You knew it was coming, like Saturdays following Fridays. Democrat Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments about rural voters would become fodder for the general election fight with Republican John McCain. Everyone expected the issue - which contributed to Obama’s primary defeat here in April and subsequent defeats in places like Kentucky and West Virginia - would be powder in the political guns of GOP surrogates, 527s and maybe McCain himself.
But … The first real high-profile reference to it comes from Obama, himself, in this New York Times article. In short, Obama would like a mulligan:
“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently. We were sitting across from each other on his plane, the one with the big red, white and blue “O” on the tail, flying some 35,000 feet above Nebraska. “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.”
{snip}
“I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, ‘You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,’ ” he continued. “Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.”
Here are the exact words Obama said, according to Time Magazine:
“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. They feel so betrayed by government that 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, then that adds another layer of skepticism.
“But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1 percent, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American.
“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. 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.”
The Huffington Post first reported it, which was delivered during a fundraiser in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton seized on those comments, attempting to make Obama look like an elitist out of touch with rural and working class Pennsylvanians who live in areas where she trounced him pretty handily on April 22.
However, as I’m compiling my “Top Ten” lists for the campaign, you might see this video appear on my “Top Ten Youtube Moments,” Obama’s response in Steelton, Dauphin County, to Clinton’s comments:
