Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?

The Weekly Standard's Sam Schulman wrote and article "Class Will Tell."

This is an interesting and depressing look at the self-identified intelligentsia. It explains why people like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan (who I have had greatly admired) have distanced themselves from Sarah Palin.

But while it addresses what we are reading in the papers and on blogs, I do not believe that there are enough people like them – just as there are no enough “country club Republicans” – to affect an election. In reality, there are many more “Joe the Plumbers” out there who disdain these people when they turn against he middle classes and argue for the classism of the Blue Bloods.

I have lived in Chicago and have visited there and Ayers may have been given an award by the movers and shakers, but Chicago’s people have nothing but contempt for the terrorist son of a wealthy family. There has always been a degree of envy and conflict between social classes in every society. In ours, as people like Obama and Ayers are honored by the upper classes, that conflict is beginning to boil.

The Republicans, alas, are stuck with this election's true and unrepentant revolutionaries. McCain and Palin have each refused, by sheer cussedness, to fulfill the social expectations of others. This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety. But do not despise the undecideds. Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome. Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will. The symptoms? Curiously amplified, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket.

There is no cure, but there is an etiology. All share a dreadful secret--their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers. There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it. (The struggle to do so is etched in the lines of Tina Brown's face.) But what the classes think is a matter to which the GOP standard-bearers are sadly but nobly indifferent.

It looks like McCain/Palin will lose the upper-East-Side vote and Alexandria, Virginia. Denizens there will be thunderstruck when they win the election.