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	BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Insightful or Insulting? Monday, April 14, 2008 Insightful or Insulting? Candidate Barack Obama made a remark at a fund raiser last week in San Francisco that's become somewhat controversial, thanks to the rebroadcasting, amplifying, and condemning it's received from his various political and racial enemies on the right and in Hilary Clinton's campaign offices. Here's the remark: 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 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. When I first read that last week I thought it was fairly insightful. I knew it would be cited by Obama's political enemies as elitist and insulting and untrue and anything else they could smear on it, since 1) they're his enemies, and 2) since any honest discourse about race or class in America is strongly condemned by the powers that be, especially those on the right side of the political aisle. Much of the conservative voting bloc in the US is motivated precisely by what Obama pointed his finger at in these remarks, and the politicians and commenters who remain in power thanks to the proletariat's inchoate anger at Hollywood liberals, or gun control, or immigrants, or the ACLU, etc. If those people are pointed, or led, to the actual economic and political sources of their troubles, in a What's the Matter with Kansas fashion, they might rethink their knee-jerk reactions to cultural provocations, and that might stop them from automatically, and self-defeatingly, voting Republican. So, much as was the case with the controversy whipped up after Obama's brilliant speech on race, the aim of the whippers is to manufacture outrage and perpetuate stereotypes, precisely because those are what keep people from reading or listening to the words and possibly rethinking some of their inbred assumptions. That was my initial reaction to Obama's words and the extremely predictable reaction to them. I'm slightly rethinking this today, since as Kevin Drum points out, Obama's comments are rather crude and arguably inaccurate generalizations of larger and more complex issues. ...what really strikes me as odd about Obama's statement is that, on its merits, it's largely untrue, isn't it? Economic distress probably is responsible for growing anti-trade sentiment (though the Midwest has never exactly been a bastion of free trade support), and maybe for a bit of the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment too... But does anyone really think that stagnant wages and globalization are responsible for rural gun culture? Or the rise of the Christian right? Or an increase in bigotry? ...Gun culture, for example, has been around forever. It's just that it was largely unnoticed until liberals started trying to take guns away in the 60s and 70s. The rise of the Christian right has lots of causes, but it's part of a long American religious tradition that has very little to do with the ups and downs of the economy. And bigotry hasn't increased in the past 25 years, so that part doesn't even make sense on its own terms. I think he's right on most of the particulars, but is ignoring the larger issue. It doesn't matter if exact, demographically-provable economic charts show that the Midwest is victimized by globalization and immigration; it matters if the white rural voter thinks that's the case, and fostering that belief, along with the attendant conservative cultural values, is what keeps the Republican party viable in national elections, despite the fact that their actual economic policies are of benefit almost exclusively to the rich. Obama might not have been exactly correct on the details, but the overall theme of his remarks was a perfect strike against the demagoguery of his opponents. Even aside from that, it was a remark made to his supporters at a fundraiser in a very liberal city, and was exactly the sort of faux-insightful political analysis those type of people like to hear. (As this San Francisco-area inhabitant is proving with this blog post?) Besides, it's not as if politicians don't focus their remarks to appeal to the audience listening, especially when that audience is paying to attend a fund raiser. Parsing out every word of a speech made to a highly supportive, partisan audience is absurd, since obviously any politician is going to give such people more or less what they want to hear. Labels: obama, politics Posted by: Flux # 5:24 PM Comments: It is insulting (read: I'm not insulted, just bemused) because he's basically saying poor people are stupid. What he said basically boils down to this: "They don't actually hold those beliefs; they just don't have any money!" That isn't insightful. It is insulting to every single person who is involved in anything he's describing, be they Christians, out-of-work blue collar folk, gun owners, immigration reformists, etc. #: 7:33 AM posted by Anonymous I'd think poor people would rather have an excuse for their stupid beliefs, be they racism or gun nuttery or Bible thumping, and Obama provided them with one and hope for improvement. Of course that's easy to say from an objective, distant viewpoint; few people think their stupid beliefs are stupid when they're still neck deep in them, which is why such people blame immigrants or whatever, rather than looking at the bigger picture and going after the cause of their problems, instead of reacting in predictable (and controllable) ways to the symptoms. #: 5:12 PM posted by Flux So believing in the importance of gun ownership or wanting immigration laws to mean something...those are simply baseless scapegoats which no sane, level headed person would believe? Have you ever considered that your own beliefs might be wrong if you stepped out of your own shoes and looked at them? Rather than belaboring how categorically elitist (if not flat out wrong) that is, I'll just ask a simple question: why are the only mass shootings done in gun free zones by people who shouldn't even own guns under the current law, I might add? #: 8:27 AM posted by Anonymous As i think my initial post made fairly clear, my opinion is that Obama's comments were clearly not policy arguments. (I don't actually know his detailed opinions on immigration law or gun control.) He was making a general reference to how some small town Americans in economic difficulty focus on minutia and eat up the "take our jobs/guns/wimmen/bibles!" scare tactics promulgated by Rush Limbaugh types, rather than looking at the bigger picture. You can certainly argue that that's insulting and wrong, or that such people are in fact making intelligent, rational choices to focus on those things rather than larger economic issues, but Obama's comment, and my comment on it, had nothing to do with specific policies. He was talking about a more general reactive/defensive mindset, and was probably overly conflating economic issues with cultural views that lead to political votes. #: 2:44 PM posted by Flux And I'm saying that it is insulting to anybody with a passion for those issues to say that they only care about them for shortcomings in other areas of their lives. Sure, he's not openly declaring any opposition to those issues, but he's clearly stamping a negative connotation onto them by saying that those passions are merely a symptom of other economic problems. It is like a right winger coming out and saying that the people who buy into the global warming scare only do so because of some misplaced guilt. ...in fact, people HAVE said that, and the global warming camp HAS been genuinely insulted by it. #: 7:38 AM posted by Anonymous Post a Comment << Home Archives May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2012

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