I don’t believe that this has revealed anything about Obamas thoughts and feelings towards poor and rural folks. I believe he’s a man who made a mistake. He is the same man who gave up big corporate jobs after Harvard to go work for the poor underprivilaged folks in Chicago - on the street. You think this statement by him means all those feelings that led him to make that decision do not exist? That he is somehow a different man? Would an elitist snob forego big time money in a big time corporation to work with poor underprivilaged folks? I don’t
I’m not saying you believe this, or maybe you do I don’t know, what I am saying is Obama made a mistake - jumping ahead and saying it reveals a fundamental truth is a jump I’m not sure any of us are fit to make. Certainly not one I am willing to look into.
If he had said, “The people are bitter because they’ve lost their jobs and been promised things that never materialized” or whatever, that would be fine.
But my understanding is that he basically said that the things they believe in, such as gun ownership and religion, are not ‘natural’ things to believe in, but rather the result of bitterness. Not only that, he also claimed that they were xenophobic because of their bitterness. That’s not only a poor reading of what motivates people, but it’s a pretty thinly veiled insult.
Will this ‘sink’ Obama? I doubt it. He’s got the intellect and speaking ability to come out and do some serious damage control, just as he did with the Wright issue. But it does give more ammo to his opponent in the general election, and more ammo for Hillary to stay in the race, and neither of those things help Obama.
The gaffe is damaging because, like all the gaffes that really damage a politician, it plays into what people are worried most about his candidacy. If people are worried about your intelligence, you’d better not say something stupid. If people are worried about your temper, you’d better not raise your voice too much. People are worried that Obama is more liberal and out of touch and elitist than he claims to be, so errors which reinforce that perception do the most damage. This is one of them.
As an Obama supporter and someone who understands the dynamics of an election, I see this as a PR clusterf*ck. I do not see it as a campaign breaker or something that reflects Obama’s fundamental core value system - I feel I know my candidate a little better than that.
Do you expect every Obama suppporter to … what? Jump ship? All of a sudden change our minds because of this? What don’t you think I understand?
I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m asking because I’m open to the fact that maybe I’m missing something…
instead of having a national conversation about why rural types tend to have the obsessions that they do, we’re all focused on counting how many votes it’s going to cost Obama. Being a fundamentalist gun nut is bad and wrong, but in our culture, bad and wrong are defined as saying things that push these people’s buzz-buttons.
I don’t think people who live in rural areas are more likely than others to lose their gun rights, and I don’t think they know more about the world so as to know that the fundamentalist worldview is the more accurate one. I guess I don’t know if they are more likely to be adversely affected by illegal immigration, but they’re definitely less likely to hurt in a terrorist attack or otherwise adversely affected by Muslims. So why the obsession.
We’re more concerned with what millions of stupid people are going to do to Obama than with the fact that there are millions of stupid people who pretty much control who the leader of the most important country in the world is going to be.
And yet the issue is ow going to become what a bad person I am for putting it that way.
No, Clinton’s issues are much more related and logical. He says that bad economic conditions can lead to people blaming immigration, free trade agreements, etc. Whether or not the attitude is correct, it’s at least related to blame those things for your economic conditions.
Obama goes much further than that. He claims that gun rights advocacy, and religious… something (not sure exactly which part he meant) resulted from the same misplaced anger over economic disenfranchisement.
As someone who takes gun rights as a very serious issue, both philosophically and practically, I’m very insulted by his stance, suggesting that my advocacy and philosophical beliefs are the result of misplaced anger over things less in my control. And he throws in racism with it - he’s saying that the same thing that makes people “cling to guns” causes people to have “anti-pathy to people who aren’t like them”.
I essentially took it as “stupid gun nuts and religious yokels only focus on those issues because they don’t know what’s best for them”.
Wrong interpretation? Maybe. But you’ll probably dismiss this as “people who make a big deal of this are the same people who will be critical of anything he says anyway” - but that’s not true in my case. I’ve been mostly pro-Obama in these threads. And this issue, to me, doesn’t seem like a simple faux pas. While getting hung up on the “bitter” thing is stupid (of course people are bitter, and they should be), the way he lumps in gun rights and religion in with anti-immigration, anti-free trade, and racist sentiments may indicate what he thinks about large classes of people, and it’s not good.
Interestingly, FOX News was interviewing people in PA, to ask them, “Are you bitter?” So far, the videos they have put up in this article are two people who feel that Obama is right. One will not vote for him, but agrees with him anyhow.
Being FOX news and all, I’m sure they’ll find an unbitter Pennsylvanian to interview sooner or later. If you click on this link tomorrow, I’m referring to the two oldest videos.
FWIW, I’m a small-town voter with a high school education who lost a job a few years ago due to NAFTA. THere are empty factories all over in small towns in SW Missouri. The bitter— yep, I’m feelin’ it. When he went on to mention guns, gay marriage and religion, part of me was thinking, “Oh no, Barack, don’t go there.” But all the while I was nodding in agreement.
Sure, you can be elitist with good intentions. I don’t doubt that he thinks he knows what’s best and genuine wants to do good. But thinking “those poor dumb slobs don’t know what’s good for them, but I do” is dangerous. Many a government has commited evil acts that they thought were in the ultimate good, because they knew what was best.
Might I point out that Sqweels is demonstrating the attitude that people are worried that Obama has? That people that believe in something other than him are “bad and wrong”?
He’s demonstrating, in defense of Obama, the exact same “stupid religious nuts and gun nuts don’t know what’s best for them” attitude that Obama may have displayed.
For those of you who don’t realize this is insulting, let me turn this around for you: What if he said that because people were bitter and disenfranchised economically, they focused on issues like abortion rights, free speech rights, being racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-trade sentiment? In that same dismissive, condescending way.
If you see the statement in a different light thinking of it that way, it reflects that your bias makes you agree with him - that those poor dumb idiots that don’t believe the same things you do are too dumb to know what’s good for them.
He didn’t say anything in a dismissive, condescending way. Nothing. That’s the spin the media, McCain and Clinton are putting on it because it serves their purpose. How about you read what someone who was actually at that fundraiser has to say about the tone and tenor with which he made that statement.
No, the fact that you see his statement as “dismissive and condescending” because it mentioned your pet issue is reflective of your bias. The man did not imply that rural Pennsylvanians were dumb idiots who don’t know what’s good for them. That is as tortured and biased an interpretation as conceivable.
Your hostile tone isn’t helping yourself or Obama.
I’m not religious at all, but if you had taken out the guns thing and left in the religious thing, it still may have struck me the same way. I have no pro-religion bias, and yet I could see how saying that people cling to their religion based on misplaced anger over economic disenfranchisement could be arrogant, elitist, and insulting.
I originally read the AP story on yahoo news, I didn’t hear about it on some slanted fox news BS. Simply reading the quotes, he lumps in gun advocacy, religion, and racism as things people place importance on due to economic disenfranchisement and feelings of powerlessness over it.
At the very least, he views people for whom gun rights issues are important as being misguided about their own self interest, right?
How is your account from someone who was there supposed to sway me? If the person writing it is in agreement with Obama, it wouldn’t strike them as condescending either. People don’t like to think of themselves or their beliefs in negative ways. I’m sure there’s a whole lot of “those stupid country religious gun nut yokels don’t know what’s best for them” sentiment among Obama’s supporters.
For what it’s worth, he may or may not be right. I’m no fan of the “fuck yeah! Bush, guns, God, and killing Arabs! Woo!” crowd. And maybe I am misinterpreting him. But that it’s certainly not absurd to be concerned over elitism based on what he said.
The thing I like best about the current ‘guns and church’ thing is watching Hillary The Pathological Liar attempt to pass herself off as pro-gun, pro-church in order to capitalize on the mess. Oh, but the question of when she last fired a gun or went to church is “irrelevant”. :rolleyes:
It was a damned stupid thing for Obama to say. Period. Obama is making some poor moves here and there (See: Edwards) that make him come off as an Elitist Dillweed. He really needs some work on that sort of thing.
Conservatives for some reason think they are the normative mean, and then turn around and talk about how everyone is a sinner because they are being lead around by the nose by Hollywood. The idea that a liberal candidate’s being liberal is his Achilles heel is kind of bizarre.
SenorBeef I saw it more as a commentary about what they DON’T vote because of rather than what they DO vote because of. He was saying that htey are so cynical about economics that it doesn’t inform their positions when they vote. So he listed off a bunch of things that they are less cynical about that DOES inform their positions. Guns and Abortion he didn’t draw a distinction between pro and con on that one, and he mentioned immigration, which I think is a little bit more clear where most working class folk stand on that one. He didn’t say people are stupid, they vote for these isssues, he said, “These are the issues these people will vote on, which are unlikely to be economics because they are too bitter and cynical about that issue to think it’ll do much good.”
Man! Barack’s campaign needs to use those video’s. When asked "are they bitter?"The older man says clearly “I know they are” I give Fox a little credit for posting them. It’s an easy thing to be selective about.
It at least shows that some {hopefully many} average citizens understand what Barack is talking about and will see through through the Bullshit stories about elitism.