Winds of Change.NET: The overlooked part of Obama's elitist comment about Pa.

April 13, 2008

The overlooked part of Obama's elitist comment about Pa.

by Donald Sensing at April 13, 2008 1:36 AM

I've been out of touch for a couple of days tending to personal affairs so I'm just now catching up on the sturm und drang erupting over Barack Obama's comments to wealthy fundraisers about Pennsylvania voters.

In journalism, they call it a "tieback," so here it is.

Last Sunday in San Francisco, in off-the-cuff remarks before a group of rich donors, Obama let his true feelings about average Americans be known:
You go into some of 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. So it’s not surprising then that 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.

Having perused a number of commentaries now, let me offer a sample and then explain what they all miss (and that I haven't seen anywhere, else, either): First up, Patrick Hynes on Obama's "clarifications:"

By refusing to acknowledge that the lumping of Americans of faith together with racists and xenophobes is empirically insulting, he essentially restates his position and digs in: Religion, racism, xenophobia are just “refuges” (his new word) for people who are not as privileged as he.

Victor Davis Hanson on the part about "nothing's replaced jobs lost 25 years ago:"

“Nothing’s replaced them”? As someone who lives in a small rural town that saw a lot of closed plants and farm depression in the 1980s, a lot has “replaced them”—explaining why for much of the last decade the national unemployment rate has been below 5%.

And, same author:

“They cling to guns or religion”. This is revealing for two reasons: one, Obama has been trying to finesse his position on guns to appeal precisely to gun owners and thus we start to see that his repositioning is cynical to the core; two, “cling to religion?” No rural Pennsylvanian clings to religion more than Obama himself, who for 20 years sat silent in the pews, while a hate-spewing minister damned his country and most everyone else. The question is not why Pennsylvanians “cling to their religion”, but why do the Obamas still cling to the Trinity Church that seems far more extreme than anything I’ve seen in rural America.

Victor almost gets there, but misses another point (and this isn't the missed point I referred to above, keep reading). VDC asks, reasonably enough, why Obama clung to Trinity Church for 20 years. But that's not what Obama's comment reveals. What Obama has let slip out of the bag is not that he did "cling" to Trinity Church, but that he did not. Trinity for Obama was not a religious refuge, it was a political stepping board and an ethnic credential. So Obama slanders Pennsylvanians who are religious precisely because he is not. And I would add that any attempt at this point in his campaign to make public some sort of statement of his personal faith would immediately be weighted down by suspicion of political expediency.
But to move on, let's turn to AllahPundit at Hot Air:

What’s most offensive? ... The crude quasi-Marxist reductionism of his analysis, which he first introduced in his speech on race vis-a-vis the root causes of whites’ “resentment” — namely, exploitation by the bourgeoisie in the form of corporations and D.C. lobbyists?

This doesn't get the cigar, but it's so close that it does get a cigarillo. Let's look at Obama's laundry list of Pennsylvanians' dysfunctions again:

bitterness

"Clinging to"

guns
religion
racism
chauvinism
anti-trade sentiment

Reading the full context of Obama's remarks, it strikes me that he believes that all of these (presumed) symptoms spring from the fact that there is too little control of the economy by the federal government. Obama said that all of these dysfunctions began when the government let their jobs go away and then, through both Republican and Democrat administrations, did nothing to "regenerate" them.

It is the lack of regulation of the economy, Obama believes, that makes people bitter, racist, religious, hunters, patriotic or protectionist. All these things are bad, and they all result from free-market, democratic capitalism. I know that many of you reading this will think I'm over-reaching here, but I stand my ground: Obama's remarks are in fact as clear a declaration of cleaving to socialism as almost anything he could have said.

Mrs. Clinton had a politically brilliant, though ideologically identical, rebuttal:

“It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter; well, that’s not my experience,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Drexel University. “Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them; they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.”

Coming from a hard leftwinger like Hillary, this statement is easy to parse: the presumed reason those jobs were were lost 25 years ago was lack of federal regulation of corporations. Since Hillary has already said she wants to force mortgage lenders to freeze rates of existing and future loans for five years, it's not hard to imagine that she might propose one day to forbid companies from firing people or moving jobs elsewhere in the country or the world. I mean, she actually did propose, back in the day, that you and I not be allowed to choose our own doctor. What level of coercive regulation could possibly be considered a stretch for her to embrace?

It has been commented exhaustively across the blogosphere and the MSM commenti that there's not a dime's worth of difference in the political ideology of Hillary and Barack. True that, and it's Euro-style socialism through and through.

But what I find especially disturbing in Obama's remarks, that I have not seen in Mrs. Clinton's ever, is the ideal of the "perfectibility of man." This is the hoariest socialist doctrine of all, explicit in Marxism and later, Marxism-Leninism. This is an idea so utterly vacuous and foolish that not even the Euro socialist governments cleave to it, if they ever did, except in Eastern Europe, and then only when they were communist. Clearly implicit on Obama's remarks is the idea that since racism, religion et. al., arise from the lack of government regulation, they can be expunged by more of it.

You see, we can all become virtuous if only the government controlled our lives.

Not only are Obama's remarks a clarion call to socialism, they also objectify the people he refers to. He dismissed them as free, moral agents in their own right. Gosh, it's no wonder those white people hate blacks and Hispanics, go to church and buy guns and feel angry - they can't help it. The government has let them down. But with proper government regulation, intervention, activism (oh, just pick your own name), then they won't be racists, religious, xenophobic, or own guns.

It gets worse:

“It comes off very badly,” Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers said of the small-town America remarks. “They are things that I think in a liberal world sound totally normal, and outside of that world I don’t know that he appreciates how it sounds. And it just sounds very elitist, and it sounds like he’s looking down on people.”

Emphasis added. (I except WOC's own Armed Liberal from Ms. Powers' observation, but that a Democratic "strategist" said it is pretty revealing, I think.) That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Update: What a coincicdence - Armed Liberal and I were apparently writing on this same topic at the same time. His excellent post date-times later than mine, so click here. Excerpt:

Obama believes that the people he's discussing - poorer, gun-owning, church-going economic left-behinds in rural America are bitter and negative toward government because it hasn't delivered. There's an alternate hypothesis, which is that they don't think it's supposed to. That there are a solid body of Americans who believe - with whatever justification or historical validity - that government's role is to leave them alone. I'll bet that people who believe those things tend to migrate away from major cities or never move to them, tend to go to church a lot, believe in guns, and in American culture. They are - wait for it - culturally conservative.

But in Obamaland, that's a bad thing. Read the whole thing.

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Comments

#1 from Marcus Vitruvius at 6:23 am on Apr 13, 2008

He dismissed them as free, moral agents in their own right.

Yes. That, right there, hits the nail directly on the head. The irony is that I have a lot of friends on the left, for whom the notion of agency is near and dear to their hearts. I could be wrong-- I hope to be proven wrong-- but I don't think many of them will frame the issue this way on their own, or agree with it if presented that way.

#2 from Max at 7:29 pm on Apr 13, 2008

The government delivers substantially less than it takes. It has to be that way. The government produces nothing so, everything it has is taken from someone and delivered to someomne less expenses and flat out waste.

Understanding this basic fact of government is what separates humans from liberals.

#3 from david at 8:08 pm on Apr 13, 2008

Nice reading your stuff. Thank your eldest for me by the way, I hope he is doing well.

#4 from Wildmonk at 11:01 pm on Apr 13, 2008

Marcus Vitruvius, in talking about how Obama seems to ignore the agency of those he proposes to help, writes: "The irony is that I have a lot of friends on the left, for whom the notion of agency is near and dear to their hearts."

Here is how this seeming irony gets, well, "ironed out." The usual next step in progressive reasoning is that: "People cannot exercise their agency unless they are shielded from coercion from people more powerful." That is, they get past the whole agency problem by arguing that freedom, understood as freedom from government compulsion, isn't enough. What good is it to be "free" if Capitalists have monopolized the means of production so completely that you cannot feed yourself?

Thus, to be truly "free" you must be beyond want. Otherwise, your physical needs compel you to sell your labor, thus abridging your freedom.

Now, there are many reasons why Conservative Intellectuals believe that the integrity of this line of reasoning is flawed but that doesn't change the fact that Liberals will see no problem with Obama's assumptions.

#5 from Paden Cash at 2:05 am on Apr 14, 2008

A word from one of the unfortunates that Obama (as well as everyone else here is talking about). I haven't the intellectual acumen to form 2nd and 3rd party arguments about my lot in life. I essentially agree with what Mr. Sensing and Armed Liberal are saying. It took me most of my life to work out what you have been saying, but I did. What's more, I am angry and resentful of liberals. The conservatives said hard work and dedication will get you the American dream. Liberals said let us do it for you. I am still waiting, but not holding my breath. While I am angry with the gop for spending like drunken democrats, I have a sense of betrayal with the Democrat party. The gop may be venal but from my perspective the dems are lying elitists who have used and discarded me. I would like nothing better than for the government to leave me alone. I lived most of my adult life in Houston and Los Angeles. Now I live in Appalachia and can't see my nearest neighbor. I have guns and am very patriotic. Good guess armed lib.

P.S. Agnostic, otherwise you nailed me. Not in a gay way. heh

#6 from Marcus Vitruvius at 3:38 am on Apr 14, 2008

Wildmonk:

And that is, in fact, not a completely stupid argument. It's not a perfect argument, and I don't find it persuasive enough to apply in all circumstances, but it is a good enough argument to prevent me from buying into wholesale radical objectivism, for instance. It is hard to be a perfectly free moral agent when you are literally starving, because it is even harder to be a perfectly free moral agent after you've starved to death.

However, we're not talking about the starving man stealing food dilemma. We're talking about the starving man becoming a religiously intolerant racist. These are vastly different propositions. One impels a man toward a particular action necessary to continue his life, without which no actions, moral or immoral, are possible. The other changes a man such that his entire outlook is immoral in ways that have nothing to do with his plight.

#7 from Hope at 6:00 pm on May 02, 2008

Hasn't Obama been to the Bible Belt?: Mega churches with packed parking lots, supermarkets advertising rifles, Christian radio and billboards. These people simply have a different lifestyle and world view. To demean them rather than court them is political suicide. But Obama is Oprah.