April 15, 2008
When you pander, don’t admit it
The polls suggest that Obama weathered the Jeremiah Wright affair with little or no damage. This new flap–arising from remarks to supporters that most members of the liberal intelligentsia would regard as stating the obvious–may hurt him more.
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. 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.
What a gift to Hillary. She piled on:
Clinton aides said they planned to make Obama’s comments central to their message on the campaign trail this weekend. The New York senator will campaign across Indiana Saturday, and will return to Pennsylvania on Sunday.
In a soft-spoken denunciation of her Democratic rival that lasted several minutes, Clinton played up her own faith and Midwestern roots before attacking point by point Obama’s claims that people who feel disenfranchised in small town America “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.”
“Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith,” she said, to periodic applause. “People of faith I know don’t cling to religion because they are bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor but because they are spiritually rich.”
On the issue of guns, Clinton said: “People of all walks of life hunt, and they enjoy doing do because its an important part of their life, not because they are bitter.”
“I don’t think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not,” Clinton continued, finishing her remarks with a line she introduced on Friday in Philadelphia after the story broke: “People don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, and that’s exactly what I will do.”
It has no intellectual merit, but an exuberantly brainless rant by Jane Smiley in reply to Hillary (to think how I admired “A Thousand Acres”…) is worth noting:
So now, Barack Obama tells the truth about conditions as we know them–that the countryside and the small towns are dying in many places in our country, and that the corporatocracy doesn’t care enough to do a thing about it. He points out that immigrant-baiting, gay-baiting, gun-baiting, and religious pandering have helped to destroy those towns and that countryside, that those being destroyed have been cynically enlisted by their very own destroyers to provide the votes that help accomplish the destruction. And this is what Senator Hillary Clinton says about it: “Senator Obama’s remarks were elitist and out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”
From Senator Clinton’s remarks, I infer that to actually see what has gone on in the US in the last 20 years is unAmerican. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you were born, what you pay in taxes, what else you might have contributed to the culture, how you vote, who you support. If you don’t support fundamentalist religion, job outsourcing, and free access to guns, then you are not even American.
I cannot believe how angry this makes me. I cannot believe that after the last seven and a half years, I can even get this angry. Yes, I know she is pandering to her audience. Yes, I know she will do anything to get elected. Yes, I know that she and Bill Clinton are corrupt to the core, and that I should have never expected anything better of her. But, please, any of you angry white women who still support this craven shill, don’t mention it to me. Do me the following favor — apologize to your children for not stopping the war that HIllary voted for, the war that is going to impoverish them. Then apologize to them for the effects of global warming that are going to make their lives hell. Then apologize to them for the school shooting they may someday see, the one where the kid gets the guns out of his father’s gun case, or buys at a gunshow. Apologize to them for the meaningless wars they are going to fight and pay for. Then tell them that “American values” killed their hopes and maybe killed them. And ask them if they think it’s going to be worth it.
Back in the land of the non-raving, Mickey Kaus offers a characteristically painstaking dissection. He enumerates four principal flaws in Obama’s comments. He says the remarks combine “things that Obama wants us to think he thinks are good (religion) with things he undoubtedly thinks are bad (racism, anti-immigrant sentiment)”. They accuse Pennsylvanians of being racists. They contradict his own position (on trade, at least). And yes, Kaus says, they are plain condescending.
I think I would consolidate points one and three, but otherwise I agree. The reference to trade interested me especially. Up to now, Obama has indeed endorsed anti-trade sentiment. In last week’s comments he portrayed that view as an error induced by bitterness and frustration. Anti-trade sentiment is regrettable, he seemed to say (though Ms Smiley is stone-deaf to this implication). But it is understandable that ordinary people should be mistaken on this, and we more successful types, with less to be bitter or frustrated about, should make allowances. If that is not condescension, I don’t know what is.
Pandering is one thing. It is to be expected of politicians. But it is unwise, and it violates the etiquette of the profession, to say that you are pandering. Hillary panders to anti-trade sentiment, to the religious, and now (can this be correct?) to gun enthusiasts–all with apparently total conviction. Obama panders less well. I think it is a question of experience.
Boy, Mr. Crook, did you ever get this one wrong! According to people in the know, Obama is the ultimate panderer, with an enormous ego, matched by a world-class sense of entitlement.
“Turns out that this writer knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who went to Harvard Law with B. Hussein Obama Jr., and, the story goes, such was Barry’s monumental capacity for sucking up to his professors that the “Obamamometer” was established to calibrate and quantify the most egregious, shameless brown-nosing, and it quickly became the gold standard of Uriah Heep-dom in Cambridge, Mass. “That was a 10 on the Obamamometer,” the Harvard men and women would whisper when someone rose to the unctuous level of Barry at his best.”
“But my friend had even more surprises in store for me. It seems that at Harvard our Barry was widely regarded as a person of overweening arrogance and a gold-plated sense of entitlement; not only did the world owe him a living, it owed him just about everything.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODRlMzM1MTYxMzFhNGQyMTFlZjY2MTUwM2JmZTU1Y2U=
Posted by: Ann H | April 15th, 2008 at 4:54 am | Report this comment“
Mr. Crook, I would note that the “liberal intelligentsia” just doesn’t get it. That is why Democrats continue to lose Presidential elections.
So “if stating the obvious” is the point, then by all means, have at it.
As for me, I’m a Democrat who wants to win the election this fall–that’s why I’m for Hillary. She gets it.
Posted by: Ann H | April 15th, 2008 at 5:06 am | Report this commentGee, it really is too bad that you no longer can tell the truth in America in a private meeting. You expect it on the hustings.
Posted by: oldasiahand | April 15th, 2008 at 1:27 pm | Report this commentIn David Axelrod’s narrative, Web 2.0 is the driving force of Obama’s grassroots campaign.
In reality, it may be the instant capture and circulation of Obama’s various gaffes that take down his campaign. It just isn’t that hard to check facts vs. his PR given a PC or a mobile phone.
Given that the press refused to report much of anything about Sen. Obama for nearly a year, the actual grassroots have provided a healthy tonic to the mainstream media.
JBP
Posted by: John Powers | April 15th, 2008 at 1:39 pm | Report this commentTo says that politicians are expected to pander is the worst kind of copout there is: they pander because they know all too well that without it, they have no realistic chance of getting our votes. The reality of it is that politicians pander because we demand it of them, addicted as we are to easy, cost-free, painless “solutions” to our problems.
Also, Jane Smiley might be ranting a bit, but her piece is neither brainless nor exuberant: living as I do in flyover country, I am painfully aware that any deviation from the prevailing mythology (God, guns etc…) results in ostracism and accusations of being unamerican, whatever that means. Smiley’s anger, her frustration, are feelings that I, along with countless others, experience on a daily basis, simply because we do not subscribe to the drivel that passes for good citizenship, these days.
Posted by: Gilles Willard | April 15th, 2008 at 2:24 pm | Report this comment@JBP: Obama gets his support from those who know what Web 2.0 is. If Hilary’s supporters used the web they could witness the depths of her pandering. Since we of the intelligentsia know that politicians pander regardless, there is something comforting in Obama’s pandering followed by his numerous, but I didn’t really mean thats.
Posted by: WL | April 15th, 2008 at 2:46 pm | Report this commentObama tried albeit somewhat unsuccessfully to answer a question in a heartfelt way that like Negros of slavery time who also turned to Religion & Music due to oppression and hard times and that small town America has very little to look forward to and so too turned to religion and hunting as a normal outlet and sometimes blamed their plight on immigrants! This excercise in “honest” judgment has been blown out of all proportions and taken up by Hillary & McCain and some in the Media to exploit for political gain, albeit with dishonesty and distorted statements to demean Obama for being honest. We have to asks ourselves as Americans “would we rather have politicians that lie to us or ones that tell us the truth no matter what?” Hillary’s current assertion that her father taught her to “shoot ducks” behind the cottage that her grandfather built on Lake Winona as a little girl smells alot like “Bosnian Sniper Fire!” And, now we have Bill Clinton going around with his current False take on “bitterness” as another example of another — excuse my blatantness — “lying politician”, with the following performance…
B. Clinton “[s]ays at campaign railly in Corydon, Indiana that throughout seven stops in North Carolina, ‘Everywhere I go there are all these people with signs, saying I’m not bitter - I’m not bitter.’ ABC’s Sarah Amos says his comments were well-received but ‘not entirely accurate.’ For instance, she says there were no signs at his rallies saying ‘I’m not bitter,’ as he claimed.” — This political couple has No Shame!
However, in light of the current fire storm and questionning and psychoanalyzing about the “bitterness” of small town America, maybe Obama has done us some good and we can finally bring or shed some light on just how bitter (or not) we really are and better yet — the “Root Cause”!
Posted by: Angellight | April 15th, 2008 at 3:01 pm | Report this commentIt seems to me that the gist of Clive Crook’s argument is that, yes, it is to be expected that politicians pander (a copout, as I said earlier), but that they should at least have the decency to dress it up a bit and make it look like what it is not?!?
This is just too cynical for me.
Am I misreading the whole thing, or are we just asking to be fooled, albeit in a way that saves us from -perish the thought- questioning our own motives?
Posted by: Gilles Willard | April 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm | Report this commentDuring the time of recession, many Americans will be looking the spiritual support from leaders and politicians, who have close ties with religion. However, Obama and Clinton on one side and McCain on other will not be able to resolve the knot of financial problems easily.
Posted by: Viktor O. Ledenyov | April 15th, 2008 at 4:21 pm | Report this commentI tell you what I find quite interesting about this latest flap.
The sentences from the Obama speech that the commentariat - including you - have chosen to focus on. The crux of his speech was surely this (it’s even more obvious when you listen to the audio):
“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.”
That sentence immediately precedes the section you excerpted.
Now why did you - and your entire milieu it seems - think this observation of Obama’s was not newsworthy, yet his comments on “bitterness” etc merited a lengthy and profound analysis?
This is not meant to challenge your own analysis here, I’m just interested why the entire political paparrazzi focused on Obama’s take on the bitterness question and not the point about Americans having lost faith in politics.
Why is the focus purely on Obama’s diagnosis and not at all the disease? Or do none of the intelligensia, liberal or not, care about the latter?
Posted by: Ed | April 15th, 2008 at 7:26 pm | Report this commentExcellent article on the Democratic divide by Michael Lind at Slate.com. Mr. Lind nails it!
“To judge from Obama’s several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.”
“Nevertheless, the cliché that working-class and even middle-class social traditionalists, when they are not simply ignorant, “low information” hicks, are maladjusted misfits whose political views are nothing more than feeble gestures of misdirected rage, persists as an article of faith among many progressives, who then wonder why the Democrats cannot win over more of the voters they despise.”
“Whether the “bitter” controversy helps Hillary Clinton win enough votes in the final primaries to beat the odds and win the Democratic nomination remains to be seen. At press time, she was surging in the polls. One thing is certain: In the fall election, John McCain, whoever his Democratic opponent might be, will portray himself as the candidate who defends the dignity and pride of working-class and lower-middle-class Americans of all races against the disdain of elite liberals. Unfortunately, many progressives will make that task much easier by repeating the litany of contempt: Rubes. Rednecks. Retro.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/15/elitism/
Posted by: Ann H | April 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm | Report this comment“Obama panders less well. I think it is a question of experience.”
I agree that if we see this as pandering, that he didn’t do it well… but can anything that Hillary has done in the last few days be seen as effective pandering?
Seperately, is there not a story in how little polls have shifted relative to pundit expectations?
Posted by: Will M | April 16th, 2008 at 3:10 am | Report this comment“Obama gets his support from those who know what Web 2.0 is” and also his most damaging unfiltered press. The backlash to the bitterly divisive statements and choices Obama has made is a sure sign of the “chickens coming home to roost”
JBP
Posted by: John Powers | April 16th, 2008 at 4:03 pm | Report this commentIt is interesting to note that unless I missed it somewhere no one, so far, has mentioned Tom Franks’ perceptive book “What’s the matter with Kansas”, in which he describes in wrenching detail how American voters in the “heartland” (and I would add not just the heartland) are being persuaded to vote against their own economic interests by appeals to prejudice, usually masquerading as “values”.
A good example of this is the winning strategy for George W. Bush put together by Karl Rove and summed up by many commentators in the phrase “God, guns and gays”. This would normally qualify as the ultimate in pandering, but it it is now being eclipsed by the pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment which is taking place at the federal level with increased workplace raids and a threatened Quixotic Social Security “no match” letter policy against illegal immigrants, as well as Congressional failure to raise the cap on legal visas for highly educated, skilled and, yes, usually highly paid foreign workers. The latter, far from “stealing” US jobs, provide needed skills in our science, engineering, math and foreign language deficient country. An even more insidious form of pandering to anti-immigrant prejudice is taking place at the state and local level with police state style immigration “enforcement” laws in places like Oklahoma and Arizona, aimed at causing chaos and terror in immigrant communities, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized US citizens
When it comes to immigration, at least, Obama hit the nail right on the head when he said that anti-immigrant feeling was one way in which working class Americans are venting their frustration at the raw deal they are getting enonomically. This was not “pandering”. Nor was it “elitism”. It was just the plain and simple truth which everyone knows, but only Obama has had the courage to say publicly. Politicians who tell the truth, however, usually pay a heavy price. So may Obama.
Posted by: algasema | April 17th, 2008 at 12:25 am | Report this commentHi, algasema. I was wondering where you were. You did a great job on that op-ed letter you wrote, which was recently published in the hard-copy FT.
I would encourage you to look at this article by Michael Lind at Salon.com. He discusses Tom Franks’ book. Link is below.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/15/elitism/
Posted by: Ann H | April 17th, 2008 at 4:39 am | Report this commentThank you for the comment and the link, Ann H. I will look forward to reading it. I was away in Philadelphia for a couple of days and enjoyed comparing the number of Hillary signs with the ones for Obama, which seemed to be about equal. I don’t know if this is any indication of things to come, but I passed two restaurants in the diminutive Chinatown section, one with a Hillary sign and one with an Obama sign. I chose the Obama one, but the food was so terrible that I almost felt as if I had been poisoned.
However, while Obama has been blamed for many things, I don’t think anyone will hold him responsible for the cooking in a Chinese restaurant. At least I would hope so. I did not get a chance to sample the food in the place with the Hillary sign, but it certainly could not have been as bad. Since I saw no McCain signs anywhere, not surprising as there is no contest on the Republican side, I cannot offer any comment about cuisine, if any, that might have been provided by his supporters.
Posted by: algasema | April 17th, 2008 at 4:10 pm | Report this comment