They’re full of leftist cant.
Like Barack Obama, who, in his most annoyingly pedantic way, tried to explain one group of Americans to another —and was recorded by a reporter for the HuffPo [e.a.]:
[W]hen he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot from a Marin County. “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,” Obama said. “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.”
Mayhill Fowler, writing in the HuffPo, is quite gentle in her criticism, considering the enormity of Obama’s gaffe (which doesn’t event qualify as a Kinsley Gaffe, because Obama isn’t telling the truth—he’s telling the truth according to lefty prejudice, and he feeds into each and every lefty prejudice):
Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of creamy Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia.
I’m not sure this is what at least this lot of Californians needed to hear about Pennsylvanians. Such phrases can reinforce negative stereotypes among Californians, who are a people in a state already surfeited with a smug sense of superiority and, as an ironic consequence, a parochialism and insularity at odds with the innovation, prosperity and openness for which California is rightly known.
This story is all over the internet, as you can see — Memeorandum at 11 p.m. tonight.
It was all over CNN tonight, and Fox of course. I didn’t bother to watch MSNBC, but apparently Chris Matthews was dissing Obama’s awkwardness with the working class even before this latest foot-in-mouth remark.
Marc Ambinder quotes Obama’s fierce spin as he answers the attacks
of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.
and McCain’s answer to Obama’s furious effort to dig himself out of his political grave:
“Instead of apologizing to small town Americans for dismissing their values, Barack Obama arrogantly tried to spin his way out of his outrageous San Francisco remarks. Only an elitist who attributes religious faith and gun ownership to bitterness would think that tax cuts for the rich include families who make $75,000 per year. Only an elitist would say that people vote their values only out of frustration. Barack Obama thinks he knows your hopes and fears better than you do. You can’t be more out of touch than that.
What fun!
