Engaging the Obama "bitter" controversy

So I've not been following the presidential race all that closely the past few days (and, in fact, almost forgot to show up and vote at the Clark County Democratic Convention on Saturday), but I've been hearing bits and pieces of the controversy about Obama's remarks at a fundraiser in San Francisco. He made some remarks about small town Pennsylvanians while answering a question, and many--Hillary and John McCain, of course--have interpreted his words as being elistist or condescending.

I had seen the quote, but just now went back to the source, the original Huffington Post article where his words were first reported. Here is the quote; the full quote, which you should read if you already have an opinion or may form one in the future, lol, is after the jump:

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. 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. So it's not surprising then that 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.

I grew up in a town of 800 in the middle of Kansas... and thank God we were only 45 minutes from Wichita because it sure makes travel easier now that I no longer live there. When I was a kid the town was vibrant and self-sufficient in many ways. Today downtown is largely boarded up... a sad, sad transformation for a town that my "big city" cousins once loved visiting. I don't know if I'd say that people there are bitter, but like so many other small towns across the midwest, it's slowly dying, the victim of agribusiness replacing farming, Wal-Mart killing off local stores, and manufacturing jobs largely moving overseas.

I read Obama's words, and they have the ring of "truth" to me. And upon actually reading the whole quote, you notice that he's not knocking guns or religion... he's simply saying that people who've seen a good way of life slowly slip away, and who've heard promises from politicians and the government that now can only be described as broken, are going to do what any of us would do: seek to make sense of their predicament. You turn to what you know, to what is familiar, and to what hasn't deserted you.

And when a politician talks about restricting gun ownership, it becomes a lightning rod... a way to protest. You stand up for your Second Amendment rights.

Or when your way of life seems to have been overrun by a dizzying set of changes--people behaving in ways that just weren't acceptable when you were growing up, or immigrants holding on to bits of their own culture in ways that your own immigrant forebears didn't--it can feel threatening. And when we're threatened we tend to dig in our heels and see issues as black and white with no softening shades of gray. (I'm reminded of Sally Mill Gearhart's remarks in The Times of Harvey Milk when she describes the clash of two ways of life--gays and lesbians enjoying their new freedoms, and the heterosexual community being forced to adapt--that sparked the anti-gay Briggs initiative in California in 1978).

When your community's economy is heading down, your security is threatened. Your survival is threatened. Because face it, the idea of a safety net is a pretty new development, and from an evolutionary perspective, we're primed to experience abstract threats as strongly as physical ones.

What is sad about this whole situation is that everyone jumping on Obama about this is essentially proving his point: that guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiment have been used as tools for manipulating and distracting voters, just as they are being used now.

I THINK EVERYONE IS AN ELITIST in this sense: we're each convinced that we see the world clearly. We like to believe we're right. And it's hard to realize how rarely we examine anyone's behavior except through our own limited experience of the world.

That goes for me. For Obama. For Hillary. For you.

But there is a door that opens to a larger world when we become a little less sure of ourselves. For some it comes with age. For others a transformative experience lights the way. A few or most--I am in no position to know--may end their days still believing with absolute certainty that their reality is reality.

So the presidential race continues, and we will eventually find out whether people are willing to listen, to examine someone else's shades of gray, and to begin to notice that possibly, just possibly, that they are simultaneously less like their neighbor than they thought... and more connected than they ever imagined.

The broader context of Obama's quote:

OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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. 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. So it's not surprising then that 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.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.