This is absolute nonsense! He never said, or implied, that there was no legitimate reason for being a gun owner. Not even close. He wasn’t talking about gun owners in general, he was describing a very specific subset of people living in a very specific region of the country who have been affected by very specific economic issues. NOT all gun owners.
Here’s an account from someone who actually lives there, and about whom Obama was speaking.
Barack Obama has been traveling all around those areas over the past several weeks. He has SEEN it first hand. He has HEARD their bitterness. He has ASKED them how they’re feeling. And when guests at his fundraiser, who were on their way to Pennsylvania to help him campaign, asked what to expect, he told them what he saw and heard. He spoke the truth about them. Not you. Not all gun owners. Not all religious people. Rural Pennsylvanians who ARE angry and bitter and clinging to the only things they feel they have any control over because the Washington elite don’t give a shit about them and their economic woes.
You missed the portion of my discussion of the Genetic Fallacy that said:
Others may be disputing whether the Pennsylvanians Obama saw were in fact “bitter,” but all of your material in support of the notion that they are is kind of irrelevant to me because I am going to assume that they are.
He felt the need, though, to posit a linkage between their “bitterness” and their support for those issues. I think the fairest reading of why he posited this linkage is that he is frustrated that he has to prove his bona fides on issues that he thinks are side effects or artifacts. The language you cite is telling – why would one speak of “clinging” to guns except to posit some psychological inadequacy or displacement as the source of Second Amendment support? “Clinging” is not a value-neutral term in that context.
So: people in rural Pennsylvania may be bitter. They may support gun rights and immigration control and faith-based policies. The latter is not necessarily a result of the former, but Obama clearly implied it was (he obviously discounts the equally-plausible possibility that the former is a result of their not seeing their preferences on the latter implemented).
When I’ve had lovely conversations with various girlfriends in which I was intemperate enough to say “you’re just saying that because your hormones are all out of whack,” their retort was never “no, wait, I can prove I’m not on the rag.” It was “I may be, but you never should have even brought that up as a way of trivialzing my complaints or avoiding the merits of my argument.”
Really? You really think lots of people told him they cling to their guns (or whatever) because the economy is bad and they’re bitter about Washington politics? You see, Senator Obama… I lost my job last year and all I have left is my gun and my religion! I mean, I guess that’s possible, but it sounds pretty far fetched to me. Especially since concern about religion, gun rights, and those other things have been alive and well in “small town” America since before Senator Obama was born.
He was part of “both”-- ie, Hillary and Obama both…
I completely agree. However, I think both are also smart enough to know that people have illegitimate reasons to want to own guns, to care about their religion, and to be concerned with immigration, as well. ISTM that those were the people that Obama was actually talking about.
I know that he could have worded his statements better (to not have it generalized for everyone), and he admits the same. Now that he has clarified, though, the intentions behind his remarks should be clear - and I don’t see how they could be construed as elitist.
Two dead giveaways that he considers them non-legitimate and meant to convey this:
(1) the use of the word “cling.” As I noted, a pejorative implying the beliefs in question are serving not as sincere political policies, but as psychological crutches.
(2) his inclusion of “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” among the list of issues he imputes as being on the minds of the Pennsylvanians. I’m pretty sure you’re not going to suggest that Obama is value-neutral on whether “antipathy to people who aren’t like [us]” is okay, or that he thinks it is a legitimate political motivator. To a lesser extent “anti immigrant sentiment” is a loaded term – this is the term immigration supporters always use, to posit hatred of individual immigrants (of course, on nasty racial grounds), rather than concern with the effects of unrestrained immigration, as the motivation behind calls to limit immigration. The coupling of these two (supposed, and illegitimate) motives, along with guns, and religion, was clearly pejorative.
Here: “Senator Obama has found broad support among blacks, women, murderers, and urban residents.” “Senator Clinton’s policies are motivated by her concerns for union members, rural residents, terrorists, and people who hate kittens.” Sorry, neither of those phrasings is value-neutral.
You have no idea what “need” he felt, that’s just a baseless assumption on your part. And the fairest reading of why he stated this linkage (as opposed to “posited” it) is that that’s what he saw and heard while traveling around the region. That you wish to ascribe nefarious motives based on the usage of one word, speaks to your bias, not his intent.
Feel free to judge yourself and your own outrageous motives for your own words. You are not free to judge someone else’s motives when they have specifically denied those motives.
Yeah, I think people walked up and said, “I’m bitter an clinging to my guns because of that.” :rolleyes: Please. There are ways to have conversations with people and hear how they respond to questions to come away with the impression (which is a true one according to one of the residents there as I cited above) that people in those areas are so bitter and angry with the government that they’re holding onto whatever they feel they can have more power with.
Obama has already acknowledged the fact that made some poor word choices. But, he is not walking away from the larger point he was making because it’s true.
So go ahead and parse his words to mean whatever hateful, arrogant, ugly thing you want to twist them to mean. Pretend you can get in his head by examining his word choice and declare him elitist or out-of-touch if it satisfies your need to find some reason to find fault with him.
But it is not what he said and not what he meant. You can either take him at his word about that and move on to the real issues that are important in this country, or you can judge him like his competitors want you to and not vote for him. Either way, it doesn’t change the basic fact that he spoke the truth, however poorly worded.
Roll your eyes all you want, but that is what you said. He didn’t tell them what he say and heard, he told them what he inferred their motivations were.
OK, so now it’s the impression he got, not what people actually told him. And what a lot of people are saying is that his impression is informed by his own personal bias. That, and the way he said it, did come off as being condescending, even if he didn’t mean it to be. Note that he has admitted to using a poor choice of words.
Well, I do think that it was implied, though not said outright.
I don’t see why the beliefs couldn’t be both sincere political policies and psychological crutches.
And I don’t agree with your use of the term pejorative, in describing this. I don’t think he intended to insult people with his statements, but rather draw attention to the issue.
Kind of like telling someone who is coming back from a 10 day float trip that they’re dirty and smell funky. Sure that could be insulting (and could have been brought up more tactfully), but is it really far from the truth?
No, it is only pejorative in your own mind. Given that that was not the intent of the speaker, you cannot impute that motive to him. It’s really that simple.
“Anti-immigrant sentiment” is not a loaded term, it’s a factual one that even former President Bill Clinton acknowledged leads to anxiety when people look at the economic situation. From my previous post in this thread:
No, that is not what I said. You made up some ridiculous faux conversation as if that was the only way Barack Obama could have “heard” something that told him people were more concerned with gun issues and religious issues and immigration issues than with their own economic issues. And I’ve already acknowledged that he admitted a poor choice of words. That does not mean that he had ill motives, that he is condescending, or that he is wrong.
Oh, come on. Of course the conversation I made up was ridiculous, but so would any conversation that would’ve conformed to what you claimed Obama was doing:
No, that’s not what he did. He didn’t speak “the truth”-- he gave his analysis of what he heard, throwing in a nice little dig at Bush and Clinton along the way. And his analysis doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Does he really think that if the economy improves, people will no longer “cling” to guns and religion? That’s absurd. As I’ve said, people have been “clinging” to those through good times and bad, and Obama isn’t going to change that one iota. If he thinks he can, he’s delusional.
As John Mace pointed out, certain culturally conservative issues and priorities have always been prevalent in certain rural, or blue collar, areas of the country. I can’t imagine that anyone who was pro-gun today wasn’t pro-gun when farms and factories were thriving. They were pro-gun from way back forever, because in the boonies, lots of people have and like guns and don’t want them regulated. Similarly, I doubt a bunch of Bohunk Catholic steelworkers, even when the union jobs were plentiful, could be expected to support NAFTA, or abortion, or to look at mass immigration with anything but suspicion.
The problem for Obama is that if a bloc of voters is really concerned about deregulating guns, or about faith-based principles being applied to government policy, or about stopping immigration, Obama can’t help them with those priorities. He’s simply never going to be able to take the position that guns need to be less regulated, or abortion needs to be more limited, or illegal aliens should be deported en masse. It’s not what he believes, it’s not what the national Democratic party supports, it is definitely not the kind of “change” he is selling. So since he can’t help them on these priorities, he’d rather explain them away as all being artifacts of a bad economy and a broken system in Washington.
Well, that makes sense, because on “fixing the economy,” and “changing Washington,” he does have a sales pitch (some find it more plausible, some less). So of course he would believe, or want to believe, or want Pennsylvanians to believe, that all of their anxieties and political discontents will go away if the economic and governance problems he can fix (so he says) go away. It’s kind of like a hammer salesman trying to persuade the punters that their stated desire for a screwdriver is really just the result of their lack of hammers, so they should just stop bugging him for screwdrivers that he doesn’t have.
So far, the answer to “can he survive this?” is Yes. He’s 10 points ahead of Hillary in the national Gallup tracker, which is as far ahead as he’s ever been (and his 8th straight day of leading by 7-10 points). The Rasmussen tracker has him up by only 4, but he was only up by 3 in Friday morning’s tracker, just before this hit.
No clue how this is affecting things in Pennsylvania, but I expect there’ll be new polls in the morning.
It is kind of amazing that a candidate can generate millions of words saying one thing, and dozens saying another, and those dozens are seized on as a symbol of what he “really thinks”. I am not saying that it is incorrect, but it’s interesting.
I was dissapointed to hear that Obama had said this, regardless of context, but I am hesitant to arbitrarily determine that this is his real feeling on the matter, and everything else he has said is studied political blather. Of course, I have a bias that I bring to the table. But so do most other participants.
That was the deservedly much-maligned ARG. RealClearPolitics stopped including them in their averages awhile back because they were so mindbogglingly unreliable.
Anecdotally, do the people who you know that trend further toward the ‘god gays and guns’ category fall more into the economically well off or more economically disadvantaged groups?