Bitterness All Around
I think Hugh Hewitt has it nailed with his analysis of Barack Obama and the wildly distorted view the candidate holds about America and Americans in "flyover" country. Obama's "small town" remarks reflect a great deal about the beliefs Obama holds – and the contempt he feels – for small town America. That small town America includes pretty much all of the United States that is not in heavily urbanized areas.
There is a furious amount of spinning underway to save Senator Obama from the consequences of his candid assessment of Americans who don't live in the big cities or on the coasts. Howard Kurtz, for example, wants to narrow the impact of Obama's slight to just small town Keystone staters, and also asserts that everyone knows what Obama meant.
"And yet, most people (and most journalists) know what he was trying to say," Howard opined. "Not that small towners are gun nuts. Or religious nuts, not from a regular churchgoer. The senator was trying to say that these folks voted on social issues, distracting wedge issues, when their real problem was economic."
I don't think that's what he meant at all. He meant that most Americans are bitter. And Senator Obama agrees with me.
Senator Obama doubled down in this appearance at the Compassion Forum last night. (RCP has the transcript here.) In fielding a question about poverty from Jim Wallis, Obama added this explanation:
You know, this actually goes back to the earlier point you raised where Senator Clinton suggested I was being elitist when I said that people are frustrated and bitter. That is absolutely true. That's not just true in small towns. That's true in urban areas. That's true in my community of the South Side of Chicago. Because people feel forgotten. They feel as if nobody is listening in Washington.
Politics as therapy; Americans as bitter, failed people. That's the senator's story and he's sticking with it. It is the very vision that motivated Jimmy Carter's malaise speech –"It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession"– recycled and with a much better delivery.
But Obama's vision just isn't true for the majority of Americans. Most Americans are productive and generally happy; hard-working and actively involved in their communities through church and their children's schools.
Most Americans are generous, and favorably disposed towards strangers and eager to help the world.
Obama doesn't know this America, which is certainly the backbone of most suburbs, small towns and rural communities in flyover-country and, truth be told, on most of the coasts outside of the largest urban centers.
What Obama knows is the world in which he has lived, which is a strange combination of some of the toughest neighborhoods in the U.S. and its most elite institutions. He belonged to a church that indulged radical politics in its weekly bulletin and from its pulpit even as it struggled to help some devastated neighborhoods. He did so after attending and absorbing the attitudes of America's most elite law school and having been taught by its –mostly– hard-left professors. He does so from the lofty perch of the U.S. Senate. He's had a schizophrenic life that combined the toughest aspects of America and its most indulgent.
Do read it all. Hugh is on a roll here. And he's right. Non-urban America has a solid majority of helpful, hopeful people who do volunteer, who do try to make their town a better place. Are there bitter people? Of course. But most people are trying to do their best regardless of circumstances. My little town just moved its food pantry to a much larger building because the old one was too small to handle the donations. I used to pass the small, old pantry and there would be bags and boxes, bicycles and appliances, furniture and all manner of things piled high in front of the place waiting for it to open. Small town? Yes, about 5,000 people. Big hearts? No doubt at all. Bitterness? Not a trace.
When the school bands have concerts, it is standing room only in the high school gym. Tonight when I drove past the high school, all the lots were overflowing with cars. People had come to watch a soccer game. Small town America isn't the bitter, gun-crazed, overly-religious, xenophobic, anti-trade hinterland that Obama thinks it is. But go read Hugh's analysis of why Obama formed that distorted idea of the country he wants to lead.
By Andy, April 14, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
Isn’t Obama anti-trade? Why is he complaining that bitter people are anti-trade?
By Plumb Bob, April 15, 2008 @ 11:58 am
Obama is simply doing what he knows how to do. His training was as an urban radical activist, and taught him to draw out and amplify the rage of poor city dwellers to evoke directed activism. His elite education and upbringing taught him the theory, and his activism in the Chicago ghetto let him put it into practice.Middle America is a foreign land to him; he’s never been there, and knows nothing of it except what’s taught by neo-Marxists at American universities. That’s why it came out of his mouth; he simply had no notion that there was anything the least bit controversial about it, he’s never spent any time in a setting where that view of middle America was not taken for granted.
By martian, April 15, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
Plumb Bob makes some very valid points. For most of his adult life, the Obamessiah has associated with bitter people – just look at his church and minister. The only small towns he was probably ever in were one’s that he drove through on the way to somewhere else – somplace big and "important" – and I doubt he ever stopped other than to get gas or grab a lunch at a McDonald’s. I would be willing to bet he never spent more than an hour in any small town in middle America before he ran for his first national office and had to in order to campaign.