During the campaign, Obama was at a small, intimate gathering in San Fransisco, a supposedly friendly crowd, when he made his infamous "bitter clinger" remarks.
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.
See any similarity to the small, intimate, supposedly friendly gathering at last Friday's White House Ramadan dinner? Obama speaks his mind in front of what he takes to be a sympathetic crowd and then spends days walking it back, telling people that he didn't really mean what he said, or what it sounded like he said...or what he really meant. Or something...
I see a pattern.
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There is something about the video from the Ramadan dinner that I haven't heard talked about. When he gets to the place where he says "like everybody ELSE DOES," the corners of his mouth pulls back on the word else and he spits out the words. This was not a neutral statement. It reminds me of the attitude when got to the podium to talk about the police in the Henry Louis Gates affair.
ReplyDeleteSounds just like a typical politician who speaks to the crowd he's with. He has little or no grounding in solid principles or values, or maybe he does and they are not basis american values. I think the latter is true. He tells the truth as he sees it and then trys to walk it back when the man on the streets reels from his words!
ReplyDeleteSorry I don't get around much anymore, but things are not good at home with the wife's illness.
Thanks for bringing up this quote again! Never before has this been so true:
ReplyDelete"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."
You need to look no further than this blog to find evidence that this is pretty spot on for a lot of Americans. Especially the part about antipathy to people who are not like them. Sad but true.