Obama’s remarks feed class resentment

Obama’s remarks feed class resentment Gene Lyons Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Email this story Printer-friendly version Some weeks ago, this column asked a rhetorical question: What could Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama possibly have been thinking about, sitting in a Chicago pew for 20 years listening to the crackpot effusions of Rev. Jeremiah Wright ? Surely the one-time editor of the Harvard Law Review didn’t subscribe to Wright’s delusional view that the U. S. government invented the AIDS virus to exterminate black Africans, so why did he expose his children to it under God’s authority ? Unlike many observers who swooned over Obama’s moving speech about race, I thought it ducked the most salient question: Did he actually buy Wright’s theology ? His successive rationalizations failed to satisfy. First, he hadn’t heard the offending sermons. Then he’d heard things he disagreed with, but thought of Wright like an eccentric uncle. Finally, Obama said he’d have quit the church had his spiritual mentor not retired. “Anybody named Clinton or Gore who sat still for something like that,” this column observed, “would be derided as an inauthentic phony patronizing black folk for political gain—a faker, a con man.” Predictably, this unfashionable observation drew accusations of racism. I responded by e-mailing news reports of Obama’s final renunciation of Wright. As the candidate himself had now thrown the controversial preacher overboard, was it still racist to criticize him ? Nobody responded. The national media declared the controversy settled. The caravan moved on. My rhetorical question, however, remained unanswered until last week, when Obama gave an off-the-cuff response to a questioner at a $ 2, 000-per-person fundraiser in, yes, San Francisco who asked, in effect, how Mr. Hope could possibly be having trouble selling his vision to Pennsylvania voters. Obama apparently didn’t think he was being recorded. Being a black man named Barack Obama, he allowed, was only part of the problem. “[O ] ur challenge,” he continued, “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. 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.” Like the poor, deluded peasants in Wright’s congregation, in short, rednecks out in the boondocks cling to superstition, bigotry and conspiracy theories because the world’s too complicated for them to understand. Never mind that Obama’s been touring Pennsylvania touting his own religious piety and opposition to NAFTA, or that Sen. Hillary Clinton seized upon his remarks with the awkward zeal of a basset hound pouncing on a pork chop. A more perfect expression of pseudo-Marxist / academic cant—or a greater gift to Sen. John McCain and the Republicans—would be hard to imagine. This is what Democrats get if they choose an inexperienced faculty-lounge lizard as their presidential candidate. People tend to assume that a black candidate has a lot of street sense, but Obama increasingly comes off as a classic Ivy League brainiac too impressed by his own SAT scores to change a tire without delivering an oration on the economics of rubber tree cultivation. Since 1968, when Richard Nixon put his famous “Southern strategy” into play, two big themes have kept the GOP in the White House most of the time: race along with class and regional resentment. In seeking to transcend the former, Obama has handed them the latter on a silver platter. Republicans won’t have to caricature him as a condescending snob who looks down on working stiffs. He’s already done it to himself. Sheltered, cosseted and treated as a wonder of nature most of his life, Obama’s never run against a tough opponent, and it’s showing. Obama’s attempts to joke his way out of this mess amuse only the already converted. No, Clinton’s not a very convincing huntress, but she certainly knows that nobody goes duck hunting with a “six-shooter.” For pointing these things out, the Clinton campaign, hitherto run on strict standards of political correctness—too timid even to point out that it was Obama’s fellow Chicagoan and national co-chair Jesse Jackson, Jr. who “racialized” the campaign by accusing Hillary Clinton of shedding no tears for black victims of Hurricane Katrina long before Bill Clinton alluded to his famous father—can now be accused of helping Republicans make their case. But what should she do ? Stand silently watching the disaster unfold ? Instead, she might try pointing out that it was working-class Democrats Obama insulted. Also, that far from falling during the Clinton administration, employment in Pennsylvania rose by more than 500, 000 jobs between 1993 and 2000 while unemployment dropped from 7. 3 to 4. 1 percent. That’s the perfectly rational reason that many cling to her candidacy. —–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons