Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, known for his skills as an orator, conceded today that comments he made at a private San Francisco fundraiser about working-class Democrats clinging to "guns or religion" were poorly chosen. "I didn't say it as well as I should have," he said. "But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to. And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families."Seeking to defuse the damage among blue-collar Democrats essential to his chances in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana, Obama told a crowd in Muncie, Ind., that he only meant to show empathy. "Lately, there's been a little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter," Obama said. "They are angry, they feel like they've been left behind. They feel like nobody's paying attention to what they're going through."
The controversy -- fanned by rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain -- began when the Huffington Post website published remarks the Illinois senator made last weekend at a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser.
In those comments, Obama responded to a question about why his candidacy was struggling in Pennsylvania by saying that residents of some hard-pressed communities had grown bitter. "You go into 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," Obama said. "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."
| Being a politician, B.O. is trying to defuse the situation by addressing the element that's least harmful to him, letting the rest of it fall by the wayside to be forgotten. Having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and places like that, B.O. probably doesn't actually know an awful lot about small town Pennyslvania. I grew up there, so maybe I can enlighten him. First of all, the state's 300 miles wide and it's not homogenous from corner to corner. Erie's a different place from Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh's different from both of them, and all three are different from central Pennsylvania. My family moved from Kentucky to central Pennyslvania, near Hershey, in the early 50s, there to live among the Pennylvania Dutchmen and the Italians imported to work in the candy factory and the limestone quarries. My Dad went from the coal mines to the quarry. We three hillbilly kids (with another on the way) became -- through my grandparents -- a part of the Italian side of things, but there wasn't an awfully big divide. Our street was maybe majority Italian, but there were Croatians and Pennsylvania Dutchmen and "English" as well. There was a small influx of Hungarians ("Hunkies") after the 1956 uprising, and a couple years later there was an influx of Puerto Ricans ("Ricans"). Perhaps our parents occasionally sneered at each other -- I can't recall ever seeing it happen -- but the kids mostly played together without any more than the usual occasions for fisticuffs. All those people who were so busy showing antipathy to people who weren't like them were even then clinging to their religion, no doubt in anticipation of all the jobs going away. Most people routinely went to church on Sunday. Us masses routinely ate up that Opiate™. There was a divide between Catholics and Protestants -- the former mostly Italian and Irish and Croatian and the few Puerto Ricans, the latter mostly everybody else. There weren't any mosques, and as far as I know there wasn't even a synagogue. My Dad occasionally attended a Church of Christ and my Mom was Catholic. We went to Catholic schools for my elementary years and occasionally fought with public school kids. Not only did we cling to our guns, we clung to our fishing rods, too. My Grandaddy taught me to shoot, with a .22, potting rats in the chicken yard while he drank home-made wine. Most kids took a few days off from school every fall when deer season opened and summers were spent drowning worms or impaling grasshoppers in search of the elusive crappy. With, I guess, the exception of big city downtowns, that kid culture's probably what the length and breadth of Pennsylvania has in common. B.O. sees embittered, faceless masses in Pennsylvania. I see a land of milk and honey dealing with the results of decades of goofy economic policies, both Dem and Publican, many of them premised on compassion. Those masses aren't faceless to me. They have wives, children, pasts and even futures. They deserve better than sneering condescension. |