And Speaking Of Thomas Frank - He's BAAACK

Aside from John McCain, the biggest winner in the latest Democratic debate was Thomas Frank, who suddenly matters again. For the time being, he's been given the space to sneer weekly at Kansans and the rest of us on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

He doesn't particularly care for that caricature, but he certainly lives down to it.