If I had to critique Obama's controversial San Francisco speech, I'd say he was mostly wrong, but he was certainly sniffing around the edges of a big, uncomfortable truth that most politicians have turned their noses away from for the past 30 years.
Lowry is right that many Americans simply like owning guns and/or hunting. And many Americans are simply religious, since that is how they were raised, and how their parents and parents' parents were raised. America has been a gun-toting, God-fearing country from the start.
But America has not always been a paranoid, angry, and deluded gun-toting, God-fearing country. That is what's different today.
Unfortunately, the Rust Belt's gun-loving Christians for whom Obama's heart bleeds don't want to hear his message. They distrust populists. For them "liberal" is a dirty, four-letter word. Worst of all, they've been socialized to believe that if you're rich, it must be because you were smarter or worked harder than everybody else; and if you're too poor to pay the bills and put your kids through school, it's because you were dumb or lazy. And that is their downfall. They've swallowed the "land of opportunity" Kool-Aid.
So all that's left is to blame their economic plight on welfare-collecting blacks and Mexicans, and damned liberals in Washington giving welfare (and affirmative action) to said blacks and Mexicans.
That is why they will vote for a guy like McCain who cuts taxes for the rich and corporations even as he admits that "those manufacturing jobs are not coming back" to America, who said it would be "fine by me" to keep their enlisted children in Iraq for "100 years," who will side with Wall Street and K Street every time to the detriment of working class interests, rather than vote for a "liberal" like Obama who wants to give them affordable health care and better education and pay for it by raising taxes on the rich and U.S.-based corporations who boost their stock price by exporting American jobs.
Call me an elitist, call me a pessimist who "hates America," but I think things will have to get even worse and stay that way before the God & Guns crowd finally wises up.
Conservatives like Bush & Cheney may hunt on occasion, they may like their BBQ, they may speak in simple, declarative sentences -- but they still wipe their asses with $100 bills, and they have enough money to never work another day in their lives, and to ensure the same for their children and grandchildren. Yet most God-fearing Americans trust an "average" guy like GW Bush over some damned lib'rul "elitist." Go figure.
(BTW, on the "elitist" scale, does it make any difference that out of the 3 presidential candidates Obama is the poorest? Guess not. Elitism must be defined by your state of mind, not your income.)
The Underside of Hope
By Rich Lowry
April 15, 2008 | National Review
Barrack Obama was caught saying something he believes.
At a San Francisco fundraiser, away from the prying eyes of the press, Obama reflected on why small-town voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest seem resistant to his appeal. He said those areas had lost jobs for 25 years. Therefore, people "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."
Obama has apologized for his phrasing while defending the substance of his statement. And why not? He was retailing an article of left-wing orthodoxy going back centuries: that the working class is distracted by religion and other peripheral concerns from focusing on its economic interests and embracing socialism.
Versions of Obama's insight have been expounded by a world-famous 19th-century economist (Karl Marx), by a 1960s New Left philosopher (Herbert Marcuse) and by a best-selling contemporary liberal writer (Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas?), among many others. It's such a commonplace that Bubba-friendly Bill Clinton wrote in his memoir that Republicans wanted to undermine confidence in government so voters would be more receptive to "their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns."
At bottom, this is a profoundly insulting point of view. Consider Obama's formulation. He makes it sound like no one would be a hunter or a Christian absent economic distress, that economic circumstances drive people into such atavistic habits. Has he considered that some people simply enjoy hunting? And view the right to bear arms as a guarantor of American liberty? As they used to say, "God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal."
The assumption is that only liberal attitudes are normal and well-adjusted: If only these small-town people could earn more income, get an advanced degree, and move to a major metropolitan area, then they could shed their chrysalis of social conservatism.
Obama prides himself on his civility, but it has to go much deeper than dulcet rhetoric. A fundamental courtesy of political debate is to meet the other side on its own terms. If someone says he cares about gun rights, it's rude to insist: "No, you don't. It's the minimum wage that you really care about, and you'd know it if you were more self-aware." But Democrats have an uncontrollable reflex to do just that. Since the McGovernite takeover of their party, they have struggled to work up enthusiasm for Middle American mores. (Since 1980, only Bill Clinton managed it, which is why he was the only Democrat elected president in three decades.)
When the liberal reflex is coupled with a Ivy League–educated candidate who seems personally remote and uncomfortable with everyday American activities, it's electoral poison. After the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry, Republicans had to be wondering, "Could Democrats possibly nominate yet another candidate easily portrayed as an out-of-touch elitist?" With Obama, Democrats appear to be responding with a resounding "Yes, we can!"
Obama brings a special measure of arrogance to the standard liberal critique of Middle America. His candidacy has always been characterized by two paradoxes. How can he be so hopeful at the same time he and his wife, Michelle, portray America as a sink-pit of despair? And how can he claim to be a uniter when he's an orthodox liberal who has risked little or nothing for bipartisan outreach?
Now, we know. Obama defines hopefulness as liberalism, specifically liberalism as embodied by himself. Only with Obama's election will America be redeemed from its harrowing false consciousness. We will be unified, not by Obama reaching out to conservatives to hammer out compromises, but by conservatives shedding their bitterness and becoming Obama liberals.
This is the underside of hope: arrogance fading into a secular messianism based on the fallenness of everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama. And it's small-town voters who are deluded?
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