>>> The feminization of Kerry in the '04 campaign was a class insult, even
>>> though Bush was less of an athlete and just as upper crust.
>>
>> But that's just the point -- it's not a class insult because it doesn't
>> implicate both of them as members of the same class the way an ethnic
>> slur insults everyone who is part of the group.
>
> No. The Bush people were trying to portray Kerry as upper class, as
> opposed to their common man candidate. It's the standard Republican
> playbook - liberal elites who eat fancy food and like the French. Upper
> class = effete and feminized. It's an old American trope that goes way
> back.
Yes. But it's based on education not on riches.
For ex-sociologists like me, there's a key difference between basing the upper-lower distinction on riches or on education level. Riches is class and education level is something else (often status). Perhaps that is a deformation professionelle. If you want to call them both different names, that's fine. You can follow Bourdieu and call them economic and cultural capital if you want (although that introduces new problems.) But it does seem important to me to make the distinction. As Bourdieu rightly makes much of in _Distinction_, battles between the two groups make up much of the dynamics of political and cultural conflict -- especially between the two different upper groups.
And in this case, once you see it's based on education level (or on the habitus that goes with it), the mystery of how they could pin it on Kerry and not on Bush disappers. Based on riches, they're the same. Based on education, they are wildly different. And based on the gestures that connote education, they are even more wildly different. There are lots of people who've read more books than Kerry who don't have as absurdly a deliberative and boring way of speaking and aren't fluent in French.
In short, the Repugs didn't make this up out of nothing and just fool people. Their candidates really were hugely different on this point.
Of course it should be a little relevance to who'd make a better president, but that's a side point.
Michael