Barack Obama's Bitter Remarks

John McCain nailed it today when he called Barack Obama’s remarks “elitist” and went on to defend small town Americans as the “back bone of America.” “These are the people that produced a generation that made the world safe for democracy… These are the people that have fundamental cultural, spiritual, and other values that in my view have very little to do with their economic condition.”

Here’s how Howard Kurtz characterized Obama's remarks: Barack Obama seems to have stepped in it.

This time the offending words are not his former pastor's, but his own.

He sounds condescending toward small-town Pennsylvanians.

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Not good. A pretty significant blunder. Plays into the worst stereotype of him as an elitist who can't connect with the working classes. The guy who bowled 37.

But Michael Barone does a better job of getting at the snobbery of Obama than anyone else:

I believe that Obama's words are not really defensible—and are a major problem for him as the Democratic nominee. Per Ambinder, he is parroting the argument of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, but the problem is that Frank, like Obama in these comments at the Gettys' multimillion-dollar house, is hugely condescending to voters. Frank's argument is that low earners are too stupid to realize that their real interests are in voting Democratic and that they are hugely stupid for voting Republican because of their religious beliefs or their views on trade (which are presumably similar to Obama's truckling-to-the-AFL-CIO views—or Hillary Clinton's) or their views on gun control or their anti-immigrant sentiments.

Obama is saying this to an audience that is willing to subordinate its own short-term interest on economic issues (i.e., lower tax rates) to its belief in reproductive rights (which equals killing babies, in the views of some fellow citizens) or in welcoming immigrants (a lot easier to get household help; anybody check the green cards on the 2800 block of Broadway?) or whatever. The implication is that low earners are not to be counted as rational unless they vote on their short-term economic interest while high earners should be counted as not only rational but enlightened if they are willing to vote (and max out contributions to candidates) despite their short-term economic interest. (I am leaving aside the possibility that voters on each side might decide that their short-term economic interests are not in the long-term economic interests of either themselves or the nation in whose interests both sides try to serve.) Bribe those poor dummies to vote for our side, and we can get them to back reproductive rights and civil unions and defeat in Iraq and all the rest of the "progressive" agenda.

But why should we assume that low earners in Pennsylvania towns are any less idealistically motivated than the rich people who thronged to the billionaires' 2800 block of Broadway in San Francisco? My own sense is that they're both motivated by strong morally based beliefs and trying as best they can to act on them. The assumption behind Obama's words is that low earners in Pennsylvania are seething with anger because they cannot afford the designer clothes and exquisite interior decoration that people on the 2800 block of Broadway can afford. I doubt it. I've been in the Gordon and Ann Getty house—in 1984, at a dinner the week before the 1984 Democratic National Convention—and I can tell you that it is beautiful indeed. But I've been in a lot of other houses in America that are hugely less expensive and exquisitely decorated, and I think the people who live there don't believe they are hugely deprived or oppressed.

Meanwhile, the far left in the Ky blogosphere (for the most part... there are a few wise voices, like Rural Democrat) aren't in sync with Obama's backpedalling. They insist that rural voters either are bitter or should be bitter. This from the nuts who want to impeach the President and try him for war crimes. This is shaping up to be an election between a man who passionately loves his country warts and all. One who's shed more blood in its defense than any Presidential candidate in history. One who's suffered more for his nation than any candidate in history. And a man who's led a comparitively easy life, has enjoyed so much of this great nation's bounty, and still isn't happy with what he's received.