Obama the Elitist! Seriously?

I’m about as pro-Obama as I’ve been pro- any candidate since as far back as I can remember following politics–and I’m counting the several years when I was really too young be at all sensible about such things. Like, when I was 5, Ronald Reagan was pictured on a horse pretty regularly and that may be one of the reasons I can’t quite shake the warm feelings I have of the Gipper. As a steady reader of Cracked magazine from 1984 to 1988 the various comic iterations of Reagan were always more favorable than their satirical swipes at Mondale too. I even have a solid memory of a Cracked magazine cover that showed Bush (41) debating Dukakis who was so short he had to stand on a box!!! (WHOO!) Hee-larious. I throw those in there only to add contrast to the way I like Obama. Even compared to my youthful, completely uncynical-about-government five-to-thireen year-old self, I’m pretty pro-Obama.

And I offer that paragraph as my way of “full disclosure” for what is about to come.

Are people really upset by the things Obama said in San Francisco?–because—if they are– they need to find a way to relax. That probably isn’t the way I’d say it if I were a Democratic worker or an Obama campaign staffer, but …I don’t know…seriously?

One comment I read on the topic quoted Obama at length with a link to the full transcript at Time’s website with the additional commentary that “reading them in context doesn’t make them better.” Well, I had read the quoted paragraph and thought: What’s the big deal? So I went to Time’s website to see if reading them in context made the comments worse.

It turns out that on that one point the commenter was right, reading them in context changed nothing whatsoever about the quoted passage. Obama was right when I read him out of context and he was right when read in context.

Except for a brief stay in northern Virginia I’ve only ever lived in economically depressed areas–often in economically depressed areas of economically depressed areas. I myself have been economically depressed for most of my life. Sometimes due circumstances growing up and sometimes do to poor decision-making on my own part.

I currently live in a state, Indiana, that self-identifies as a “blue collar” or a “manufacturing” state, despite the fact that the factories, plants, and farms here started closing down decades ago never to return. DECADES AGO. And despite the fact that, like most states, our largest growth sectors are service and health. Among Indiana’s most recent major success stories is its catering to the bio-engineering folks.

And you know what? The people are bitter. They do distrust the government. They do think that free trade agreements and immigrants have colluded to deprive them and theirs of their well-being. They do believe, at best, that their government has stood by and allowed this to happen and, at worst, have been an integral part of this demolition of their quality of life. Part of that bitterness is evident in the mere self-identification as an industrial state when in fact Indiana is hardly any such thing anymore. Like Ohio and Pennsylvania, Indiana would be more accurate to call itself “a McDonald’s state” or “a strip mall state” or “a Wal-Mart” state since that’s the employment that defines not just the character of the state but also it’s shifting landscape. But it doesn’t–for a couple of reasons. One, of course, is America honors its working class heroes and has for a long time…at least in its rhetoric. There is honor in being a “manufacturing state” that one cannot find near the grease trap of a Wendy’s. But the more important reason that Indiana (and Ohio and Pennsylvania) identify as “blue collar states” is because, they are upset that those jobs left and they want them back. Each successive presidential election comes with a slew of promises that those jobs are coming back and they never do. Living lives of constant disappointment and deprivation makes one bitter.

I suppose that it does require a little bit of care to fully parse the following sentence:

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.

But parsing or not, it does not say that people are ignorant or mean or stupid or unsophisticated. It does not say that religion is “economically based” or anything else. What it says is that people are looking to the wrong things in order to create their politics. It says that when the real concern should be how to put food on the table, people are voting for the president that won’t take away their guns. It says people should be voting on how we are going to retrain an outmoded workforce but instead they’re focus on religious differences. It says that when people need to be concerned with how their government can and should be guiding them to better futures they are more concerned with how many immigrants walked through the desert last year.

Once again the people prove themselves incapable of perceiving the irony of real life. To react the way they did to this sentence actually proves how right Obama’s statement is. Now people are screaming: “Did you hear that, Obama thinks that I’m an ignorant redneck because I own a gun!” “He thinks I’m stupid because I love the Lord!”

So they have found a way to ignore their problems by concentrating on the second part of a statement that tried to remind people what their real problem is. Unbelievable.

But let’s take it one step forward. Obama was a community activists before he was a state senator. In that capacity he worked with some of the poorest people of one the country’s largest manufacturing centers (and third largest city). If Obama is an “elitist” who doesn’t understand working class America then what chance does corporate lawyer Hillary Clinton have? Or the son (and grandson) of a Navy admiral? Their positions are practically the definition of “elite” in America’s “military-industrial complex.”

Perhaps the only person in the country who can out elite these two is George Bush. As the son of a senator George Bush meets the minimum standard of “fortunate son” set by Creedence Cleawater Revival. But Bush’s dad went on to serve as head of the CIA, vice president, and president. Bush (43) himself was the CEO of an oil company and owner of a baseball team. AND he’s president. His brother was governor of Florida. His family is still regular visitors to the Royal House of Saud and…last I heard…Bush’s niece Lauren repeatedly has to defend herself against rumors that she is dating this or that prince. She is currently dating Ralph Lauren’s son.

I guess what I’m saying here boils down to this:

1. The statement would not be that bad, even if it was wrong.
2. It wasn’t wrong.
3. You can bitch about Obama’s “elitism” all you want but your choices are between his elitism, Clinton’s elitism, or McCain’s elitism and the latter two are head and shoulders more distinguished than Obama’s is and you’d have to be willfully ignorant to think otherwise.