Time for Another Obama Speech
or
Obama explains to San Francisco liberals why racist, gun-humping Jesus jumpers in fly-over country are too stupid to vote their own interest
UPDATE: According to Jennifer Rubin, the press, for several reasons, isn’t letting Obama off the hook. My guess is that they just love to build up and tear down. Beatify you this week, crucify you next week, resurrect you the following week etc. I think Obama is going to be so hurt this time – “his cross was rather bloody, he could hardly roll his stone.”
Uh oh, time for another Lincolnesque speech so Obama can explain how we all need to get over our bigotry and racism after he gets caught behaving like a racist. Again.
Obama isn’t stupid: he just doesn’t understand normal people
He’s so surrounded with elitist liberals, and has been, in academia and politics for so long, that he has absolutely no idea how what he said is divisive, condescending and asinine.
He and his spinners (including the CNN team led by Jeffrey Toobin who tried to gloss this over) are equally clueless. Obama is so clueless he can’t figure out the right way to spin out of this tailspin. He doesn’t know where he’s wrong. He thinks he erred just by saying they are bitter, I guess.
I have to explain this, because most commentators, and indeed Hillary and McCain, in their attack on Obama, miss it too. Its not that he just said Pennsylvanians are bitter. Maybe they are.
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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.
The shitty point he’s trying to make is the only reason people cling to religion or guns or bigotry (lumping them all in together is asinine enough) is because they have economic hard times. As if, when things are good, like they are for him and his wife, people don’t need to cling to redneck gun obsessiveness or old timey religion or hating on the dirty fucking Mexicans. They would all be gun control supporting secular humanists who support amnesty, if economic times weren’t so God damned hard! And its the Republicans’ fault!
So gunnuttery, religion extremist and all racism is a product of Republican economics, pure and simple, and don’t try to blame it on cyclical economic trends either.
Obama may have finally killed his campaign. I hope so. I genuinely think Hillary would be better for the country than Obama, who is starting to really sound like a fucking asshole. All this Messiah shit has gone to his head in a big way.
John Podheretz gets it:
Well, it has finally happened. Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do — he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism. Obama’s statement today that small-town folk “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” may be the most distilled example of this train of thought I’ve ever seen
and the always great Tim Maguire
WORK THAT SHOVEL: Barack keeps digging in this video from Hot Air. Slightly scary but mostly funny bit – his big applause line, twice, is (roughly) “People are bitter, and they ought to be.” Yeah, let’s hear it for bitter! Sounds like a winning platform – Mourning in America. That’ll nail down the Nutroots, as if they weren’t already nailed down… now if only the rest of the country could get on board the Bitterness Express.
IT’S ABOUT JUDGMENT: Barack routinely lauds his good judgment in wanting to stay out of Iraq. Now let’s see if he stays out of Pennsylvania.
DROLLERYS: Glenn’s got ’em.
HELPFUL, BUT NOT: Marc Ambinder psychoanalyzes Obama and tells us what he really meant. Well, fine, but no matter how well-intentioned and sincere Obama may have been, when a big government Harvard lib explains to working class people that they are bitter because government has failed them and consequently they have taken refuge in guns, religion, and racism, it sounds condescending. Mainly because it is.
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