The charge of elitism, wielded so devastatingly by conservative politicians for 40 years, is not so much about income. It's about intelligence.

It is about intellectual snobbery, more than economic class.

Liberal Democrats tend not to get this point. If they did, they wouldn't get bushwhacked so regularly at election time.

Hillary Clinton's wanton use of the elitist riff against Obama is breathtaking on several counts. One is the spectacle of Ms. Democrat doing the Republicans' dirty work for them.

It's like race car driver Tony Stewart having his crew tune up Kyle Busch's car right before the Daytona 500. Another is the sight of this daughter of Wellesley and Yale Law masquerading as a shot-and-beer gal.

Many observers find another facet of the shtick even more startling: that someone with a net worth of more than $100 million could tar as elitist someone who famously just got done paying off his college loans, whose father-in-law was a Chicago water department worker.

Or that John McCain, with his millionaire spouse and admiral daddy, would try to do the same.

This is where some liberals, as their foes on the other side of the ideological divide love to say, just don't get it. Even after eight years of George W. Bush wearin' denim, clearin' brush and mangling syntax.

The charge of elitism isn't about people flaunting income; it's about people flaunting IQ.

Americans, as a rule, don't resent people who have more money than them - particularly if the wealth is seen as earned. Envy, maybe, but not resent. You don't resent people whom you hope to emulate. And most Americans dream easily about having much more dough than they do.

What Americans more readily resent is someone who is smarter than them, who knows it, who shows it, and who seems to think being smart makes you better than everyone else.

A gap in income, you can always dream of closing. A gap in IQ, not so much. It's more personal, thus easier to resent.

To call someone an elitist is to charge him or her with being a snob, intellectual, moral and stylistic. The indictment is: "You are so convinced of your own intellectualized wonderfulness that you disdain the commonsense moral values of ordinary Americans who don't get to hobnob with the French ambassador at wine tastings in Georgetown. You're happy to let us send our kids to defend your liberty, but you still look down on us because we watch Survivor, shop at Kohl's, eat at Bennigan's, and, most of all, go to Calvary Baptist on Sundays."

God is close to the heart of the matter. Elitists, in this typology, scoff at religion as a refuge for superstitious lunkheads. They're proud that they rely on Reason, not "an infantile fantasy."

You have to admit: There are plenty of secular liberals who live down to this stereotype.

Obama, bursting on the scene, didn't seem to be one of them. He talked about worshiping an "awesome God." Even though he clearly is smart as all get-out, he doesn't lord that over people.

Then came his bitter/cling comments about religion and guns. You could hardly script a speech that played more perfectly into the old elitist rap. Who clings? Bawling children, mousy wives, cowardly men. The word drips disdain.

The sound you heard was a thousand Republican strategists clapping their hands in gleeful unison: The old material is still good!

After stumbling around for a while, dazed, Obama began to gain his footing against the elitism riff in his North Carolina primary night speech.

But he's in a bind. He is smart. Very. (Being black and running for president, you have to be awfully smart and you can't afford folksy diction.)

What's more, he's running a campaign fueled by a principled disgust for the phoniness of American politics. So he can't simply pander to one of its silliest, most cynical pretenses (perfected by the current occupant of the Oval Office): that the well-educated, powerful, privileged people who run our country are really "just folks."

Americans are funny. They want a president who'll protect them in a perilous world that's changing at warp speed. Yet they want the person who takes on this impossible job to pretend he's no smarter than Joe down at the Texaco.

Obama can't bowl his way out of this one. He's just got to hope that Americans, in the end, are smart enough to remember how much it has cost them recently to rely on a man who is much better at folksy pretense than at governing.