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Saturday, April 12, 2008
Calm down,
everybody.
SNOOTY AIN'T NEW. The conservatives seem to think they're really on to something with Obama's trashing of Pennsylvania small town folks. Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey has done a good job of explaining why the remarks should be so damaging:
Obama’s camp... has tried adopting
bitterness as its
strategy, claiming that small-town voters are right to be bitter about
an economic expansion that has created the lowest unemployment we have
had in any 25-year period of this nation’s industrial history.
But that’s intellectually dishonest.
Let’s break this statement into its component insults:
- “[T]hey cling to guns…” Cling to guns? Americans have “clung” to guns since the founding of the Republic. It’s such a core value to this nation that its founders placed it second on the Bill of Rights, right after freedom of speech and religion. Speaking of which …
- “or [they cling to] religion …” People don’t become religious because the economy hits a few bumps in the road. Obama may have chosen his religion based on politics, but most people follow a religion out of a deeper sense of spirituality. I can’t think of a more condescending and contemptuous analysis of religious dedication than this statement.
- “or [they cling to] antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…” Small-town voters are bigots and xenophobes; there’s no other way to read the first part of this statement. The second part, about them being “anti-immigrant”, is a non-sequitur. They may be anti-illegal immigrant, but that’s a far different issue. Obama offers no proof that small-town voters are xenophobes, but the Frisco audience didn’t demand any, either. It’s part of their own bigotry that makes them see middle America in those terms.
- “or [they cling to] anti-trade sentiment …” And this is just jaw-droppingly hypocritical. This comes from the same candidate who opposes the Colombian free-trade agreement and wants to throw NAFTA out the window. Who’s clinging to anti-trade sentiment? Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Big Labor.
It would be difficult to be any more condescending or insulting in so many ways to so many voters in a single sentence. It reveals a deeply elitist and shockingly callow candidate. It’s the “Let them eat cake” of 2008.
I'm not going to do the big round-up thing. You can find that at practically every conservative site. They think they've got their teeth into something big here, and they're using each other's opinions for support. I'm not convinced. The only additional quote I'll cite is also linked from Hot Air:ABC News' Sarah Amos reports that at
North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C., Clinton campaign
North Carolina chieftain Tom Hendrickson, a former state party chair,
made much hay out of the "small town" comments made by Sen. Barack
Obama, D-Ill....
And so he did. He spelled it out in some detail. But the ABC news piece ends with this:
Amos points out that, interestingly,
the crowd had little reaction at all. They, in fact, seemed a tad bored.
It's hardly a secret that the Democratic Party hates guns, Christianity with few exceptions, opposition to any and every form of immigration no matter how blatantly and catastrophically illegal, and most of the people who live between the two enlightened coasts of the continental United States.
That doesn't mean there aren't loyal Democrats who are Christian, gun-loving, prejudiced against this or that ethnic group or nationality, or lifelong citizens of the most stereotyped states in flyover country. Of course there are. And they're used to hearing various aspects of their own identities and values trashed by Democratic pols seeking election. In fact, they routinely expect to be slandered and lied to by their candidates. The Democratic 'Big Tent' includes millions of moderate foreign policy hawks, for example, who are sure neither of their party's presidential candidates will execute the kind of precipitate withdrawal from Iraq they're promising. It's understood that this kind of rhetoric is simply a sop to the crazy -- but electorally necessary -- left wing.
This is the most important thing to understand about Democrat elitism. It's not just that all the real movers and shakers of the party's leadership are Old Money snobs with Ivy law degrees and a profound contempt for the lowly church supper. It's that their three-quarter-century-old New Deal coalition has bought into the concept of a patrician political class they don't really expect to understand or respect them -- as long as they can be pressured to support the legislative agendas of the various plebeian groups who will never dine with them in the Hamptons: labor, minorities, single women who think abortion is a dandy birth-control device, government employees of all kinds, especially teachers, and fleets of non-Ivy lawyers whose livelihood depends on their ability to assault every legitimate business with frivolous lawsuits.
The truth of the matter is that these groups don't have much in common with each other apart from being necessary parts of the Coalition. Mostly, they don't care at all what the aristocrat politicians say, or have to say, or slip up and say, as they're campaigning for public office. The one postulate that matters is that Demorats aren't Republicans, meaning naifs who consistently let ideology get in the way of all the mundanely pragmatic deals that protect various blocs of government dependents.
Conservatives in particular never seem to understand this. They believe stubbornly that most people have deep beliefs which must be respected by those who seek office. They mistake all the ideological pap Democrats utter to appease the one small but influential subset of the faithful that does have ideological convictions -- the mass media, the academics, and the guilt-ridden limousine liberals -- as the philosophical core of the Democratic Party. It's no such thing. The Democrat Party is simply a cold-blooded alliance held together by a desire to loot the public treasury in plain view.
The small-town Democrats of Pennsylvania know this. They don't care that Obama thinks they're dogshit any more than they care that Hillary lies her ass off at every opportunity. They -- and all the much sought after independents -- will choose their horse in the general election the way they always have. By picking the one self-important rich prick who promises them the most loot.
It may not be pretty, but it's the way it is.
