In case you haven’t thought of these yourself, the Politico offers 12 reasons to substantiate its claim that Obama’s Bitter Lesson in Political Etiquette will stick around to do a lot of damage.
1. It lets Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) off the mat2. If you are going to say something that makes you sound like a clueless liberal, don’t say it in San Francisco.
3. Some people actually use guns to hunt
4. Some people cling to religion not because they are bitter but because they believe it, and because faith in God gives them purpose and comfort. [Plus: you claim you are a religious Christian; is that because you are bitter? ---ed.]
5. Some hard-working Americans find it insulting when rich elites explain away things dear to their hearts as desperation.
6. It provides a handy excuse for people who were looking for a reason not to vote for Obama but don’t want to think of themselves as bigoted. [I'd word that differently: "It provides a believable rationale for people who were anti-Obama before, because they disagreed with his stated policies and found his manner deeply irritating. But that would be me. ---ed.]
7. It gives the Clinton campaign new arguments for trying to recruit superdelegates,
8. It helps Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) frame a potential race against Obama,
9. The comments play directly into an already-established narrative about his candidacy … that Obama has limited appeal.
10. The timing is terrible. With the Pennsylvania primary nine days off, late-deciding voters are starting to tune in.
11. The story did not have its roots in right-wing or conservative circles. It was published — and aggressively promoted — by The Huffington Post, a liberally oriented organization …
12. It undermines Democratic congressional candidates who had thought that Obama would make a stronger top for the ticket than Clinton. Already, Republican House candidates are challenging their Democratic opponents to renounce or embrace Obama’s remarks.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Newsweek investigates Obama’s claim that his superior knowledge of the world will make him a better president than his rivals.
I find it hard to believe this, but Barack Obama has singlehandedly managed to make Hillary Clinton believable as a solid Middle American. But suddenly she has become their voice.
Ann Althouse takes us back 40 years to remember the last time our country, supposedly in the name of Middle America, rejected an antiwar elitist in favor of a shifty-eyed, mean-spirited liar.
1969
The Middle Americans
Jan. 5, 1970
The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor. Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over—the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.
Of course the Clintons, being dyed-in-the-wool Democrats of 2008, would never make the arguments that Time magazine made in 1970 about Middle America. Indeed, I don’t see anyone making such arguments with a straight face anymore about “Middle Americans” reclaiming their birthright.
But John Harris and Jim VandeHei at the Politico do—finally!—spell out why Hillary Clinton has stayed in the race. Even if she can’t spell it out, they can: because it’s not about the primary; rather, it’s all about the general election, which Obama can’t win.
Rip off the duct tape and here is what they would say: Obama has serious problems with Jewish voters (goodbye Florida), working-class whites (goodbye Ohio) and Hispanics (goodbye, New Mexico).
Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.
This view has been an article of faith among Clinton advisers for months, but it got powerful new affirmation last week with Obama’s clumsy ruminations about why “bitter” small-town voters turn to guns and God.
There’s nothing to say that the Clintonites are right about Obama’s presumed vulnerabilities. But one argument seems indisputably true: Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges.
Most interestingly, Harris and VandeHei claim that Obama’s biggest vulnerabilities aren’t inherent to him (i.e., his “liberal ideology, exotic life story, …and elitist style”). Rather, they claim, he will become a victim of the same anti-liberal conspiracy that undid, via stealth, the previous two Democratic candidates for president [e.a.]:
Al Gore and John F. Kerry, were both military veterans, and both had been familiar, highly successful figures in national politics for more than two decades by the time they ran.
Both men lost control of their public images to the right-wing freak show — that network of operatives and commentators working mostly outside of the mainstream media — and ultimately lost their elections as many voters came to see them as elitist, out-of-touch, phony, and even unpatriotic.
Interesting. In this formulation, it’s a “right-wing freak show” that causes an otherwise “highly successful” Democratic figure to “lose control” of his (presumably positive) public image. There’s not even a hint of a suggestion that the “figure” him/herself is somehow inherently flawed as a candidate (and that his public image conceals more than it reveals—which is what I think is at the root of Obama’s problems).
Why don’t Democrats look inward? Why are they always pointing the finger of blame at others? Are they never in the wrong? Is there nothing they can do differently from last time, to ensure that they don’t lose again in 2008?
