Obama Has a Vision

Who'da thunk that a Huffington Post contributor would send a torpedo into the Obama campaign? Mayhill Fowler transcribes Obama's words to an elite California audience:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I thought: I've seen this before. From Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed, pp. 119-120:
For those with the vision of the anointed, it is not sufficient to discredit or denigrate proponents of the tragic vision. The general public must also be discredited, as well as the social processes through which the public's desires are expressed, individually or collectively, such as a market economy or social traditions. In short, all alternative to the vision of the anointed must be put out of court, by one means or another. Nowhere is evidence considered so unnecessary as in making sweeping denigrations of the public. Mass psychoanalysis of "society" is a common pattern …
Sowell follows with a large number of examples from such luminaries as Karl Menninger, Tom Wicker, Anna Quindlen, Jimmy Carter, and many more. Today, he has one more.