Obama's statement causes anxiety, division among Dems
By Soren Dayton Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Democratic Party | Elitism — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Barack Obama's statement about "clinging to guns and religion" is causing real divisions and anxiety in Democratic ranks. TNR's John Judis, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, wrote:
Some liberal commentators have downplayed the effect of Barack Obama's fundraising speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last week. But that's wishful thinking. ... his remarks in San Francisco will haunt him not only in the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, but also in the general election against John McCain, assuming he gets the Democratic nomination.
For confirmation, just look at this from the $2,300 Obama donor who broke the story:
“I’m a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family -- sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich. Immediately, the remarks just really bothered me. For the first time, I realized he is an elitist.”
That's a real, live Obama-supporting liberal who feels a little alienated over this. How many more of those are there? Read on.
Rasmussen polled the response to this over the weekend and found, "Democrats are fairly evenly divided—34% agree with Obama and 43% disagree." That is the context to look at the defection rate. Today's Quinnipiac poll found that "26 percent of Clinton supporters would switch to Arizona Sen. John McCain." This whole debate, and Obama's gaffes, may just be giving Republicans the tools to make that happen.
How bad is this for the Democrats? Back to Judis for a moment:
To win in November, a Democratic presidential candidate has to carry most of the industrial heartland states ... Ruy Teixeira and I have calculated that in the heartland states, a Democratic presidential candidate has to win from 45 to 48 percent of the white working class vote.
This is the same heartland that Michael Barone describes as containing "Jacksonians." Barone had this to say, after a detailed analysis:
The Democratic Party has seldom won a presidential election without their support: Jimmy Carter carried Jacksonian voters in 1976, and so did Bill Clinton in 1992 and, by a lesser margin, in 1996. If Al Gore had carried just West Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee or Georgia or Arkansas—all states carried by Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992, all heavy with Jacksonians—he would have been elected president in 2000, and we wouldn't have spent 37 days arguing how to count the vote in Florida.
No wonder the Dems are starting to run scared. And every day this story goes on is another doubt in the minds of superdelegates.
...as we speak. No doubt they are raising Rev Wright, Ayres, Bittergate, and a host of other things to prove that Obama will be a disaster in waiting in the general election.
The SDs and the Democrat Party at large is also concerned about another matter that is more important than the 2008 elections - and that is not alienating the black vote. Even if they are convinced that Obama is a sure-fire loser, they still may go with him because failure to do so would fracture the black vote which the Democrat party desperately needs to maintain its electoral viability in the future.
“.....women and minorities hardest hit”
Appease the Black Vote alienate the Hispanic and the (Non Black) Women's Vote.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
"I grew up poor in a very wealthy family -- sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich."
I've got to wonder if she holds the views that she does because she feels slighted by the rich because the wealth in her own family didn't help when her immediate family was struggling financially. I'll also bet she uses the fact that she has rich relations to prove to others that she favors redistribution not out of animosity for the wealth but out of compassion for the poor.
But hey, I don't know the person, so my uneducated, ill informed guesses are just that. Though my usual take on people favoring redistribution of wealth is that they usually harbor resentment due to a conceived inadequacy in their own past.
it would be why her choices for President are liberal choices.
Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion
How could she NOT have known he was an elitist when he's the standard bearer for a political movement that is nothing if not elitist?
Progressive, liberal, socialist, it's all different names for people who think that they (and people who think the way they do), have a right and responsibility to use government to make decisions that the individual citizen and the free market can't be trusted to make correctly.
If that's not elitism, it's a pretty good impersonation.
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"You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice" - Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert)
but you won't see his pampered derreire travel coach for the remainder of his sorry natural life.
"I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." - The last recorded words of Adam Smith.
to realize that like the Republicans before them, their choice are down to worser and worsest instead of the lesser of two evils. Only the Republicans weren't so stupid as to engineer a proportional voting Rube Goldberg device to select their eventual nominee. Which means their worser and worsest are getting more air time than our guy is, and more people get to see how horrible they both are as candidates. And even worsester than that, with this one candid remark Obama may have undone all of the work the Dems have done in the past two decades trying to paper over their tyranical inclinations.
We need to come up with a way to put all these tiny pieces into one complete narrative. Each time the Obamboozler is able to "retract and deny" a specific phrase. But when you put Michelle and Wright and Rezko and his father's writings and his own socialist policies- you get the complete puzzle.
"Small town folks get bitter after which they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment."
McCain would never approve this, but I'd like to see an ad that juxtaposed him talking about bitter religious, racist white folks in the sticks and Jerimiah Wright's bitter, racist, twisted view of Christianity in Chicago. Maybe throw in some of Obama's own anti-trade speeches when he was campaigning in Ohio, just as icing on the cake.
Of course, the difference is that the hicks are doing it out of ignorance, but Obama has a degree from Harvard.
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"You can't save the Earth unless you're willing to make other people sacrifice" - Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert)
Look! This is a politician who denies being a politician. He claims that he can change WASHINGTON but not CHICAGO. He has too many friends there who is in trouble; including REZKO who are connected to IRAQ, corruptions and who knows.
People takes his word for it.
He told an elite group that the reason pennsylvanias are so bitter that they go to church and hold onto guns. Which Church? Rev. Wright's church that he was in taught him that.
Normal people don't.
Now he is trying to fool us by the rhetorics that indeed there are people there who are bitter. Now to be fair, there are people in Illinois who are bitter. If OBAMA's claim hold any water, he seems to be responsible more than WASHINGTON.
Funny that OBAMA can delineate himself from politicians while seeking endorsements from them. If he did not like politicians, he should tell those endorsement to get lost. It is ironic that he wants to sound like an outsider while he is very much inside getting lots of benefit in the elite group.
What gives him the right to speak so condescendingly about the small town rural Americans. He makes the existence of people of bitterness a new discovery, but it isn't.
He is just like other politicians, get the votes and leave the voters by themselves praying and shooting as soon as he can.
He lies and contradicts. Our confused media, please catch up on him with his lies before we make a wrong choice of president again. We wrong to know his true skin because he made changes all the time.
I wonder how this will really affect them?
I have no data, but I would guess that the Jacksonians are underrepresented in the superdelegate ranks.
It will be interesting to watch.
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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.