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Obama's scream? Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008 By John Brummett That's what I've been admitting grudgingly lately. The latest evidence may be the strongest yet. There are things a politician should know better than to get caught saying. There are cynical opportunities a good politician will exploit. Obama has been caught. Clinton has exploited. Obama was speaking at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco. Someone asked him why he was not doing better in the polls in Pennsylvania. His guard down, he said some people have become so bitter about their economic condition that they cling instead to religion, guns and antipathy toward immigrants. Clinton, learning of that remark from a prominent liberal blog, leapt to take full advantage. She called Obama's remarks those of an elitist who doesn't understand middle America. Hillary became a gun nut for the occasion, saying people don't cling to guns because they're bitter or poor, but because they have a constitutional right. She became a religious right defender for the occasion, saying people don't embrace religion because they're bitter or poor, but because they have sincere faith. Clinton saw two powerful openings, if only she could do a little bit of a George Wallace impersonation. One was to fortify her vital appeal to conservative working-class whites in Pennsylvania by standing up for their sensibilities against Obama's condescension. The other was to send a message to her party's super-delegates that Democrats will lose again if they send out another candidate who doesn't relate to the common man. Clinton is at least as elitist as Obama, but she is entirely too smart and disciplined ever to get quoted revealing it. He was a community organizer; she was on the Wal-Mart board. No matter. She shot a duck once. In modern American politics, it's all about what you slipped up and said yesterday. Obama first turned defiant, standing by his remarks and emphasizing that working people have a right to be bitter. But, by the next day, he had seen a powerful need to apologize and explain. This may be seminal, like a Howard Dean scream. Obama was generally correct in the analysis. In her private moments, Hillary probably has said much the same. Most left-of-center Democrats I know have said as much. Many white working people went Republican over the last quarter-century because of cultural and religious issues. They didn't think liberal Democrats were doing them any good economically. So when Republicans told them that Democrats intended to take their guns and didn't share their "family values," many of these white working people were persuaded that Democrats were to be feared as culturally alien. But Obama's phrasing was, indeed, simply awful. He almost seemed to say that poor people were religious because they're ignorant. Actually, if you examine the history of some regional varieties of rural American Protestantism, well, just forget I started to say anything. It was perhaps only slightly less disastrous than if Obama had said that all those Pennsylvanians were racists, which is essentially what the mad Clinton cultist, James Carville, was saying when he called Pennsylvania "Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between." Hillary is going for the in-between. The better general election candidate is the more overt and shameless panderer, the more dishonest, the one cynically and brazenly redefining herself to seize any and all opportunities, the one who agrees with Obama, but has entirely too much discipline ever to get caught revealing the sentiment. It brings to mind the question I got from a woman the other night in Rogers at a gathering of the Benton County Democratic Club. She wanted to know if "those New Englanders," meaning Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Howard Dean, "were going to stick us again with someone we can't win with," another Michael Dukakis, or another Kerry, in other words. Maybe not now. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
