So here's the Barack Obama quote, from remarks to a group of wealthy liberal San Francisco supporters, that has sparked a media and blogosphere kerfuffle...
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Let's see. Past government failure - to provide new jobs apparently - has made small town Pennsylvania people embrace their prejudices and fears and hatreds, and "cling" to their guns? Their faith serves them as a way to "explain their frustrations" and deal with the bitterness caused by the under-performance of the federal government in their lives?
I'm not sure whether it's the condescension, the bizarre detachment from American culture, or the economic theory implicit in the statement that is the most striking. The bemoaning of the bitter Pennsylvanians' "anti-trade sentiment" is especially galling, given the candidate's protectionist campaign through the Midwest, dishonest though it was.
Obama really does have no clue about Americans and their guns, does he? Like that they've been clinging to them since 1776...and before. And I guess that clinging to religion habit is also something not just born of bitterness, but presumably curable by enlightened government action. Can he really think this way?
There's a piece at the HuffPo by Mayhill Fowler, who is learning things about Pennsylvanians while covering the campaign there. She allows that "his frank words about Pennsylvania may not have translated very clearly."
That's the problem. Obama has a different message for Californians than he does for Pennsylvanians. It needs to be translated depending on the audience. The "anti-trade sentiment" thing is mind-boggling. If anything it reveals for a broader audience that Obama's anti-NAFTA stance in Ohio and the industrial Midwest has been cynical and contrived.
I imagine Obama to be genuinely concerned about the plight of some people in Midwestern towns hurt by some de-industrialization two or three decades ago. What concerns me is that he thinks it should be the province of the federal government to see to it that those people have a job in a factory in their town again...doubtless manufacturing something Green. Either that, or he doesn't believe it, but he's willing to tell some rural rubes in flyover country that he does, because that's what he thinks they want to hear. Neither inspires hope.
The message is that he'll deliver on that promised regeneration (I must have forgotten this) that the last two Presidents couldn't accomplish. The fact is lots of those Midwestern towns have regenerated... and they're the ones who successfully attracted new manufacturing and service industries with tax incentives, good local leadership and private sector investment, to go along with their skilled and unskilled labor pools. But enough about what works. We're talking politics here.
So here's a sample of what the pundits are saying...
Allahpundit at Hot Air
What’s most offensive? The condescension displayed here by the intelligentsia’s candidate of choice? The sheer breadth of the stereotype, which would send Team Obama screaming from the rooftops if a white politician drew a similarly sweeping caricature of blacks? The crude quasi-Marxist reductionism of his analysis, which he first introduced in his speech on race vis-a-vis the root causes of whites’ “resentment†— namely, exploitation by the bourgeoisie in the form of corporations and D.C. lobbyists? Or is it the shocking inclusion of religion, of all things, in the litany of sins he recites? What on earth is that doing there, given His Holiness’s repeated invocations of the virtues of faith on the trail? Note the choice of verb, too. Why not just go the whole nine yards and call it the opiate of the masses?
...lots more at Hot Air, including comment by Senators Clinton and McCain and the customary quality linkage.
Ace goes off....unexcerptably.
Lots of comment at contentions, including...
...if that is these people’s reason for adopting an uninformed view on trade what is his explanation for embracing protectionism?
Obama’s astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal — the paternalistic attitude that says, “Oh, well, people only do thing differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward†— that it has survived and thrived despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims.
And in The Corner, Lisa Schiffren:
It is striking that Obama makes clear that he believes that clinging to religion is no different than clinging to guns, (— we know his class of elitist Democrats has no respect for either the Second Amendment or deer-hunting —) racism, xenophobia, and anti-trade sentiment — as if they are all equivalent signs of lack of education and gullibility.I now feel fully vindicated in my suspicion that Obama's attendance at Wright's church was entirely political and expedient. No one who has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — or even moderate respect for other people's religious views — thinks in these terms about why working class people might believe in God. Or believes that a more enlightened government will supplant that.
I had a ton of fun covering Kerry's awkwardness with Americans but, in fairness, it was essentially a consumerist snobbery: he preferred the Newburgh Yacht Club for lunch over the local Wendy's, he'd rather be windsurfing off Nantucket than rednecking at Nascar, etc. Obama's snobbery seems more culturally profound, and unlike Kerry he can't plead the crippling disadvantage of a priviliged childhood. Rather, Barack's condescension reveals a man out of touch with the rhythms of American life to a degree that's hard to fathom. As Michelle says, they "chose" to "leave corporate America", and Barack became a "community organizer" and she wound up a 350-grand-a-year "diversity outreach coordinator". I've no idea what either of those careers involve, and most of us seem able to get along without them. But their remoteness from the American mainstream perhaps explains why the Obamas seem to have no clue how Americans live their lives.And yes, I'm a foreigner. But it takes one to know one, and this guy seems weirdly disconnected from everything except neo-segregationist Afrocentric grievance politics and upscale white liberal condescension. Not much of a coalition.
and Victor Davis Hanson:
“antipathy to people who aren't like themâ€â€”as in the case of Rev. Wright’s views of Jews, whites, Italians, or Americans in general? In short, Obama accuses rural Pennsylvanians of a racism that they haven’t expressed while contextualizing the racism that his own Rev. Wright has.“Anti-immigrant sentimentâ€? As in wishing that drivers’ licenses are not issued to those here illegally, or that we insist that those who immigrate to the U.S. do so legally?
The worst hypocrisy, of course, is Obama’s charge that these small towns in Pennsylvania express “anti-trade sentiment.†It was not George Bush or John McCain, but Barack Obama himself who tried to salvage Ohio by demagoguing NAFTA and opposing a free-trade agreement with Columbia. His entire campaign is predicated on showing more anti-trade sentiment that the Clintons.
Obama has come out with an unapologetic apology, tagged by Michael Goldfarb: "Obama's Sorry You're Too Stupid to Understand What He Meant" :
Here's another response from the Obama camp.
A photoessay from the Obama event in San Francisco on April 6.
Donald Sensing was getting the same message I was, and he expands on it:
Reading the full context of Obama's remarks, it strikes me that he believes that all of these (presumed) symptoms spring from the fact that there is too little control of the economy by the federal government. Obama said that all of these dysfunctions began when the government let their jobs go away and then, through both Republican and Democrat administrations, did nothing to "regenerate" them.It is the lack of regulation of the economy, Obama believes, that makes people bitter, racist, religious, hunters, patriotic or protectionist. All these things are bad, and they all result from free-market, democratic capitalism. I know that many of you reading this will think I'm over-reaching here, but I stand my ground: Obama's remarks are in fact as clear a declaration of cleaving to socialism as almost anything he could have said.
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what I find especially disturbing in Obama's remarks, that I have not seen in Mrs. Clinton's ever, is the ideal of the "perfectibility of man." This is the hoariest socialist doctrine of all, explicit in Marxism and later, Marxism-Leninism. This is an idea so utterly vacuous and foolish that not even the Euro socialist governments cleave to it, if they ever did, except in Eastern Europe, and then only when they were communist. Clearly implicit on Obama's remarks is the idea that since racism, religion et. al., arise from the lack of government regulation, they can be expunged by more of it.
You see, we can all become virtuous if only the government controlled our lives.
Not only are Obama's remarks a clarion call to socialism, they also objectify the people he refers to. He dismissed them as free, moral agents in their own right. Gosh, it's no wonder those white people hate blacks and Hispanics, go to church and buy guns and feel angry - they can't help it. The government has let them down. But with proper government regulation, intervention, activism (oh, just pick your own name), then they won't be racists, religious, xenophobic, or own guns.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has more, including this quote from Newt Gingrich:
If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be weird ideas.They can’t really believe in the right to bear arms.
They can’t really believe in traditional marriage.
They can’t really believe in their faith in God.
They can’t really want to enforce the law on immigration.
Therefore, they must be “bitter†and “frustrated.â€
This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife’s view that “America is a mean countryâ€. Not since Governor Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.
Ed comments...
This distills the Obama viewpoint about middle America to its essence. He assumes that gun ownership, religious faith, and a desire to enforce border security grows out of a mental defect or simple petulance. He cannot understand any of it as deeply held values or beliefs because they are all so foreign to him. His cure is a huge, whopping dose of government intervention to replace all of it. That’s the hubris, the condescension, and the elitism rolled up into a precise point.
All you can eat, at Memeorandum
UPDATE 4/14: Bill Kristol in The New York Times
Posted by dan at April 12, 2008 8:50 PM