Soren Dayton, looking at Obama’s statement…

My upbringing was much more reflective of what working class black and whites go through than John McCain’s background being raised as the son of an admiral in boarding schools or Hillary Clinton out in the suburbs of Park Ridge.

… declares that the candidate has ’The Audacity of Prep.”

Again, the candidate, like his wife, is insisting that he cannot be an elitist because he had a humble upbringing. Elitism isn’t a lifestyle, it’s an attitude.

Also note, in today’s Times,

“One of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” he said, referring to his wife. “The fact is Michelle and I, our lives — if you look back over the last two decades — more closely approximate the lives of the average voter than any other candidate. We struggled with paying student loans, we tried to figure out how to make sure that we got adequate day care, I filled up my own gas tanks.”

Well, yes. But living a lifestyle closer to the average voter’s, in competition with a former First Lady and a guy who married a beer heiress, isn’t exactly the highest bar to clear.

Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His first job out of college was a research associate at Business International Corporation. Obama did work as a community organizer for an extremely modest salary, but after law school he rather quickly picked up two jobs, one a lawyer at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland (where he did his limited work for Rezko), and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. His salaries for those jobs are unknown, but they seem at least enough to guarantee a middle-class lifestyle in one of America’s largest cities. He had his book deal for Dreams From My Father in 1991, and the advance, while described as “modest,” “allowed him to set aside six months after he graduated to write.” By 2000, the couple’s adjusted gross income was more than $240,000.

Again, the candidate is called “elitist” by some not because of his early lifestyle or even his recent standard of living, but by his attitudes — i.e., I know what motivates small-town voters even more than they know themselves. Very few people I encounter, including my readers, really are bothered by him vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands with his kids.

It’s also the complaining – Michelle Obama time and again telling audiences how hard she and Obama have had it — that spurs the elitism charge…