Because let's face it, that's what the "elite" label is really all about. Those of us who've felt incredibly insulted by Clinton and Fox News' comments about Obama the Elitist, Harvard-educated and pointed-headed know what Obama knows: education isn't cheap (for most of us) and it doesn't come easy.
People like my husband and I, both from solidly middle-class families, are tagged with the "elite" label because we worked hard enough and took out enough student loans to go to college, then graduate school. Meanwhile, Hillary is running around bragging about her support from whites without college degrees.
So thank god someone (Stanley Crouch) has taken the time to point out in print that all these attacks on education are attacks on what's best about America.
Crouch points out how deeply undemocratic Hillary and many conservatives' definition of elite is:
They are anti-democratic because they scoff at this basic truth: Education is the key to social mobility in our country. The stereotyped working class has no innate limits. It has produced the majority of doctors, engineers, architects, educators and others who realized the dreams of their families by studying hard and moving into careers quite different from those of their parents and their neighbors.
He also makes the excellent point that suspicion of education is a common tool used by those trying to enslave or subjugate others:
Education has always been viewed as suspect by everyone from slave owners to totalitarians. Wherever in the world you find them, they share one hostility: They hate books.
After all, if our country's best and brightest had disdained education as elite, where we would be today? Crouch shares his view on that, too:
And we should be ever suspicious of anyone or any group that scorns education, that pretends to believe that only the simple and the uncomplicated can express the national ethos.
That is absolutely ridiculous in a country from which so much technological and scientific innovation has come. Tell that to Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers or Bill Gates, none of whom were from the upper class. Or are we to believe they were just simple men looking for a loud bar and a cold beer?
Conservatives have always used this same tactic to try to unlink class and economics, and link class with education and other deeply democratic and positive principles. It's the only way they can stop the masses rising up to topple crooked CEOs, and send them slinging eggs at the eggheads instead.
But for a Democrat to join in on the book-hating? Especially one who herself owes her own pioneering career to the benefits of education? It would make me weep if I knew she wouldn't be out of the limelight soon enough.