I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — at this point, I figure I’ve already decided who I prefer and I’ve frankly lost interest in following the campaign any further until a candidate is officially chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August — which means that I only learned of “Bittergate” this morning when I saw that the blogosphere had been chattering about it all weekend. Basically, I guess Obama made a remark about small-town folks relying on guns, God, and anti-immigrant feelings to deal with their frustrated ambitions, and Hillary and McCain are feigning offense on behalf of those people he was talking about, branding Obama an “elitist.” (In case you also missed this one, details are here.)

Now, I’ve read Obama’s remarks and I personally don’t think he said anything all that offensive (although I grant I may feel differently if I were one of those small-town people). While you never know what’s going to piss people off, this whole thing strikes me as a tempest in a teapot that’ll likely be forgotten by next week. However, the accusation of elitism has been reliably effective in bringing down politicians who display too much schooling in their speechifying, so, again, you never know what’ll happen here. It’s a phenomenon I’ve never fully understood, myself. I find our cultural distrust of intellect both mystifying and deplorable.

So does writer Peter David; he made some particularly cogent remarks on the subject today:

We have a situation wherein this country’s anti-intellectualism has become so pervasive, so suffocating, that we have multi-millionaire Ivy league graduates trying to pretend they’re just plain folks when clearly they’re not. And people know they’re not. This country was founded by men who knew they were the best and brightest, and the citizenry took pride and comfort in that. But television has put politicians into peoples’ homes, and now we just want someone we’re comfortable with. We don’t want men and women who come across like professors; we want the guy who sat in the back of the class and goofs off, as if life was a sitcom. To put it in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” terms, we should want to elect Mr. Hand; instead we opt for Jeff Spicoli.

Couldn’t have said it better myself…