Peggy Noonan today on the President—
"He told staffers that John Boehner,
one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner,
was a 'country club Republican.' "
Related material from The Atlantic
on the late author John O'Hara (1905-1970)—
As the son of a prominent surgeon, O'Hara held a social position far above that of almost all other Irish Catholics. But in a world in which "'foreigner' meant anyone who wasn't Anglo-Saxon," as one longtime Pottsville resident told us when we recently visited the town, O'Hara could never quite attain the status of his friends, members of the WASP "anthracite aristocracy." This predestined immobility gave O'Hara an acute sensitivity to minute yet telling social distinctions. He was fascinated by the pattern of a necktie, the make of a car, the brand of Scotch, the choice of collar pin, the misuse of a pronoun, the club joined, the college attended, and how these define— in fact, determine— character. "To read him on a fashionable bar or the Gibbsville country club," Edmund Wilson wrote of O'Hara's fictionalized Pottsville, "is to be shown on the screen of a fluoroscope gradations of social prestige of which one had not before been aware."
— "John O'Hara's Protectorate," by Benjamin and Christina Schwarz, The Atlantic , March 2000