Saturday, April 12, 2008
Are You Bitter?
Obama at his best. Damn right people are bitter. Just start a conversation about our government and determine for yourself whether people are bitter or not. Ask those that have lost their jobs, who have lost their homes, who are unable to return to a hurricane ravaged city, who have no health insurance. Ask those in the military that are getting a little tired of the lack or real support for the troops. Yes, a good number of people are bitter.
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6 comments:
Your candidate was referring to rural, eastern smalltowns being bitter in his California remarks at a private fundraiser.
I'll grant there is bitter component in some smalltowns, but is that rural bitterness taking the sublimated form of silly 'gun' love and
deep refuge in simplistic religious faith. That is what the man really said and it sounded a tad egalitarian to me.
Obama made the mistake of speaking his mind. And he's absolutely right. People are bitter about these macroeconomic forces that they can't control, that don't change regardless of who's in power. So they focus on the small things that actually do separate the major parties.
And tf, I don't know about you but 'egalitarian' is a quality I'd love to have in my president. It's certainly preferable to cronyism.
Where I think he erred is this. I don't see any problem with saying something controversial, so long as it advances some debate the candidate is trying to have. I couldn't get the Youtube to work (my laptop is being difficult). But if he said something like, "These people are bitter and they have every right to be because both major parties have pushed economic policies that have caused and exacerbated their misery. And here's how my presidency would be different, would mitigate these problems," that would've been fine.
In 1991, candidate Bill Clinton talked said, "The reason (George H. W. Bush's tactic) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death.... They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them. They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, 'What happened to everybody's job? What happened to everybody's income? What ... have ... you ... done ... to ... our ... country?'"
(Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2008/04/in_1991_bill_clinton_spoke_of.html)
But that worked for Bill because he was a details and could offer a plan that would make people think he'd combat these issues.
If Obama didn't offer solutions, then it simply comes across as condescending, "Poor rednecks with their stupid God and guns." To say nothing of adding to the perception that he's all fluff.
Last night on the Faith thing on CNN he explained his remarks adequately enough for me. He said he used
'clumsy language' in describing what he felt was a emphasis on traditional rural values by some smalltowners who have seen little material advancement in the past couple of decades. He went on to say that the same feeling of economic impotence is experienced by the urban underclass as well.
Thats good enough for me. He is a strong candidate that I would have no trouble endorsing if Hillary doesn't make it. Lets move on.
Oops, I erred in my previous entry. The first sentence I attributed to Bill Clinton was his. But the rest was actually Joe Klein's. I misread the piece in question.
Rottenchester did a nice commentary that I pretty much buy into. See what you think?
http://www.fighting29th.com/
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