Obama’s “bitter” pill
All right, it’s been a few weeks since I really had something to say, but this last weekend has stirred my muse once more.
By now most of my American readers will have heard the accusations leveled at Senator Obama for his alleged “elitism,” stemming from a comment he made about economics and the effects a long-term loss of opportunity have on those experiencing it:
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 toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Anyone not running for president and not living the high life can see immediately that Obama has touched on yet another truth: people with no money and no prospects get pissed off, and they need someone to get pissed off at. This isn’t exactly a revelation; we’ve all experienced this in ourselves to one degree or another.
And step back for a moment and think about this: can anyone imagine Senators Clinton and McCain having the cojones to confront an unpleasant truth like this and talk to their constituents about it like they have a modicum of intelligence?
I can’t, yet Obama did the same thing in his “More Perfect Union” speech on racial divisiveness in America (watch it if you haven’t, and see someone who hints at the courage of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin), and in many other speeches and comments. As Bitter Jon says at his site Bitter Voters for Obama:
One of the most refreshing things about Barack Obama is his fearlessness when it comes to voicing a hard truth. It’s an ice cold glass of unsweetened lemonade: hard to swallow, but unmistakably pure. The truth is, if you aren’t bitter, you’re probably voting for someone who is going to give us more of what we’ve been getting all along. And all Clinton and McCain seem to be saying is “Let them eat Lemons.”
I may not agree with Obama on everything, but there is an edge to him, unpolished and forthright, not unprincipled and smoothed over like other politicians who appear subject to the whims of voters and media.
Also, let us not overlook the blatant hypocrisy of two very well-heeled multimillionaires accusing someone of Obama’s modest income and bootstrapped origins of being out of touch with mainstream, working class Americans.
I applaud him for this, and I can see that come November, this race will boil down to one thing: whether people are so fed up with the direction of this country that they finally take a true interest in debating actual, important issues that hearken back to the debates of the Revolution and our very reason for sundering our ties to Great Britain all those years ago, or whether they lack the energy to rise up and break the hold that television and sound-bite pundits have over them, sinking us further into the moral, social, and economic quagmire in which we now reside.
I hope it’s the former, and I mean for my words here to push for that, but my hope remains dim.
As an aside, please enjoy Obama himself pointing out McCain and especially Hillary’s peacock feathers in this highly entertaining speech he gave on Sunday in Steelton, PA. Especially amusing is the reference to Hillary in a duck blind.
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I think that Obama was trying to say that it’s the politicians and spinmeisters who tell voters to vote values. There’s a book - a couple of years old now - about how folks in Kansas were (are) persuaded to vote against their economic interests. And, of course, it’s not just in Kansas that this happens.
Seems odd (maybe) that not many commentators get this. Just shows you how difficult it is to break from tradition, tradition being Gotcha! politics and hoodwinking voters.
Sometimes people get what they deserve. Folks who fall for this sort of stuff are mentally lazy and go for simplicity over complexity every time. Dumb.
And BO could have been more explicit.