Obama Class Warfare Validated

Solid gold rocking chair $600,000.

$15,000 Swarovski crystal-encrusted high chair among $1.5 mil cost to outfit Beyonce and Jay-Z's Blue Ivy baby digs.

Blue collar: Pew Research 2011 Rich Man Poor Man survey.

White Americans have shifted from hating immigrants to hating rich people in the two years since Pew's 2009 rich v poor tally.  2011's survey confirming Obama's class warfare election spin was taken in December after the Obama-orchestrated Occupy Wall Street tents folded.

Through the looking glass. 2009 WH Halloween party.  Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

The real issue:  are Americans giving up on the American dream?

NYT: “Americans have always acknowledged that there are Rockefellers and the lunch-bucket guy,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center, based at the University of Chicago. “But they believe it is not a permanent caste, but a transitory condition. The real game-changer would be if they give up on that.” . . . 

The survey’s main question — “In America, how much conflict is there between poor people and rich people?” — was based on language used by Mr. Smith’s center at the University of Chicago.  . . . Mr. Smith said the question was often understood to mean, “Do the rich and the poor get along?” and “Do they have the same objectives?”

The issue has also become a prominent part of the political debate. President Obama has pressed the case that income inequality is rising as election season has gotten underway. It has even crept into the Republican presidential primary race. At a debate in New Hampshire last Saturday, Rick Santorum criticized Mitt Romney for using the phrase “middle class,” dismissing the words as Democratic weapons to divide society. And conservatives have been wringing their hands over Newt Gingrich’s recent attacks on Mr. Romney’s past in private equity, saying they are a misguided assault on free-market capitalism.

Independents, whose votes will be fought over by both parties, showed the single largest increase in perceptions of conflicts between rich and poor, up 23 percentage points, to 68 percent, compared with an 18-point rise among Democrats and a 17-point rise for Republicans. Sixty-eight percent of independents believe there are strong class conflicts, just below the 73 percent of Democrats who do. (The survey’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the total sample.) 

Related:  Obama campaign hauls in $68 mil third quarter 2011. Wash Post