Fake outrage of the week: Obama and the bitter white people
This has got to be the dumbest "scandal" I've ever heard of. To be honest, as cynical as I am about the media, I can't believe that this is even a story, or that Keith Olbermann ... MSNBC ... the sanity network ... would bother to make this breaking news. First, the set up, courtesy of ABC News:
In the midst of an assault from his rivals, a defensive Barack Obama said Friday that many working-class Americans are angry and bitter over economic inequalities and have lost faith in Washington — and, as a result, vote on the basis of other issues such as gun protections or gay marriage.
The Illinois senator's analysis of what motivates working-class voters came after chief rival Hillary Rodham Clinton accused him of looking down on such voters. Clinton rebuked Obama on Friday for similar remarks he made privately last Sunday to a group of donors in San Francisco.
"People don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them," Obama told a crowd at a Terre Haute, Ind., high school Friday evening. "So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington."
I see nothing controversial in that. In fact, I hear some version of that on "Hardball" about every other day. So what did Barack orignially say, that caused such a firestorm? Let's go to the folks who broke the story: The Hillarycentric Huffington Post:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, 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.
So ... if Barack is "looking down" on these voters, as HRC later accused him of, then what do you make of the guy who wronte "What's the Matter With Kansas?" a book all about people voting against their economic interests and turning to marginal social issues instead. And isn't what Hillary is really pissy about is that Barack included her husband's administration as one of the periods during which people fell through the cracks?
By the way, tanks alot, HuffPo, for exploiting the Obama statement for link ratings. It came as part of an extended piece by Mayhill Fowler on Obama's travels in the Keystone State, but Ariana & Company chose to elevate it as the headline. Nice work.
Meanwhile, the Obama camp has responded ... by essentially ignoring Hillary and going after John McCain (the other front in this Friday, slow news day war of words):
"Senator Obama has said many times in this campaign that Americans are understandably upset with their leaders in Washington for saying anything to win elections while failing to stand up to the special interests and fight for an economic agenda that will bring jobs and opportunity back to struggling communities. And if John McCain wants a debate about who's out of touch with the American people, we can start by talking about the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that he once said offended his conscience but now wants to make permanent,” said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.
But back to my original point. What morons in the media find it perfectly reasonable to ask whether Michelle Obama is "angry" and "bitter," and various pundits feel free to drone on and on about hte bitterness of lower middle class whites in the aftermath of Barack Obama's speech on race, but if Barack Obama says precisely the same thing, in I have to say, rather mundane fashion, it's somehow a scandal. Why? Because Camp Hillary says so?
Give me a break.
The real reason the MSM cares about this story is that it fits the narrative the East Coast elite media has written about Barack: that he is an elitist who only attracts elitists, and who can't connect to the common man. Like the "bowling-gate" story, it reinforces the notion of the Chris Matthews crowd -- an elite, wealthy East Coast bunch whose children go to Ivy League schools, but who style themselves as men with the common touch who can still belly up to the bar and have a cold one with the boys -- even though they haven't actually done so in a generation and now enjoy a good, fine wine and cigar -- that somehow Barack is the sell-out that they are not. Except that they are.
This whole notion of wanting the president to be a "common man" doesn't even jibe with American history. America has a history of preferring aristocratic presidents -- from Teddy Roosevelt, the ultimate elite sportsman, to FDR to JFK to Ronald Reagan. We've only fallen in love with the "Bubba concept" since Bill Clinton, who chumped Bush I with the help of the media, who exposed the former veep as a man who didn't know the cost of a loaf of bread. But right after Clinton, Americans turned around and elected Bush's blue-blood son, knowing that he was an elite, Ivy league educated SON OF A FORMER PRESIDENT, but falling for the completely phony media-enabled narrative that he is some sort of common Rancher Joe. Give me a break.
The only reason Bush gets away with the "regular guy" gag is because the mainstream media suck-ups let him get away with it. And they are doing the same thing with Hillary "$109 million" Clinton and John "Married to a Liquore Heiress' McCain. Apparently, Ivy educated reporters feel inadequate in the manliness department, and so they project whatever qualities they think are common and manly onto the politicians they enable.
Unfortunately for Barack, he is too much like the members of the media for them to feel good about loving him.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
