Because of this story at Politico (and others at places to which, as matter of personal preference, not to be confused with editorial policy, I will not link) Barack Obama is getting hammered today. If you clicked the previous link, you’ve learned the cruel truth: Senator Obama has attacked gun owners and people of faith. Worse still, he held a fundraiser in San Francisco. Grab your kids, people, teh gayz are coming.
Hillary Clinton seized on these comments, eager to distance herself from what must have seemed to her like the news cycle from hell. First, the story of Mark Penn’s double dipping: drawing a salary from Clinton (who, while in Pennsylvania and Ohio at least, has found blue-collar religion: hostility to free trade) while also on the payroll of trade-deal-seeking Colombia. And second, Bill Clinton’s latest episode of unforced fabulism, in which he doubled back to his wife’s exaggerated exploits in Tuzla while she served as first lady. Obama’s remarks, then, allowed Senator Clinton to paint him as, gasp, “elitist.” And, as ABC news reports, with John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” blaring in the background, Clinton talked to an audience in a Pennsylvania factory about her “Midwestern values,” “unshakeable faith in America” (Reverend Wright, anyone?), and respect for gun rights and religion. From all of the above we learn, yet again, that Hillary Clinton has really terrible taste in music.
The McCain camp also welcomed Obama’s remarks. Senator McCain had, of late, made a series of calamitous gaffes about the mortgage crisis, while demonstrating, for the umpteenth time, that he’s either addled or ignorant by repeatedly confusing Sunnis and Shi’as. Accordingly, as with Senator Clinton so too with Senator McCain: Obama’s remarks offered a chance to change the subject. And so, McCain’s spokesman, Steve Schmidt, labeled Senator Obama “elitist.” It’s eerie the way the McCain and Clinton camps seem to be sharing talking points lately. In the same statement, Schmidt suggested, and you may want to put on a raincoat lest you become soaked by the cascading irony, that: “It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.” If I start counting the ways that John McCain is out of touch with average Americans, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop before November. But hey, while we’re here, let’s begin with McCain’s age: he’s 71 and will turn 72 before the election. The average American, it seems, is only 54 years old. McCain is extremely wizened elderly hoary venerable.
Reading about all of this yesterday, my first reaction was: this is business as usual. Campaigns rip quotes, absent context, from opponents’ stump speeches all the time. Whatever. It’s up to the voters to take the time to do their homework. But then I placed the Clinton camp’s comments in the context of an ongoing effort to argue that Barack Obama can’t win the general election. Remember, this gambit has been unspooling for weeks now; for a long time, it was an argument in search of evidence. Then Reverend Wright’s comments ostensibly proved the point. But Obama transfigured that crisis into a bump at the polls. So now the Clinton camp claims Obama won’t be able to win Pennsylvania in November, because, you know, he hates working-class whites. And without Pennsylvania’s — or Ohio’s, I suppose — working-class white people, he can’t beat McCain come November. Which is why the superdelegates must support Senator Clinton and her cheeseball soundtrack.
All of which leaves me wondering: for reals, has this sort of thing happened before in a modern Democratic primary? And by “this sort of thing,” I mean one candidate saying, explicitly, of his or her opponent: “he can’t beat the Republican nominee in the general election.” I suspect that the answer must be yes. But I think the argument has always been subtler than this: “I’m more electable,” rather than “he can’t be elected.” That’s a distinction with a difference, if you see what I mean. And coming on the heels of Senator Clinton’s still-impossible-to-fathom, “Senator McCain and I are the only candidates left who pass the Commander in Chief threshold,” I suppose I’m much more suspicious of Clinton’s latest attack than I would be otherwise.
Returning to the issue of context, Obama’s comments, beyond just the gotcha pull quote, are, if politically imperfect (okay, that’s generous), heartening. Roll tape:
Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.
But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.
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. 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.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.
As the EotAW continues its celebration of the New Deal’s 75th anniversary, I’m pleased that the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is reminding working-class whites, particularly those who identify as Reagan Democrats, that government can be a force for good. Very little that progressives care about will change for the better until this message gets through. So yes, Obama could have crafted his rhetoric – especially the word “bitter” – more carefully. But the context in which he used that word matters. So, too, does the context in which Obama’s rhetoric has been attacked.
Although I agree with Ezra Klein and Oliver Willis that this absurd mess can be traced back to bored journalists manufacturing a scandal so they have something to write about, I also think the story would have died a quick death had the Clinton campaign not used heroic measures to keep its feeble heart beating (the story’s, not the campaign’s, though that too). It seems that Senator Clinton is ready to poison the well, or scorch the earth, or whatever metaphor you prefer, to secure the nomination. That said, Theda Skocpol has it right: these tactics are as small as they are short-sighted. Unless, that is, you go in for conspiracy theories and think Clinton is setting the stage to run against President McCain four years from now, long after a disgraced Barack Obama, having lost the coming election, slinks from the limelight. I’m not ready to believe that just yet. But in the meantime, Senator Obama, once again, responded quickly to his critics. He asked the voters to pay attention to context. In the words of Ogged, over at Unfogged: “Good luck, man. You’re going to need it.”
Via Cogitamus.
The Edge of the American West 
27 comments
April 14, 2008 at 12:01 am
Ben Alpers
Has this sort of thing happened before in a modern Democratic primary?
The short answer is “yes.” This was exactly what was said about Jesse Jackson in 1988. See, for example, this E.J. Dionne news analysis piece from the New York Times, March 29, 1988. Almost makes you wonder if “unelectable” is a codeword for something…
On the other hand, the 1972 primary election might also provide an example of this, but I’ve yet to locate a smoking gun. Certainly by the fall of 1972 there was a pretty well articulated Democrats for Nixon movement opposing McGovern. But did any of McGovern’s rivals (Scoop Jackson, perhaps?) suggest that McGovern was unelectable during the campaign? If Rick Perlstein reads this blog, he could probably provide an answer.
Another example: Howard Dean in 2004. Throughout the fall of 2003, as Dean was emerging as a surprise frontrunner, Democratic leaders and consultants were nursing the unelectable meme. Here’s a quote from an unnamed, putatively neutral Democratic consultant (source is Jodi Wilgoren’s October 25, 2003 NYT piece “Talking Like a Firebrand” to which I won’t link in order to avoid having my comment moderated):
This meme was carefully nurtured over the next several months. One reason that the “Dean Scream” proved so devastating to his campaign is that it fit this emerging narrative perfectly.
April 14, 2008 at 12:03 am
Ben Alpers
In my second paragraph above, I meant to write:
“Did any of the McGovern’s rivals…suggest that McGovern was unelectable during the primary campaign?”
April 14, 2008 at 12:31 am
Ben Alpers
One final thought about this….
As I was writing my above comment, I began to think: this sort of thing is actually very typical of modern, Democratic presidential primaries. But it’s not very typical of modern Republican presidential primaries.
While Democrats seem to spend a lot of time wringing their hands over “electability” and the specters of ’68 and ’72, Republicans never talk like this during their contested primary races. The notion that Republicans might like someone, but that he would be unacceptable to the broader electorate never seems to come up.
But then I remembered 1980. This was exactly what Reagan’s Republican opponents said about him that year. And just as Democrats today–sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly–raise the specter of 1972, the memory of 1964 was once a major issue in the GOP.
Here’s an example of this from 1976 (“Ford, Stumping in Ohio, Warns G.O.P. of a ‘Debacle’ if Reagan is Nominated,” New York Times, June 8, 1976):
But this sort of thing, as far as I can tell, disappeared from Republican primary campaign rhetoric after Reagan’s victory in 1980.
So perhaps the silver lining for the Democrats to this nonsense from the Clinton campaign is that if and when Barack Obama is elected president, that party, too, will finally take the circular firing squad of “electability” out of its primary campaign rhetoric.
April 14, 2008 at 3:32 am
drip
Democrats seem to spend a lot of time wringing their hands over “electability”. Just so. And they use republican talking points to do it. The vast majority of the country believes that the criminals running the country have made us poorer, more vulnerable and ill-prepared for the future. The candidates should be arguing over who will appoint the toughest special prosecutors and cooperating most with Congressional committees investigating war profiteers. They should be contrasting the past with their future. As for silver linings, well, I’d settle for mylar to contain the blather at this point.
April 14, 2008 at 4:53 am
wren
Vade retro Satana! Nunquam suade mihi vana! Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!
April 14, 2008 at 5:49 am
Gene O'Grady
The real unspeakable truth behind Obama’s perfectly correct statement is the qualitative way in which things like guns and church have changed in significance, not for the better, in rural, or blue-collar, or whatever America. Many fewer people hunt nowadays, but many more men (and a few women) “shoot,” or more significantly show off and brag about their guns as emblems of masculinity or power or just a gesture of defiance. My father, who hunted ducks for sixty years (and memorably said that his one deer hunting trip was his last because the last thing he needed to be doing was tromping around in the brush with a bunch of drunks carrying rifles) grew appalled in his last years at the non-hunting gun culture.
And religion has seen similar changes. My once-Baptist wife simply finds the church of her youth unrecognizable, and is embarrassed by decline in clergy from the thoroughly impressive man who baptised her fifty years ago to the mediocrities driven by sentiment cynicism and marketing who fill the pulpits nowadays. On a national scale one sees the decline from the impressive but flawed Billy Graham to the televangelists and worse. One way of expressing that decline is that Graham was capable of speaking honestly and perceptively about his own flaws, whereas the Falwells and Robertsons seem to think they will be saved by mock horror at some homosexual’s sins.
In both these ways, and others one could point to, the things Obama was talking about have degenerated from traditions within a living, and demanding culture, to cheap and deadly security blankets.
April 14, 2008 at 6:57 am
Benjamin Baxter
What frustrates me is that I’m not sure this mythical, idyllic small-town America exists outside The Andy Griffith Show, yet Sen. Clinton explicitly uses this image to promote her campaign.
April 14, 2008 at 7:11 am
Galvinji
The headline of this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer reads “Obama Goes on Offensive” and is followed by a story about Obama castigating Clinton for using Republican talking points — he expects McCain and his people to make these criticisms, but he’s “disappointed” to hear Hillary Clinton saying these things. I’d link to the story but am deathly afraid of winding up in the spam queue. So maybe the press backlash has begun (although the Inky, which features Rick Santorum as an op-ed columnist, is perhaps not the best example of the press these days).
And is there anything more ridiculous than Hillary Clinton talking about gun rights and rhapsodizing over how her grandfather taught her how to shoot? It’s like Mark Penn was never fired… Does she pay attention to the things that comes out of her mouth?
What frustrates me is that I’m not sure this mythical, idyllic small-town America exists outside The Andy Griffith Show
You’d be surprised. The suburb where I live — which borders on the city of Philadelphia — features a July 4th parade, volunteer fireman, a community association, the whole nine yards. One of my neighbors once described moving here and saying to her husband, “Fred, we’ve moved to Mayberry.”
If lawn signs and vote canvassers are any indication, this is Obama country.
April 14, 2008 at 7:19 am
PorJ
All of which leaves me wondering: for reals, has this sort of thing happened before in a modern Democratic primary? And by “this sort of thing,” I mean one candidate saying, explicitly, of his or her opponent: “he can’t beat the Republican nominee in the general election.”
Ben beat me to it. The one that jumps out is Reagan in 1976 (and 1980, actually). You shouldn’t go past ’72 because of the rule changes (primaries, pre: 1972 were *relatively* problematic).
Actually, this fight annoys me for another reason: if we’re arguing about religion’s proper role amongst the American citizenry (as an ameliorative?), and we’re fighting to be absolutists on the 2nd Amendment, then we’re living in GW Bush’s America. Ari has asked several times about Bush’s legacy as a “failed” president, but I look at the context of the DEMOCRATIC primary and all I see is the way Bush (and Rove) (building upon 1994) successfully moved (or intensified the move) of the American polity. I was (and am still hoping) that Obama blows up the system and restores a more centrist dynamic. But if its Hillary v. McCain, then George Bush’s legacy is more secure than Ari thinks (Iraq included). My (depressed) 2 cents.
April 14, 2008 at 8:20 am
Marichiweu
So yes, Obama could have crafted his rhetoric – especially the word “bitter” – more carefully.
Actually, I suspect “bitter” is not really the problem. Clinton and McCain will try to suggest otherwise, but for anyone NOT totally out of touch with the average American, “bitter” is a no-brainer. Of course we’re bitter, after devastating government fuckups #1, 2 and 3 etc. I think the problematic word is “clinging.” Clinton was entirely right that nobody thinks of their support for gun ownership or religious practice as “clinging,” as a fear-based reaction. And being told that it is, that their convictions are actually false consciousness, pisses people off. That’s the hard part. Of course, C and McC are making the most of that, and working hard to create pissed-offedness where very little probably existed, but that’s politics.
April 14, 2008 at 8:46 am
Jay
What’s weird to me is that he’s clearly talking about single-issue voters. There’s video of him on Charlie Rose talking about the same thing back in 2004. From the reaction to his comment you’d swear that no one – including the pundits who talk about them – had ever heard the terms “wedge-issue” or “single-issue voter” before.
April 14, 2008 at 8:55 am
Ben Alpers
Actually, this fight annoys me for another reason: if we’re arguing about religion’s proper role amongst the American citizenry (as an ameliorative?), and we’re fighting to be absolutists on the 2nd Amendment, then we’re living in GW Bush’s America. Ari has asked several times about Bush’s legacy as a “failed” president, but I look at the context of the DEMOCRATIC primary and all I see is the way Bush (and Rove) (building upon 1994) successfully moved (or intensified the move) of the American polity.
Intensified, perhaps. But I think primary blame for the Democrats’ behaving like this lies with Bill Clinton, with large assists from Dick Morris and David Gergen. Rove and Bush may have been building upon 1994, but 1992 is the key year.
Clinton:Reagan::Ike:FDR
April 14, 2008 at 9:47 am
KRK
I agree with the commenter above that, despite all the fluff about “bitter,” that’s not really the problem. (I am personally baffled by the suggestion that “bitter” connotes something derogatory or weak-willed about the one who is embittered. Based on most responses in the media and around the intertubes, people don’t seem to consider it an insult, more like “Hell yes, I’m bitter.” See also: http://www.bittervoters.org.)
So it’s “cling” that really has the potential to cause Obama some problems, but he did an excellent job of explaining his point last night at the beginning of his half of the Compassion Forum at Messiah College. (On youtube & probably elsewhere, no linky for fear of the wrath of WordPress.) Again, “cling” doesn’t connote weakness on the part of the one who clings, but rather holding fast to the only things that still seem reliable.
April 14, 2008 at 9:57 am
ari
People, I now check the spam queue at least three or four times per day. All legitimate comments will be rescued, I assure you, in due time.
April 14, 2008 at 10:25 am
Galvinji
People, I now check the spam queue at least three or four times per day. All legitimate comments will be rescued, I assure you, in due time.
Well, in that case, this is the front-page story in the Inquirer I referred to above.
Meanwhile, Senator Clinton, in her continuing effort to prove she is a regular guy, is going on sports talk radio today.
April 14, 2008 at 10:55 am
bitchphd
You know, much like the Wright controversy, my basic reaction is “the man is speaking truth.”
And the opposing candidates are trying to make it a political liability to do so. Kinda sums it all up.
April 14, 2008 at 11:02 am
bitchphd
From Galvinji’s link: Analysts said that uproar hurt Obama with blue-collar voters and let his political opponents portray him as a snob.
“A lot of Pennsylvania Democrats have grown leery, or skeptical, that the rest of the Democratic Party understands their values and lives,”
Leery, or skeptical. Or, you might even say, “bitter.”
April 14, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Gene O'Grady
KRK,
I think “cling” is completely accurate in at least one sense. As these rural communities come under assault from the elite, or globalization, or politicians who think they don’t matter (I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, by the way), thinks like owning a gun or going to denominationally unaffiated church without a professional clergy go from things that are just part of life to things that people cling to to give them an identity in an increasingly hostile world. I’d rather they’d kept the community baseall teams and brass bands that have disappeared from the dying Oregon logging towns but were a center of community identity a hundred years ago. But I don’t get to choose.
April 14, 2008 at 4:38 pm
hairybeast
The Beast is terribly amused that the party of “Racial Code Words” suddenly discovers the importance of context! Where was context when Obama pilloried Bill Clinton for what could be read into his “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in 1984 and 1988” statement? Where was context when they savaged Geraldine Ferraro?
In the end, the slack you get is equal to the slack you cut.
April 14, 2008 at 5:32 pm
urbino
People, I now check the spam queue at least three or four times per day.
Also, in The Urbino’s experience as both a commenter and an administrator on WordPress blogs, one link in a comment virtually never causes a problem. Two is a gray area. When you get up to 3, you’re pushing your luck.
April 14, 2008 at 5:37 pm
urbino
On the bitterness rhubarb, I think Josh Marshall got to the marrow when he pointed out that the whole rhubarb consists of a bunch of wealthy, urban, highly educated whites telling each other what poor, rural, poorly educated whites think and feel.
The fact is, none of them knows the first thing about poor rural whites, nor gives a good goddam about them.
April 14, 2008 at 5:52 pm
ari
hairybeast, I have no idea if your comment is sarcastic or serious. Assuming it’s the former, I don’t remember Senator Obama saying much about Bill’s invocation of Jesse Jackson’s performance in South Carolina. In fact, Obama has made a point of minimizing discussions of race — except, of course, in the wake of Senator Clinton’s decision to hammer him about Reverend Wright’s sermons. And, if you really want to play this out, we can put Bill’s comments about Jackson into the context of a campaign that has, from the run-up to South Carolina through the Wright nonsense, engaged in race-baiting. That doesn’t strike me as a flattering context for Senator Clinton, but so be it.
April 14, 2008 at 6:00 pm
bitchphd
As these rural communities come under assault from the elite, or globalization, or politicians who think they don’t matter . . . thinks like owning a gun [become] things that people cling to to give them an identity in an increasingly hostile world.
Indeed, particularly as a fair number of the single-issue gun voters will argue that their guns are, in fact, a defense against the tyranny of the state, that gun control laws are an attempt to enslave the people, etc.
April 14, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Gene O'Grady
It may be time for Ms. B to set me straight again, but my sense is that the notion that guns will defend anybody against the state strikes me as suburban/libertarian rather than rural/conservative.
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