Did you hear what Obama said yesterday? “Instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up — from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street.” I must say that’s a craftily good piece of rhetoric.

And did you catch this? “It’s not that I think John McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of most Americans. I just think he doesn’t know. He doesn’t get what’s happening between the mountains in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of power where he works.” That is less good, I think — the same old socialist baloney that’s been sittin’ in the fridge for years.

Of course, a lot of people like to eat it.

I thought of Mario Cuomo, in his much-ballyhooed keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. (In San Francisco, maybe the most Democratic of cities.) He lectured Ronald Reagan about what it is to be poor or wanting: “A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city.” A few sentences later: “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.”

Yeah, yeah. Remember that Reagan was the son of an itinerant alcoholic shoe salesman. That his mother took in laundry — and that she sent him to the butcher’s, to get scraps for the cat. Only there was no cat. Additionally, Reagan was 18 — on the cusp of adult life — when the Depression hit.

And that was an economic problem.

I was brought up with Cuomo-style demagoguery, Obama-style demagoguery. It was my mother’s milk. But, finding out about the world for myself, I learned to spit it out. That’s what most mature people do, I think. And here we are, about to elect — or perhaps about to elect — a man who, in so many ways, seems a college leftist who just hasn’t grown up. The stuff he says is basically the same stuff you heard in the dorm rooms — only more grammatical and less drugged.