Well what a firestorm we've got going on right now. Holy Guacamole.
Just so you have them in front of you, here are the comments that Barack Obama made at that fundraiser in San Francisco a week ago, Sunday:
OBAMA:
So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.
[radical]¢¬Ä¬®Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).
But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.
But the truth is, is that, our challenge 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. So it's not surprising then that 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.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
Now, I realise that that may have taken you a while to read... it doesn't quite fit in to the soundbite machine that so informs John Q Public, but, assuming you managed to get through it, actually read it, can you tell me if I am living in a weird delusional disconnected world because I think that Barack Obama is right on the money? Does what he says here sound demeaning, elitist and disconnected to you? I have been listening to the furor grow over the weekend, the tempo rise and rise and the Clintons get more and more bellicose, I've listened to Obama respond (I think brilliantly) both on Friday and again on Sunday but I've also seen the way this bitter thing is playing in the press. The boys and girls on Meet the Press think this will hurt him in Pennsylvania and beyond. On CNN's post "Compassion Forum" analysis, John King, reporter, host and apparently objective, states that Barack Obama "should have known better," Campbell Brown avows that this is not going away, and they all agree that these comments will be misconstrued by Blue Collar voters in Pennsylvania, Indiana and beyond.
The only reason why these comments can be misconstrued by Blue Collar voters in Pennsylvania, Indiana and beyond is because the media chooses to misconstrue them, and the media allows Hillary and Bill to misconstrue them. If you can suffer through the (poor quality) audio of Obama's comments made at the fundraising event in San Francisco, he doesn't sound like he's disrespecting anyone, nor disparaging anybody, he is merely describing a portion of the population that is wooed and wed every single election cycle only to be divorced almost as soon as the voting booths have closed.
It's politics I know but it's a type of politics I can't stomach. It's "parsing words" politics, it's clinging to words like "cling" politics, it's "taking words out of context" politics, and every single time, it's "pundits getting off" politics. If I can stomach the sight of watching Pat Buchanan work himself in to a frenzy tonight over this one, I'll try ... or listen to Anderson Cooper tease "bitter" like a dirty word, I'll try to do that too, but I will be hoping for some reasonable, responsible, intelligent commentary, someone who is actually brave enough to say, "hey, ladies, gentlemen of the democratic party, you are parsing your candidate's words here, you are not looking at the context, you are ignoring what he actually said." If I'm really lucky some pundit might continue with something along the lines of, "what Hillary Clinton is doing right now, reminiscing about her time shooting guns when she was nine but not thinking it's necessary to divulge when the last time was that she actually shot a gun (not relevant to this conversation apparently), is actually far more disrespectful to the intelligence of the voters in small town America."
I don't know that I'll hear that tonight on the TV Machine. Maybe if I don't, I should pour myself a shot of whiskey and knock it back. A bitter dose of the American Politics of old. Hard to swallow.
As the death toll from clashes in Sadr City rises, Muqtada al-Sadr, who holds the U.S. occupation responsible for the assassination of a key aide, rejects an overture by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, indicating that "he will not enter any political process that would allow U.S. forces to remain in Iraq." [Cursor.org]
12:55:18 PM comment []
U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, a Hebron Republican, compared Obama and his message for change similar to a "snake oil salesman" [at a Northern Kentucky Lincoln Day dinner].
He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a "highly classified, national security simulation" with Obama.
"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."
Hillary Clinton appeared before the Alliance For American Manufacturing Forum today in Pittsburgh, and continued to attack Barack Obama for his "small town" comments first posted on the Huffington Post.
Clinton hit Obama for saying voters are bitter over their economic situation, suggesting that Obama was projecting his own political failings onto voters:
"I am well aware that at a fundraiser in San Francisco, he said some things that many people in Pennsylvania and beyond Pennsylvania have found offensive. He was explaining to a small group of his donors what people who live in small towns right here in Pennsylvania are like and why some of you aren't voting for him. But instead of looking at himself, he blamed them.
"He said that they cling to religion and guns and dislike people who are different from them. Well, I don't believe that. I believe that people don't cling to religion, they value their faith. You don't cling to guns, you enjoy hunting or collecting or sport shooting.
"I don't think he really gets it that people are looking for a president who stands up for you and not looks down on you.
Meanwhile, some members of the crowd responded by cheering on Obama, reports Jason Linkins:
Obama, who greeted the crowd at 8:45am, raised the issue and received applause. Clinton, addressing the same crowd later in the morning, brought up the remarks and received mostly silence, with a few audible impatient jeers.
Recently, Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R) came under intense criticism for making a host of incendiary remarks toward gays. For example, she said gays are a “bigger threat” to our nation than terrorism. She also warned, “Gays are infiltrating city councils.” As an example, she cited the town of Eureka Springs, AR, whose city council she claimed is now “controlled by gays.”
The American Family Association (AFA) has joined in promoting this myth of the evil gay agenda in a new video called “They[base ']Äôre Coming To Your Town.” The poster advertising the DVD appears to have menacing rainbow-like lights in background. PageOneQ summarizes the trailer for the video:
The presentation in the AFA trailer…”They’re Coming to Your Town,” tells the tale of an uncharacteristically diverse resort town’s government infiltrated by “a handful of homosexual activists” and bent to their will through the enactment of the town’s domestic partner registry on June 22, 2007.
“Watch, and learn,” says the trailer, “how to fight a well-organized gay agenda to take over the cities of America, one city at a time.”
Eureka Springs is not pleased with people such as Kern, who claim that they have the city’s best interests at heart. Responding to Kern, Eureka Springs’s mayor said the city is “welcoming to all visitors and residents without regard to their race, color, sex, age, sexual orientation, disability or national origin. It is our hope that all people would aspire to this ideal.”
This is not the first time AFA has launched a homophobic campaign. In 2005, AFA president Tim Wildmon backed a warning about “evidence of homosexuality and lesbian people on programs like HGTV and Animal Planet.” AFA founder and chairman Don Wildmon also proposed a hypothetical trip to “the homosexual bathhouses,” saying, “[W]e’re going to confront these people…for what they’re doing.”
Last Sunday evening I attended the San Francisco fundraiser that has been the center of recent political jousting. The next day, when asked about the talk Obama delivered, I too commented about his answer to a question he was asked about Pennsylvania. Over the past week, though, I have had a Rashomon-like experience concerning those remarks.
Clinton, McCain, and media pundits have parsed a blogger's bootlegged tape of Obama's remarks and criticized a sentence or two characterizing some parts of Pennsylvania and the attitudes of some Pennsylvanians. In context and in person, Senator Obama's remarks about Pennsylvania voters left an impression diametrically opposed to that being trumpeted by his competitor's campaigns.
At the end of Obama's remarks standing between two rooms of guests -- the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana -- a questioner asked, "some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?"
Obama's response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.
Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama's campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer "relevant" in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week's commentators who have seized upon the remarks about "bitter feelings" in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer.
First, I noted immediately how dismissive his answer had been about "talking points" and ten point programs and how he used the question to urge the future volunteer to put forward a larger message central to his campaign. That pivot, I thought, was remarkable and unique. Rather than his seizing the opportunity to recite stump-worn talking points at that time to the audience -- as I believe Senator Clinton, Senator McCain and most other more conventional (or more disciplined) politicians at such an appearance might do -- Senator Obama took a different political course in that moment, one that symbolizes important differences about his candidacy.
The response that followed sounded unscripted, in the moment, as if he were really trying to answer a question with intelligent conversation that explained more about what was going on in the Pennsylvania communities than what was germane to his political agenda. I had never heard him or any politician ever give such insightful, analytical responses. The statements were neither didactic nor contrived to convince. They were simply hypotheses (not unlike the kind made by de Tocqueville three centuries ago ) offered by an observer familiar with American communities. And that kind of thoughtfulness was quite unexpected in the middle of a political event. In my view, the way he answered the question was more important than the sociological accuracy or the cause and effect hypotheses contained in the answer. It was a moment of authenticity demonstrating informed intelligence, and the speaker's desire to have the audience join him in a deeper understanding of American politics.
There has been little or no reaction to the part of the answer that was addressed to the hopelessness of inner city youth who have been rendered "irrelevant" to the global economy. No one has seized upon those words as "talking down" to the inner city youth whose plight he was addressing. If extracted from the surreptitious taping by HuffPost Blogger Fowler, those remarks could (and may yet) be taken out of context as "Obama excuses alienation and violence by urban youth." But in context, Senator Obama's response sounded like empathetic conclusions and opinions of a keen observer: more like Margaret Mead than Machiavelli.
As the week's firestorm evolved over these remarks at which I was an accidental observer, I have reflected upon the regrettable irony that has emerged from Senator Obama's response to a friendly question: no good effort at intelligent analysis, candor -- and what I heard as an attempt to convey a profound understanding of both what people feel and why they feel it - goes unpunished. Such insights by a political candidate might otherwise be valued. In a national campaign subject to opposition research on bootlegged tapes, his analytical musing has instead created an immense amount of political flak.
Now and "in this time," to invoke one of the candidate's favorite riffs, such observations and remarks shared among supporters are just a push of a record button on hidden tape recorder away from being spread across the internet to be dissected by political nabobs. What struck me immediately after the fundraiser as so refreshing turned out to be a moment Senator Obama is forced to regret. Today we marvel at de Tocqueville insights about American communities. Apparently, such commentary is valued as long as it is three centuries old and doesn't come from the mouth of a contemporary observer who might be elected president.
So much for the political ironies. But there is one more personal observation that was missed by the secretly taping blogger.
I happened to be on the balcony when Senator Obama's vehicles arrived and he emerged from the Secret Service SUV. Obama shouted the friendly greeting "How are you guys up there doing?" to the group of us looking down from the balcony and then said, "You have to excuse me, I need to call my kids in Chicago now." All of us stood and watched the leading candidate for the Democratic party nomination for president have a short conversation with his kids before he entered a fundraiser to make his remarks.
No tape of that conversation has emerged as yet. Who knows how casual remarks of a father to his children or his wife on a cell phone could be spun to support the argument that as a father speaking to his kids two time zones away before they go to bed, his comments sounded as if he "looked down" upon them. Given his relative height and the age of his kids, he probably does. But that would be precisely as relevant to his capacity to unite and lead this country as were the remarks at the fundraiser that have been so deconstructed over this past week.
Bill Kristol's column in the Monday New York Times is always something to look forward to after a long weekend, as he continues to fill the political humor op-ed slot at the paper once filled so ably by Russell Baker. Today he serves up an unintentionally hysterical classic, using Barack Obama's recent remarks about people clinging to religion in hard times to link the candidate to - are you ready for this? -- Karl Marx.
After Marx, why not Lennon? The John Lennon who once proclaimed, "I don't believe in religion" and "I don't believe in Jesus." But by the end of the column, I stopped laughing when Kristol, whose writings and advocacy have so damaged "average" Americans, called Obama a fraudulent voice of the people because he is truly "disdainful of small-town America.... He's usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it's not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize."
He concluded: "And what are the grounds for his supercilious disdain? If he were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service -- then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur. But what has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?"
Now, let's take that paragraph, re-read it but substitute Bill Kristol for Barack Obama at the end. How does that hold up? Let's review Kristol as man-of-the-people, his military service and remarkable civil achievements.
-- Son of intellectuals, attended exclusive prep school in Manhattan, then Harvard.
-- Served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the Reagan administration.
-- Led the fight to scuttle health care reform under Clinton. Kristol claimed there was no health care crisis and wrote key memo urging Republicans to "kill," not try to amend, the Clinton plan. If the Clinton proposal passed, he warned, it would "revive ... the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."
-- Was the most influential agitator for the attack on Iraq in 2003, which has taken the lives of thousands of "small town" soldiers and injured thousands more for life. Made famous 2002 statement, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
-- Has backed every tax cut for the rich and other economic policies that have kept the middle-class sliding backwards for years.
-- Military service? Come on!
* Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.
Published on Sunday, April 13, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Finding Voters [OE]Bitter and Frustrated,[base '] Obama is Sounding Like Nader
by Dave Lindorff
I haven[base ']t lived in rural Pennsylvania or in rural Indiana, but I have lived in rural upstate New York, in towns where there are so few Democrats that on some local election ballots, not a single position, from town council to justice of the peace, has a contest. As in China, your option is to vote for the Republican candidate, or to leave that line blank.
And many of the people in these towns, uniformly white, when they talk politics, spend a lot of their time complaining about black people, immigrants (neither of whom can even be found in the vicinity) and the threat to their guns.
Barack Obama is exactly right.
In Hancock, NY and Spencer, NY, there are no factory jobs. There used to be in Hancock, but the companies where hundreds of people used to work have long since folded or moved south of the border, courtesy of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) aggressively promoted and pushed through Congress by Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1990s. In Spencer, there are no jobs because in the free-for-all bidding by companies for tax giveaways between communities, Spencer had nothing much to offer. The town is so dirt poor that when the library board, of which I was briefly president, got a measure on the ballot to have one extra dollar per taxpayer of school district taxes allocated to support the local little library, which was at that time totally supported by donations, the measure went down to resounding defeat (I was labeled a communist by some for promoting the idea!).
In 1992, neighbors in Spencer told me they were voting for George H. W. Bush-a patrician blue blood if ever there was one-because Bill Clinton, if elected [base "]would take away our guns.[per thou]
Of course, he didn[base ']t, and had no intention of doing so, but that didn[base ']t matter.
Don[base ']t get me wrong-the people in Hancock and Spencer are good folks. I[base ']m pretty sure many of them probably give a higher proportion of their meager incomes to charity than do millionaires John McCain and Hillary Clinton. But Obama is right that in their angst and frustration at seeing the good economic times pass them by, at seeing themselves abandoned by the federal government in hard times, and at seeing candidates promise them everything during campaigns, only to ignore them after winning, they are bitter and frustrated.
And they have a right to be, and they should be.
One response to that bitterness and frustration is that they are open to the charlatans in both parties, and especially the Republican Party, who have played on their basest fears. It[base ']s Republicans who have whispered the poison in their ears that their high taxes are because [base "]the Blacks[per thou] are getting all that welfare money and are getting all the jobs through [base "]quotas.[per thou] It[base ']s the Republicans who have warned them about [base "]hoards[per thou] of Mexicans coming across the border to steal their jobs. It[base ']s the Republicans who have been warning them that Democrats are going to take their hunting rifles and shotguns away. It[base ']s the Republicans and their Christian fundamentalist front men who have been saying that the Democrats have been causing the nation[base ']s decline by supporting licentiousness and a [base "]gay[per thou] agenda. And it[base ']s Republicans and Democrats who have been hyping the bogus issue of national defense to keep people from focusing on the deliberate dismantling of the US economy that is underway. (Over years of Republican and Democratic administrations, the tax contribution of US corporations to the national budget has fallen from 50% in 1940 to just 14% today. Between 1996 and 2000, 61% of all corporations and 39% or large corporations paid no taxes at all, and that situation has only gotten worse in the Bush years.)
Anything but the real issue, which is how to provide funds so that the children in places like Spencer and Hancock can get a decent education without bankrupting the local taxpayers, how those communities can get jobs again, so that their children won[base ']t have to move out, how to ensure that everyone in town can have health insurance and access to medical care.
Barack Obama is right. I[base ']ve seen it in person. The people in rural America are bitter and frustrated, and after years of being played by politicians, they fall victim to the charlatans who tell them it[base ']s all because of [base "]the Blacks,[per thou] or the immigrants, or who tell them that their guns are in danger. Or they turn to religions that preach division or apocalypse-a concept that offers the chance of a final, delicious revenge against the rich and the powerful oppressors on Wall Street and in Washington.
Now I don[base ']t know what Obama has in mind to try and turn things around for these good people, but it[base ']s a start that he[base ']s at least talking to them, not down, but honestly.
His talk (http://pa.barackobama.com/page/s/paletter) in response to attacks on his statement about rural residents being [base "]bitter and frustrated[per thou] is as good as anything Ralph Nader has said about the power and mendacity of the ruling political elite in America.
As he put it, to wild applause at a rally in Terra Haute, Indiana, explaining the difficulty of appealing to the rural working class voters in Pennsylvania:
[base "]For the last 25 years they[base ']ve seen jobs shift overseas, they[base ']ve seen their economies collapse, they have lost their jobs, they[base ']ve lost their pensions, they[base ']ve lost their health care. And for 25-30 years, Democrats and Republicans have come before then and said we[base ']re gonna make your community better. We[base ']re gonna make it right.
[base "]And nothing ever happens. And of course they[base ']re bitter, and of course they[base ']re frustrated. You would be too, in fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing has happened across the border in Decatur. (Wild applause) The same thing has happened across the country. Nobody[base ']s looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you.
[base "]And so people end up, they don[base ']t vote on economic issues, because they don[base ']t expect anybody[base ']s gonna help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns-you know are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. You know, they, they take refuge in their faith, and their communities, their families-things they can count on. But they don[base ']t believe they can count on Washington.
[base "]So here[base ']s what[base ']s rich. Sen. Clinton says, `Well I don[base ']t think people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know I think Barack[base ']s being condescending.[base '] And John McCain says, `Oh how can he say that? How can he say that people are bitter? You know he obviously is out of touch with the[sigma][base '][per thou]
[base "]Out of touch? Out of touch! I mean, John McCain, it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he[base ']s saying I[base ']m out of touch?[per thou]
[base "]Sen. Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt, after taking money from the financial services companies and she says I[base ']m out of touch?
[base "]No, I[base ']m in touch. I know exactly what[base ']s going on. I know what[base ']s going on in Pennsylvania, I know what[base ']s going on in Indiana. I know what[base ']s going on in Illinois. (Standing ovation) People are fed up! They[base ']re angry, and they[base ']re frustrated and they[base ']re bitter and they want to see a change in Washington, and that[base ']s why I[base ']m running for president of the United States of America![per thou]
Now who knows whether this is all talk too. Maybe Obama is just one more political charlatan.
What is clear though is that this was a speech that we have not heard from a Democratic politician for decades, and it sure sounded good to hear it.
If Obama sticks to this rhetorical approach in the coming weeks, he will nail this nomination in spite of a concerted attack on him by the corporate media and by the combined forces of the Clintons and McCain.
And if he does win the nomination, and resists the siren calls of the Democratic Party leadership to [base "]move to the middle,[per thou] and instead hones this populist message, he will go on to win the presidency.
That[base ']s when the real challenge will come, for an aroused citizenry, in those rural communities and in the larger cities across that nation, to make a President Obama and a Democratic Congress deliver on these words.
For now, they[base ']re pretty powerful words, and just hearing them coming from a Democratic Party frontrunner is an exciting change.
Dave Lindorff[base ']s most recent book is [base "]The Case for Impeachment[per thou] (St. Martin[base ']s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Recently, Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R) came under 
All of us stood and watched the leading candidate for the Democratic party nomination for president have a short conversation with his kids before he entered a fundraiser to make his remarks.
