Obama said the following at a fundraiser last week and righties are up in arms about it.
Every word of this is true, yet the refrain over the weekend now is that Obama is an “elitist,” for stating the bleeding obvious. Now, it might end up being a political mistake for Obama to have been a little too blunt, but he wasn’t wrong, and the objections to his statements aren’t founded in any factual rebuttals but in resentment (or at least upon the hope of creating resentment) of Obama (the candidate with the least personal wealth of the three and the most humble background), is an “elitist.” “Elitist,” of course, is code for “uppity.” The bitching about Obama’s truthful insights into small town bitterness (and the attendant symptoms of religionism, xenophobia and the pathetic machismo of gun culture) is really just anger at the thought that an uppity, Harvard educated black man is looking down his nose at blue collar whites.
Actually, I’m not even sure how many blue collar, small town types really feel that way, but the pundits on the political right are certainly trying to create that kind of emotional response.
Obama didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I guess the truth just hurts. It might cost him votes, but that will only prove that he was right.
I didn’t actually hear the speech, but as you’ve quoted it there are no qualifiers.
It makes it seem like Obama is saying all small-town people from Pennsylvania who lost their good manufacturing jobs 25 years ago are:
Religious
Xenophobic
Gun owners
Even if we could assume all three of those things, Obama is making the further assumption that:
Any religious person in these Pennsylvania towns must be religious because they are “clinging to religion” to make up for their backwards life and/or fucked up personal financial situation
Any gun owner in these towns is “clinging to guns” because of other hardships in life.
It basically discounts any possibility that any of these people don’t own guns, discounts the possibility that some of those gun owners might own them for different reasons, that any of them are agnostic/atheist, and that some of these religious people may be religious for other reasons.
It’s entirely possible Obama’s original words are more nuanced, as you’ve quoted them here it makes it look like he made a bunch of sweeping statements about a group of people I’m willing to bet my personal net worth he hasn’t done any meaningful research on. I think Obama generalized some stuff that is probably true for a decent segment of a certain part of the population–but that isn’t the same thing as saying “what he said is undeniably true.” If he’d added some qualifiers I would give it a pass. But even then, I seriously doubt Obama has a lot of information on these people so I imagine he’s making a lot of wild-assed generalizations based on common perceptions of people in rural Pennsylvania towns.
I’ll be the first to get on board with the idea that many times generalizations are true, but on this forum in particular sweeping generalizations are usually not given a pass unless they are condemnatory generalizations directed towards people on “the other side.”
It may make it seem that way, and it was politically stupid of Obama to say it the way he did (plus, his pseudo-apologies have not appeared to me terribly politically strategic either, alas), but his phrasing does not seem to me that different from the ordinary language practice of saying things like “Americans prefer baseball to cricket”. Someone who says that is generally not asserting that every single last American prefers baseball to cricket; he means something a little less strong than that. A level of strength at which I think Obama’s comments, at least regarding anti-trade sentiment, for example, are right on the ball.
Dio, you are seriously not helping your case by saying shit like that. Whether or not it’s true, do you really think it makes anyone more inclined to examine your arguments fairly?
Myself, I think he put it poorly, but he’s essentially right. There’re a lot of tensions because of the long-standing economic problems, and that makes itself known in other issues such as the ones he mentioned.
He didn’t say all small town people, he said “it’s not surprising” when people start scapegoating others and clinging to cultural identifyers. He didn’t actually use the word “xenophobic” either, although he would have been perfectly correct and justified if he had. I know something about those people. He was right on the money. It might not have been politically smart to be so blunt about it, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. A lot of blue collar whites absolutely do scapegoat and they absolutely do cling to religion. Nobody knows that better than the GOP. They’ve been playing to those cultural tendencies for decades.
It’s a rant, not an argument. That’s why I put it in the Pit instead of GD. I knew I’d be wasting my breath trying to debate it. I’m just lamenting the fact that a candidate can get screwed for telling the truth.
Captain Carrot has stated more clearly than I would be able to, my exact thinking on what Obama said.
BTW, Dio, are you claiming that Hillary is now a conservative? Most of the complaints I’ve heard and seen about Obama’s comments being elitist have been coming from her camp, not McCain’s. Though that may be a matter of selection bias in my local media - NYS leans heavily towards the Democrats.
Fox News has been beating the word “elitist” into the ground. Hillary might be doing it too, but she’s desperate, so I give her a pass. I don’t think there’s any question that when Fox News says “elitist” they really mean “uppity.” I find it very discouraging that the tactic might work.
Actually if you’ve been alive the past few years you’d realize people get in trouble all the time for saying similar things about urban blacks. You do realize Bill Cosby got a lot of grief (along with praise) for some of his comments?
If you don’t hear the question asked first, then it’s easy to misread his answer. I don’t have the exact quote, but my summary of the question asked of Obama was "why were folks in rural PA were resistant to voting in their self interest?’
I took the comments that caused all the hub-bub to be Obama’s answer. The explanation as to why a rural, lower economic level type person would vote for a party that had as their main plank the vow to keep screwing them without vasoline for as long as they could. His answer was because those voters were cynical about anyone helping them, they might as well vote for the guy who was against gay marriage (like them) or against gun control (like them). He talked about those traits in the context of voting for candidates’ positions, not all by themselves.
I dunno. I expect people in small towns tend to be both more religious and more xenophobic than people from big cities. Do you think that is false? It has certainly been my experience of small towns.
But that’s not the claim. It isn’t “This is what some people there are like”, it’s “this is what some people there are like, and this is why”. It’s the “why” that people seem to be disagreeing on.