Obama’s ‘English’ Comment Yet Another Proof of His Elitism

Barack Obama, campaigning in Georgia, offered the following pearl of wisdom regarding America’s lack of foreign language proficiency:

“It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German,” he had said. “And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘Merci beaucoup.’

I can’t help but remember one of his other critical lectures regarding the ignorance of Americans:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I guess you can add “the English language” to that list of things that Barack Obama thinks Americans are bitterly clinging to.

Barack Obama came under a lot of fire for little “bitter” remark. I myself was actually much more upset by the incipient Marxism that Barack Obama revealed in his thinking, but the criticism that stuck was that Barack Obama was arrogant, and an elitist. He went to some bunch-of-money per plate pinky-in-the-air fund raising event in San Francisco, and proceeded to tell a bunch of fellow arrogant elitists what he really thought about those idiot hicks over in Pennsylvania.

The charge of “elitism” has continued to resonate with the voters:

(CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama is saddled with a potentially toxic image problem: that he has an elitist attitude.

Well, I really don’t want to give the Obama campaign any useful advice, but one thing I’d tell their guy if I were inclined to help him is: “Hey, Barack, if you really truly want to dispel the impression that you’re a condescending elitist jerk, please, PLEASE, don’t tell us simple-minded Americans we’re not as smart as those sophisticated Europeans and then throw out something in French.”

Jesse Jackson was completely unfair in claiming that Barack Obama was “talking down to black people.”

He talks down to white people too (excepting European white people, of course).

You can say that our first metrosexual candidate for President is an equal-opportunity condescending elitist jerk. He looks down on pretty much everybody.

Obama’s right in a narrow sense, of course: Americans for the most part haven’t bothered to learn a bunch of other languages. Instead, Americans have occupied themselves with building such a great, such a wealthy, such a powerful, such an influential country, that everybody else in the world found it necessary to learn to speak English.

Unlike Barack Obama, I like the American way better.

On a sheer practical level, one must understand the sheer size of the United States relative to Europe, and the absence of the influence of foreign languages upon American culture.

In terms of size, if you overlay the United States over Europe, the U.S. literally either covers or overlaps Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herze-govina, Serbia and Montenegro, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, Russia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sweden, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria. We don’t have anywhere NEAR the constant “international contact” with languages that Europeans routinely have due to the small size of the countries, and we’re isolated by two oceans to boot. It’s simply ridiculous to expect us to have the same grasp of other languages that people living in countries you can drive through in a few hours have.

In terms of influence, our only foreign language-speaking neighbor – Mexico – is frankly insignificant to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Mexico’s economy has been in a perennial state of shambles for over a century now. Apart from being polite, why should Americans learn to speak Spanish?

And related to that last point, just what language should Americans learn? French? (Seriously, WHY!?!?) Chinese? Russian? Maybe we should learn Arabic, so we can better beg them for oil if – heaven forbid – Barack Obama gets elected and cuts off all our domestic oil production?

The simple fact of the matter is that Americans haven’t learned foreign languages because we haven’t needed to. And if Barack Obama is somehow ashamed of us for that, that’s really just his problem, isn’t it?

There’s another thing about Obama’s “English” remark that underscores his arrogance and elitism: he frankly thinks he knows better than an overwhelming majority of Americans on the issue of just what language Americans ought to be speaking in this country.

According to Rasmussen Reports:

Eighty-five percent (85%) of Americans believe that English should be the official language of the United States. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 adults found that only 11% disagree and 4% are not sure.

You know who issued Executive Order 13166 into law requiring multilingualism in federal documents? The last Democrat president we elected. He smuggled this unpopular edict into law in the waning days of his presidency.

That’s just the kind of exposure to foreign languages that Americans don’t need. And it’s just the kind of stuff that Barack Obama – “I know better than you, merci beaucoup” – is going to give us if he’s elected President.

The real danger for Obama is that his arrogance and elitism could – and frankly should – become a unifying narrative, where absolutely everything he says or does becomes interpreted through the prism of “elitism.”

Charles Krauthammer recently did a rather masterful job of connecting Obama’s dismissals regarding his rampant pattern of recent flip flopping with his personal arrogance, for example:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: What impresses me is his audacity. Everybody moves to the center after securing the nomination. There’s nothing new under the sun there.

He did it in a particularly spectacular way with the flips that you talked about. There are a couple of others on NAFTA and flag pins, and he does it all within about three weeks. It’s sort of unprecedented.

But he goes way beyond that. On each of these he pretends that he has never changed. He says, yes, I said the gun bill was constitutional and I supported it. And now he supports the Supreme Court decision that rules it unconstitutional, and pretends it is the same decision.

But then he goes beyond that, reaching an almost acrobatic level of cynicism here, in which he says, as you indicated, Fred, anybody who believes otherwise, anybody who believes he is not actually a flipper and he hasn’t actually changed, is himself cynical, or, as he puts it, “steeped in the old politics,” and so cynical that they can’t even believe that a politician like him would act on principle.

What non-political no-self-interested reason explains his change on campaign finance other than the fact that he has a lot of money and he would lose it otherwise if he had stuck to his principles?

What non-self-interested reason explains his flip on guns, on FISA, on the flag pins, on everything? But he thinks he–what impresses me is his intellectual arrogance. He thinks everyone is either a fool who would believe all this, or a knave who is somehow distorting his words.

So Barack Obama is pretty much “talking down” to the American people as a matter of routine.

Sadly, too many Americans might just prove to be too dumb to recognize it, which is why Krauthammer ends his above analysis by saying, “I think he will get away with it.”

The only thing worse than being “talked down to” is being dumb enough to allow the tactic to succeed.

Tell you what: come November, I hope the American people overwhelmingly vote to say “good bye” to Barack Obama. They can use as many languages to say it as they want: Adios. Au Revoir. Auf wiedersehen. Ciao. Sayonara. Ma’a salaamah. Namasté. Zai jian. And please don’t let the door hit your rear end on the way out.

Tags: arrogant, Barack Obama, bitter, elitist, embarassing, English, Europeans, flip flops, French, German, guns, Jesse Jackson, merci beaucoup, multilingualism, official language, religion, talking down