Slate: Let Them Count Houses — Can’t we escape this tiresome demagoguery about candidates’ income and property? By Christopher Hitchens
Every four years, we suddenly discover that the only people worth noticing or mentioning in the United States are those who are ill, or unemployed, or uninsured, or underpaid, or homeless, or some combination of the above. Bill and Hillary Clinton went on about these unprotected and wretched millions on two successive nights last week, apparently never reflecting that some of them at least must have been alive and suffering under the two Clinton administrations. How can a thinking person sit still and listen to such piffle, let alone get up and wave their arms about when they hear it again and again?
I mention this mainly because Barack Obama has repeatedly advertised himself as a new type of candidate and as a stranger to the usual idiocy of the partisan cheap shot. Yet he and his chosen running mate have now made a series of demagogic references to the income and property, not just of their rival for the White House, but to that of his wife. Nice going.
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