Does it not seem that the media latched onto Obama's because it beats the hard work of examining the candidates' policy statements?
I am not offended that he spoke the word bitter. There might have been better words but the emotional truth of the word is sound enough. I see enough of it, feel enough of the financial and economic problems in this area to justify bitterness and other adjectives.
What really gets me going is the media reaction. Eugene Robinson is the only one who put the whole comment into context. See his Shot and a Chablis:
"This whole sideshow began when Obama committed what she portrayed as the apparently unforgivable sin of trying to describe the resentment felt by some working-class Americans, venturing that '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.'"
In case you want to know who is not bitter read Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending from The New York Times:"In this case, I didn't think what he said was offensive. Of course, I don't live in a small town or in rural America. But then again, neither do any of the other people I've heard sound off on this topic. So I'm in good company. (This has been one of the more comedic aspects of this 72 hours -- watching a cavalcade of extremely wealthy pundits, editorialists and political operatives from New York and Washington tell me how rural Americans won't stand for this.) My understanding is that Obama was answering a question from someone who planned to go canvass for him in Pennsylvania and what they should expect since it's portrayed as being unfriendly ground for him. And what I understood him to be saying is that years of economic abandonment have left many communities in middle America even more reliant on community, tradition, their religion, etc. -- and from a political standpoint very protective of it."
***With the Wright business and now with this, the more nuanced version of the Clinton line has been that what 'we' think is not really the point. It's what Republicans will do with it in the fall. And that's a real concern that I definitely have. I won't deny it. I've never thought Obama was a perfect candidate. But as we get deeper into the primary calendar, increasingly so, this 'what the Republicans will do' line has become more of a simulacrum, or a license, if you will, to do what Republicans actually do do. That is to say, to grab for political advantage by peddling stereotypes about Democrats and liberals that are really no less offensive than the ones we're talking about about Americans from small town and rural America.
And seeing Hillary go on about how Obama has contempt for folks in small town America, how he's elitist, well ... no, it's not because I think she's either. I never have. But after seeing her hit unfairly with just the same stuff for years, it just encapsulates the last three-plus months of her campaign which I can only describe as a furious descent into nonsense and self-parody. Part of it makes me want to cry. But at this point all I can really do is laugh.
Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and Robert Reich in his blog described Clinton's tactics as old politics. They are old and they are also stale."Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends."
Cohen had this to say in his Guns, God and Gotchas:
And Reich wrote Obama, Bitterness, Meet the Press, and the Old Politics:"It is this quality of Obama's -- this sense that you need him more than he needs you -- that probably explains why Clinton seized upon his remarks about the poor of Pennsylvania and elsewhere who, in Obama's artless telling, have turned to God and guns. It was, as he conceded, a bumbling attempt to express an economic truth, and it gave her a chance to imply that you can judge this particular book by its cover. But the spirit of what Obama said was not condescension but empathy. People were hurting. They were bitter. He understood."
***
Obama should not have attributed a yearning to hunt or attend church to hard economic times. The remarks will haunt him -- witness how John McCain has also called them "elitist." But Obama was right about the economic roots of bitterness and anti-immigrant sentiment. And he's been right, too, about the patent insincerity of Clinton's criticism. Her attack is hardly based on a touching regard for gun owners or even churchgoers, but on the desperate hope that the smoothly aloof Obama can be painted as arrogant and elitist. It's old, tiresome politics -- the politics of politics -- and, paradoxically, more patronizing than anything Obama himself said.
Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.
Then I got double teamed by George F. Will and Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh read Will' column on the air (I was driving and switching stations).
Will is at his most sanctimonious and self-serving in his column Candidate on a High Horse:
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
***
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Will ends his column with this:
In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind.For another view on Hofstadter, read America, Through a Glass Darkly from The Nation:
The Hofstadter nostalgia boom is also fueled by readers who find in his work a foreshadowing of their own anxiety about the irrationality of populist movements. His feeling that populism posed a danger to democracy seems to liberals and conservatives alike to speak to our own time--as indeed in many ways it does. Many writers seeking to understand the 2004 "red state" phenomenon turned to Hofstadter's essays on "status anxiety" and "the paranoid style in American politics"--especially after George W. Bush mobilized his supporters with a good-old-boy rhetoric that was proudly stupid.Seventy-one years on, there is little "coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes" in Muncie compared with the effort of sheer survival. People around here have the kind of worries shown in this poll from workforce.com:
Limbaugh, Will, and Bush need to explain why after all these years of Republican control of our government, we feel this way."Concerns about the economy, home values and health costs continue to sap workers’ confidence that they will have enough cash for a comfortable retirement."
***
The percentage of workers who said they were very confident about having enough money to retire comfortably dropped to 18 percent this year from 27 percent in 2007, according to the 2008 Retirement Confidence Survey.
That represents the largest one-year drop in confidence in the 18-year history of the survey, the study said.
At the same time, the percentage of workers who said they lacked confidence about having enough money for a comfortable retirement jumped to 37 percent this year from 29 percent in 2007.
I will finish this rant with a link to a far better writer than myself. I wish I could have explained why this "bitter-gate" BS is BS as well as Andrew Sullivan does in Now He's A Godless Commie.
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