Both groups accuse the other of elitism, and both are too often correct, at least as far as the movers & shakers on each side go.

Witness Ted Kennedy's tireless efforts to defeat the Cape Cod wind farm.

How is Ted Kennedy's efforts to stop a wind farm from being built in eye-shot of their long-time compound elitist?

I am not advocating for the Kennedy's case for opposing, one specific, wind-farm;

I am asking how that opposition makes them elitists? Is everyone, in every neighborhood across America, who has opposed some new construction project in their neighborhoods also elitists???

How does that compare with Cindy McCain's perception that the only acceptable method for commuting in Arizona, or anywhere in America, should require an airplane???

Nice try.

Let's see...

We'll support "alternative energy sources" for decades in the government. We'll have the taxpayers fund them to the extent we can push such legislation through.

Just don't try to place any such alternatives in our lovely neighborhood where we'll have to look them, as our neighborhood is far too good to f' up like that.
And gee..., since we happen to be one of those rich and powerful Massachusetts families, AND we have a seat in the Senate and long-standing clout in gov't, we can make sure nothing like that IS located where we'll have to look at it.
You piss-ants in middle class or low income neighborhoods are going to get stuck with 'em no matter how many letters you write to editors & congressmen, because "it's for the greater good".

I think that about covers it.

As to Cindy McCain's statement, were we given the slightest bit of context? Or is a single sentence with no idea how it was used, what other statements preceeded or followed it, and in what conversation enough to judge whether it's "elitist" or not?
Could she have been talking about covering all the corners of Arizona in a short campaign season? Arizona, with hundreds of miles between towns.
Well, maybe she was, maybe she wasn't, but for some reason we weren't given the necessary background to decide.
(Rush Limbaugh would be proud of that maneuver)

In the case of Ted, we do have it.

The Pot & The Kettle:

And, all the poor that have been reduced to being under bridges have been taken out of sight -- to jail and prison.

Capitalism's Beginning

In the 16th Century Capitalism began in England account a demand for WOOL. The demand for WOOL resulted in a demand for sheep. The demand for sheep resulted in a demand for land. The demand for land resulted in the English Parliament's elite and nobles enacting laws that allowed the nobles to redistribute the land of the peasants, the Common Population, from ownership and use by the Common Population to ownership and use by the elite and nobles on which to raise sheep. The expropriation of the peasants' land created a common peasant population of homeless beggars, paupers and vagrants that the elite and nobles employed as cheap labor in an emergent CAPITALIST ECONOMY. The land of the peasants taken by the elite and nobles allowed the elite and nobles to breed and grow sheep in commercial quantities for their WOOL. The WOOL of the sheep allowed the elite and nobles to employ the peasant population to take care of the sheep and work in newly established TEXTILE MILLS to process the WOOL into fabric. Employment of the peasants allowed the peasants marginal income to buy necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and housing. The purchases made by the peasants for their basic needs originated an Agricultural Economy. The Agricultural Economy originated both supply and demand that in turn originated a Manufacturing Economy. And, last but not least, the TEXTILE INDUSTRY responded to FOREIGN DEMAND with a supply of WOOL TEXTILE PRODUCTS that started FOREIGN TRADE. All of this resulted from land expropriated and redistributed from the English peasant population to the elite and nobles for growing sheep and harvesting WOOL. Thus Capitalism was born into the world in 16th Century elitist England and thus, Capitalism has been maintain by the elite from the 16th Century to the present.

Looks like I'm not the only person who sees the Kennedy position as elitist hypocrisy.

Over at CommonDreams.org, we find these thoughts:
by Charles Komanoff

NEW YORK -- Lord, make me chaste," St. Augustine prayed, "but not just yet." Modern environmentalists and eco-celebrities such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have a similar prayer: Lord, give us wind power -- but just not here. Yes, they say, windmills are nonpolluting and renewable and everything that's good -- but put 'em somewhere else.
...
If anyone should understand the need to maximize the energy output from wind turbines, it is environmentalists -- particularly those who live or summer on Cape Cod. In the coming decades, Cape beaches will be inundated and Cape dunes and structures battered by rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms, wrought by global warming. And, sure as daylight, continued reliance on oil will not only contaminate the environment but also fuel the cycle of war and terrorism.

Yet somehow environmental groups and high-profile individuals such as Kennedy can't connect the dots. They decry the April breakup of a barge carrying bunker oil to a Cape electricity-generating plant that has shut a prized shellfishing area and many beaches. But they can't see that stopping Cape Wind will subject Buzzards Bay to such oil shipments for decades. Nor does it seem to matter to them that other precious -- albeit less prosperous -- places, from West Virginia mountaintops to Wyoming sandhills, are sacrificed daily to yield the very fuels that the wind farm would displace.

If obstructionists such as Kennedy and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound have their way, wind power may never amount to more than a "niche" energy source. What is at present our most promising large-scale energy alternative -- and certainly the most alluring -- could be strangled in its cradle as the NIMBY precedent takes hold nationwide.

History's great movements have all been universal, not selective. Abolitionists fought to free all slaves, not some. Labor sought to organize all workers, not just the most skilled. Environmentalists from John Muir to Rachel Carson campaigned to save nature everywhere -- not just in a few "unique" areas.

It remains to be seen whether latter-day environmentalism will rouse itself to protect the whole earth -- or degenerate into a protection scheme for the pretty views of well-to-do landowners.
/www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-01.htm

MarthaA, Scots of that day and their descendants (such as me) refer to that dark period as "The Clearances".

Parts of Scotland were, at one time, some of the most densely populated places in Europe, and due to the clearances the population dwindled to what must be called sparse, at best, and they remain that way today.

Millions booked passage to the Americas, Australia & New Zealand, where property rights would permit them to own the land they lived on and prevent what they had experienced in their ancestral home.

One caveat:
Soon after the clearances, with everyone jumping into the lucritive wool market in Europe, the bottom dropped out (predictably) and many of the desperate Scottish lords found themselves travelling to the US, Canada, etc, hat-in-hand, trying to get the "clansmen" they had evicted a few years previously to return home and work the land again.
They got a well-deserved "middle digit" by way of response.

Not to come to the defense of Sen Kennedy, but I wonder just how many of those pushing for more nuclear power plants would volunteer to have one built in their neighborhood.

Of course there is an “elite”; there is always an elite running all societies and thank goodness for them. Ask yourself, do we really want the “average Joe or Jane”, the ones who make sure the trash entertainment that fills the popular culture is always present, the fascination with whatever the pop-slut dujour is up to, the slack-jawed mouth breathers that find NASCAR a religious experience, the residents of faculty lounges nationwide who are convinced the world works much like their tenured featherbed, running the show? Do we really want the People magazine readin’, reality show watchin’, Las Vegas goin’ hoi polloi making policy? Of course not. I come from those folks, love those folks, but certainly don’t want them determining the course of events

Not sustainable as a species, A very wise man once examined that question.

Here is his commentary:
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
--Thomas Jefferson--
to William C. Jarvis, 1820

In 1821 he also noted:
“Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust.”