush party line almost 90 percent of the time, according to “McCain Revealed.” The senator has voted “right” on labor bills only 16 percent of the time, says the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. Few lawmakers in Washington are more anti-union than McCain.

Obama’s COPE rating is 98 percent. Clinton’s is 94.

McCain is against the Employee Free Choice Act. Obama and Clinton support it.

McCain is for a national right-to-work law. Obama and Clinton are not.

McCain is especially unhappy with teachers’ unions like mine. I belong to the American Federation of Teachers and the Kentucky Education Association-National Education Association.

“It’s time to break the grip of the education monopoly that serves the union bosses at the expense of our children,” The New York Times quoted McCain.

“Union bosses” is a term often tossed around in corporate board rooms, country clubs and in other elitist circles. Obama doesn’t use it, and neither does Clinton.

The kids of union leaders and the rank-and-filers who elect them mostly go to public schools. McCain’s senate votes show he’s not much on public schools. The NEA gave McCain an “F” on its current Congressional Report Card. Clinton and Obama earned As for how they voted.

I teach history. One of our greatest presidents – a Republican – supposedly said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

That quote is attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Senator McCain, you’re no Abe Lincoln.

Anyway, when it comes to politicians, I don’t define “elitist” by bank accounts, cars, clothes, houses, where somebody went to college or what’s for dinner. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Harvard man and one of our wealthiest presidents. But nobody who ever occupied the White House did more for the working class than FDR.

McCain is a millionaire. But that’s not what makes him the real elitist in this campaign. How he votes does.

McCain has a bus he named “The Straight Talk Express.” But McCain’s a double-talker in the anti-union mold of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes.