Michael Barone & the Cadillac Conservatives

One of the favorite attacks by Republicans is to label any of their opponents as wealthy billionaire liberal elitists. Everything, it seems, comes back to vilifying George Soros, as Tom DeLay most recently showed. And now look at Michael Barone's new column at the Heritage Foundation's website. Barone, you may know, is one of Fox News's favorite bloviating blowhards - a guy so stale from so many years insulated in Washington that all he can do is regurgitate the most recent piece of spin he heard at the last GOP cocktail party. Yet, because he works at U.S. News and World Report, he gets a free pass to turn that drivel into mainstream opinion and news.

"The trustfunder left," he writes this week, "has reached a critical mass and become a major force in one of our two great political parties" - the Democrats, he says. Who are the trustfunders? "People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard," Barone says, and then adds, "These people tend to be very liberal politically." His proof? Nothing more than the fact that some of the most stereotyped areas in America like Martha's Vineyard and San Francisco voted for John Kerry.

Barone's charicature shows he is either deliberately dishonest, or historically challenged (probably the former). Are we really supposed to believe that because San Francisco and Martha's Vineyard went Democratic, that that means the Democratic Party is run by the super-wealthy and the super-wealthy are universally liberal? No, of course not - it's the classic case where a dishonest right-wing pundit will use a charicature to try to trick the public into jumping to a conclusion that can't be jumped to.

The fact is, Barone conveniently forgets to discuss the integral role that an influential group of right-wing billionaires continues to play in today's Republican Party. Barone and his Cadillac Conservatives don't want people to know that today's far-right movement was built by the most elite segments of America. Richard Mellon Scaife, for instance, is the heir to the Mellon fortune, and has used that money to fund almost every major right-wing cause over the last 30 years. As People for the American Way note, "Scaife has given away at least $340 million dollars to promote right-wing causes." And there are a host of others family trust funds fueling the right - the Bradleys, the Kochs, the Olins, the Coors and more.

This is not to say that there aren't very wealthy people who support the Democrats. But trying to claim, as Barone does, that the Democratic Party is run exclusively by the rich, and that the rich are universally liberal is just downright false. And yet the stereotype continues with ever more fervor from the GOP. It is the same way someone will viciously attack an opponent for the very thing he/she is most embarrassed about.

What's really troubling about Barone's column is that it shows how many supposedly "legitimate" pundits/reporters are willing to ignore facts in pursuit of their ideological agenda, and yet are promoted by mainstream media organizations like U.S. News and World Report. It is emblematic of exactly why overall media coverage skews so harshly to the right.