SamuraiFrog poses a real head-scratcher:

Why is it that in a presidential race against a former First Lady and an admiral’s son who married into a beer fortune, it’s the black guy with almost no political presence who has to prove he’s not an elitist?

This started me thinking: What does “elite” really mean, anyway, and how does one become “elitist?” Is it a factor of education or wealth? If it’s a question of intelligence or accomplishment, what’s gone so wrong in our society that a term that once meant simply “the best” has acquired such a negative connotation? What’s wrong with being the best at whatever it is you do?

Why is it that our current president, a New England blue-blood by birth who only plays at being a working man on his ranch in Texas, is seen as a “good old boy” and therefore not elitist, but our previous president — who started life as poor Arkansas trailer trash — was often accused of elitism? Is it perhaps more a reflection of the person calling someone elitist than the person being accused of it? Bill Clinton has a tendency to come off as the smartest guy in the room — worse, as someone who knows he’s the smartest guy in the room — and perhaps he makes some people feel insecure because of that, or his detractors mistake his intellectual confidence for an air of superiority, so they call him an elitist. Here’s the funny thing: smart people don’t bother me, personally; the ones who I see as having an air of superiority are the wealthy, especially the children of the wealthy. For me, money and privilege are far greater indicators of “elitism” than brains. But that’s probably just my own personal insecurity and prejudice; other people’s issues may vary.

I think what’s really going on is that “elitist” has taken the place of many other words that political correctness and a societal trend to not want to debate race and class no longer allow us to say. Where once you could call someone a nasty name or, in the case of a woman or a black candidate who rub one’s prejudices the wrong way, uppity, our modern social mores now dictate you have to express yourself some other way than with the, ahem, traditional epithets. You have to call them something else, find a word that’s less loaded than the one you’d probably really like to use. At the core of it, you don’t like the thought of women or black people or smart people or rich people being superior to your own pathetic self (whatever your definition of superiority may be), so you call them “elitist.” Really, all the word means these days is “other.” By calling someone an elitist, you’re saying, “this person isn’t like me, he (or she) isn’t one of my kind, so therefore, I dislike this person.”

But that’s just my Saturday morning theory…