What if I said.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The statement was made at a San Francisco big big money fund-raiser. It's probably what they expected to hear.

Half of all dwellars are in rural Pennsylvania, or have family and friends there in spades. Here's the deal.

Pennsylvania small town provincialism didn't start 25 years ago. It started as soon as the society became mobile. People interested in constant change, creativity and exploration started moving to the urban areas.

Obama's real gaffe here is that his statement is the entire opposite of what his campaign has been so far. It's negative, when his campaign has been all about the positive. It's divisive when the campaign has been about unity.

Here's an article from the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/op...14kristol.html

But it’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to ... religion” out of economic frustration.


I am one of those potential crossover voters. I am waiting for the general election debates so I can make my decision.

Most people would agree that this administration has left people bitter but to say this group of people is more bitter than the rest is devisive because it is a narrow view of human motivation. It is a gross generalization and anyone that finds questioning such statements disturbing is probably more often than not disturbed about life in general. There is nothing wrong with an open and honest look-sie into the motivations of our next elected officials.

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

The wife just remarked to me that the TV commentators are "making dead-horse jerky" of this.

Of course, the Dem Party isn't selling anything I'd buy, so...

Funny statement. hehe I like her

I am not so happy with Hillary either. If McCain comes center which I predict he will and is sucessful in pulling democrats and independants from Obama during the General election he will be our next President.

Originally Posted by Cicero

I don't give two squats about any of the candidates so I will roam around and diagnose any of the comments as I please......

I think you might be one of the smartest persons on this site but what makes you so appealing is your humor regarding your opinions. I admire that so much!

hehehe diagnose just cracks me up!

[deadbeater]

Obama's main mistake is not punctuating his comments with "I understand and empathize with their bitterness", echoing Clinton's "I feel your pain" mantra.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by deadbeater

Obama's main mistake is not punctuating his comments with "I understand and empathize with their bitterness", echoing Clinton's "I feel your pain" mantra.

I take your point, but I must clarify something. There is *no* path that does not offer the opportunity for criticism. Even doing nothing can be ridiculed. All statements by all the leading candidates in the race at this stage could be criticized.

The task for those of us who wish to be informed voters is to listen, critically. That means including context. That means going to original sources when possible. That means listening to others' analyses, also critically. That means considering the source (thanks Dad). That means not focusing too narrowly, taking second hand paraphrases of other's words out of context. This is tiring endless work. But the reward is worth it.

[Ibby]

But Hillary Clinton and John McCain slammed Obama as an "out of touch elitist" for a comment that he made trying to tell a supporter how to go reach out to voters in Pennsylvania. Obama was trying to say that his race was not a barrier in Pennsylvania, but that years of political neglect of economic issues was. Obama told that volunteer that in the context of that "economic bitterness" some voters privilege issues of guns or religion and that that's an obstacle in reaching out to them.

He could have said it better or more artfully. But don't forget the point he was trying to make. He was telling that volunteer how important it was to go out and talk to people in Pennsylvania on his behalf, to knock on doors, to participate. He was attempting, just like he tried to do with his speech following the Wright controversy, to bring us together and help us understand where each other was coming from. On some level, Obama was telling that volunteer to learn to talk to people where they are at.

Obama has been ruthlessly attacked for that. If the attackers win, that will have a lasting effect on all of us and our politics as a nation. Can we afford to have the walls between red and blue, urban and rural, well-to-do and economically-hurting built up even higher? Is that the direction we want to go? More division, more enmity, more mistrust?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well said, V.

[BigV]

Thank you, sir.

[Flint]

If the attackers win, that will have a lasting effect on all of us and our politics as a nation. Can we afford to have the walls between red and blue, urban and rural, well-to-do and economically-hurting built up even higher? Is that the direction we want to go? More division, more enmity, more mistrust?

Give me a break already! This paragraph is just as stupid as the original controversy.
They've taken a mountain made out of a molehill, and made an even bigger mountain out of it.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by skysidhe

All you people from small rural areas, bitter about imigrants cling to your religion and your guns and your antipathy.

Is it true? Discuss:

If you were to use the word "all", it would be very different than anyone in the media might have said. When I hear someone say "all people", I already know they are wrong.

I believe in the case of Barrack Obama, he was saying that people are losing their jobs, keeping less and less of what they make, they're having a harder and harder time making ends meet. They are desperate and angry when they see their company forced to go elsewhere to make a profit, and they see their job go to someone else. These people are clinging on to single issues rather than looking at the big picture. They are clinging to abortion, or guns, or religion, because they feel like they can't get much from government, so they will pick their battles carefully and choose a few areas where they think they can win, rather than spreading themselves thin and trying to win everything.

I'm the same way. I know that I will give a certain amount of money to charity. Do I give a dollar to every charity that has a worthwhile cause? Or do I give a thousand dollars to one or two charities where I think my money might actually make the most difference?

[kerosene]

Originally Posted by BigV

...This is tiring endless work. But the reward is worth it.

Not if over half the rest of the population doesn't do the same.


(Cic, you might check my grammar on that...should it be doesn't or don't?)

[BigV]

I respectfully disagree, case. I think you're silently assenting to my first assertion, that it is tiring endless work. We agree on that point. I think you're taking issue with my second assertion, that the reward for that work is worth it. That's where we might disagree.

Yes, hard work. Yes, worth it. No, it doesn't always result in the best candidate for the job being elected to the office. But it is still worth it for a couple of reasons.

1 -- *I* will have done *my* best for myself and my city/county/state/country/PTA/fellow shareholders/etc/etc. That's priceless.

2 -- It greatly increases the chances that the best person will be elected, because I'm able to make a better choice, and those people I communicate with will know more about "the facts", "the truth" and will be better informed as well.

3 -- The people I come in contact with while doing this work might be more motivated to vote because of my efforts, if even to counterbalance my vote against some right wing nut job. More voter (informed voters) is a good thing. Misinformed voters can have unpredictable results.

4 -- I set a good example for my kids and the other young people around me who aren't yet old enough to vote.

5 -- I preserve my right to bitch about the winner of the election because I put my two cents in. That's true whether my candidate wins and I've been betrayed or my candidate loses and I cry "toldja so!" for the rest of the term.

Still worth it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Flint

They've taken a mountain made out of a molehill, and made an even bigger mountain out of it.

In short, too much is taken too literally. All those position papers, etc are only sufficient to say which way their wind blows. Much of what all three promise to do and what others accuse them of saying, instead, will not happen. Do you really think anyone will rescind NAFTA? Do you really think anyone will immediately pull all troops out of Iraq? Do you really think anyone will cut taxes or institute massive tax increases? Of course not.

We get pissy about a comment made in San Francisco that is also (in simpler terms) somewhat accurate? Yes, when times get bad or people get frustrated, then people seek to blame others or things. So what? People do that. Why is that so important?

Only metric to measure any of these candidates is how they manage the overall campaign. For example, Kerry did a very poor job explaining himself about "Mission Accomplished" or knocking down outright lies from the Swift Boat coalition. It may have cost him enough votes to lose. We measure our leaders by watching what they do in these long and painful treks over the nation and airwaves. At least the minority who think for ourselves - who do not vote as ordered will judge on how they managed the campaign - not get lost in silly details or perceived insults.

It is a silly controversy. Just another day in a campaign that should have been mostly ignored until after the Super Bowl - and that is still too long.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Radar

If you were to use the word "all", it would be very different than anyone in the media might have said. When I hear someone say "all people", I already know they are wrong.

I believe in the case of Barrack Obama, he was saying that people are losing their jobs, keeping less and less of what they make, they're having a harder and harder time making ends meet. They are desperate and angry when they see their company forced to go elsewhere to make a profit, and they see their job go to someone else. These people are clinging on to single issues rather than looking at the big picture. They are clinging to abortion, or guns, or religion, because they feel like they can't get much from government, so they will pick their battles carefully and choose a few areas where they think they can win, rather than spreading themselves thin and trying to win everything.

Thoughts like that are better left in the back of one's head. He was going for points by putting down the very constituents he needs to win. Yes there are simple minded people but did he have to say it out loud? and what about the people whos religion is more than a single issue and who's love for guns is more about tradition than an understanding of the issues. I love how Obama gets a pass or a look over when if it had been Hilary who had said it the lynch mob would be out with torches and the dogs.

[TheMercenary]

Candidate on a High Horse

By George Will


Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.


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.


By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.


When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture — the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."


Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than — in Michelle Obama's words — "just downright mean."


The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:


First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.


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.


Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.


Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.


Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.


When Democrats convened in San Francisco in 1984, en route to losing 49 states, Jeane Kirkpatrick — a former FDR Democrat then serving in the Cabinet of another such, Ronald Reagan — said "San Francisco Democrats" are people who "blame America first." Today they blame Americans for America being "downright mean."


Obama's apology for his embittering sociology of "bitterness" — "I didn't say it as well as I should have" — occurred in Muncie, Ind. Perfect.


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.

[Radar]

Stating the fact that the vast majority of Americans aren't very bright isn't intellectual condescension. The fact is stupid people breed more, and they tend to vote Republican.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Radar

Stating the fact that the vast majority of Americans aren't very bright isn't intellectual condescension.

My mom said it was. :p

Originally Posted by Radar

The fact is stupid people breed more, and they tend to vote Republican.

Oh he didn't say 'those Republicans' and their single hammer issues!' That would have made it alright because that's what he meant to say.