Let's take a trip back to July 2007. The many presidential candidates of both parties are dividing their time between the early primary states, and the economy's bottom was still many months from falling out. Then-underdog Barack Obama asked farmers at a campaign stop in Iowa: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff.” The reaction from pundits and Republicans was swift and uniform -- Obama was betraying his elitism by talking about this exotic “arugula” substance in front of middle-American farmers who don't have the time or money to waste on big-city salad greens.

Of course, Iowa farmers grow lots and lots of arugula, and it's sold in supermarkets all across the state. But no matter -- Obama said “arugula” and “Whole Foods” in the same sentence which meant he didn't understand middle-America.

The Obama-as-an-elitist trope became one of the big media talking points for the rest of the campaign, as pundits and Republicans criticized Obama for -- and it's still remarkable to recall this -- drinking orange juice and vacationing in “foreign, exotic” Hawaii. In the end, all the hand-wringing over Obama's alleged inability to connect with “regular” voters was for naught, as voters making less than $50,000 preferred Obama to McCain 60-38 percent, and 57 percent of voters thought Obama was “in touch with people like you.”

I bring all this up because Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers has an op-ed in the New York Post this morning slamming Michelle Obama for taking a “well-publicized, expensive vacation in southern Spain” because it “was a PR gift to her husband's opposition.”

Powers, to her credit, points out that Obama is frequently targeted with absurd accusations of elitism from the right, bringing up Sean Hannity's laughable attack on Obama's preference for Dijon mustard to note that “no issue is too trivial to support the 'Obama doesn't care about you' meme.” But she presents these examples of right-wing hackery to reinforce her argument that it was a bad idea for Michelle Obama to go to Spain “in the middle of a major recession, with many Americans suffering terribly” -- essentially, it's Obama's fault for not being responsive enough to the lunatic sensibilities of Fox News hosts.

But as the media's campaign '08 obsession with arugula, orange juice, and Hawaii show, the timing and the economic conditions are irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the Obamas do or when they do it -- they're Democrats, and they're in power, so the right-wing and the punditry are going to turn anything they can into an example of elitism. As Powers writes: “But if the right will try to use mustard as a political weapon, it's foolish to hand them a lavish foreign vacation, too.”

That's not an argument against taking a “lavish foreign vacation,” that's an argument against doing anything.