Since I grew up in Pennsylvania, I have been watching with interest the Democratic presidential primary contest there. It has been probably the nastiest national race I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve waded through George Bush Sr.’s Willie Horton swamps and
Barack Obama is being castigated and flagellated from coast to coast for opining that some folks, some small-town folks, might be a bit bitter about the way the economy is crushing their American dream.
Some of them, who have watched a lot of their hope drift away when their jobs drifted away, are counting on their churches to not just sustain them spiritually, but financially as well. He went further and said that some of them grab hold of their guns for security (while a federal government on a spending binge robs them blind).
The Clintons and Sen. John McCain (how’s that for a team) are calling Obama an “elitist” because of the remarks. How strange is it that the Clintons, who earned $109 million over the last few years, are painting themselves as working stiffs? After 25 years feeding at the public trough, the Clintons now feel empathy with those taxpayers who have been paying their salaries all that time, and who are paying the mortgage on their New York home.
McCain has called Obama “out of touch,” with those people in small towns. This is the same McCain who, after a stellar military career, has spent the second half of his life in the political wonderland that is Washington, D.C. The last 7.5 years offer proof that in Washington, “out of touch” is a way of life.
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) defending gun owners in Pennsylvania, while working for gun control everywhere else, is the height of pandering. Clinton ran for the Senate advocating a national gun registry. Presidential candidate Clinton has backed off that and is now telling voters how she used to go shooting in Scranton, Pernsylvania with her grandfather.
But, Obama’s opinions on small towns across this country, and specifically in Pennsylvania, are not so extreme. Those words he strung together are hardly as shameful as these from Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, a Hillary Clinton supporter.
“You’ve got conservative whites here,” Rendell said in February, “and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African American candidate.” Is being an elitist worse than being a racist? If Rendell is suggesting that Clinton should be the nominee because “conservative whites” won’t vote for an African American candidate, isn’t that basically selling out the nomination in his state to racists? I’ve been to some of those bitter burgs and some even more bitter ‘burbs.
I have felt the backlash from residents who feel that their economic condition is someone else’s fault. I have seen those small towns, and small suburbs, where white teens scream racial epithets at a Black pedestrian.
I’ve been to some small towns where the job a Black man gets is perceived as being achieved by leaping over any number of more qualified whites. Not all of those small towns are in Pennsylvania, but I am intimately acquainted with them. It is not just the small towns, but also large parts of large cities. And it is not just white folks who are bitter.
There are Blacks and Asians and Hispanics who are bitter as well, and they are bitter at a government that has produced an interminable war, a tremendous budget deficit, an economy in recession, $4 per gallon gas, jobs migrating abroad and a mortgage foreclosure crisis that has already cost billions in taxpayer bailouts and thousands of lost homes.
The Clintons and McCain are truly out of touch because they have misread that bitterness. It is that bitterness that is fueling the movement for change that has propelled Obama to the lead of the Democratic race. The Clintons and McCain would opt for the status quo, more of the Washington wonderland.
Rendell sees racism in his state, not bitterness, and for him, I guess, racism is preferable. Obama represents that change. No amount of bitterness or political spin or racism changes that.
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