Posted on 04/14/2008 10:17:29 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
George Will rocks.
Excellent column from Mr. Will, as usual.
I am a fan of G. Will (own all of his books). This article articulates my reservations about the Barack Obama candidacy much better than I ever could.
Ouch! that one left a mark, George!
Good piece! BO is getting slammed unmercifully tonight and he deserves it.
I absolutely agree with Will, what Obama did was he insulted the class of Democratic voters that have been Democrats since the inception, insulting the core of them. FDR would never say that because he knew the history of the Democrats as being people who felt disenfranchised by poor, working conditions and who wanted to have a voice and feel empowered. Obama insisted instead that they are a bunch of post-apocalyptic Deliverance hicks. He also says that it is natural, like there will always be the same breed of hicks in that area.
Well what about the gang-wars and gang-bangers in the inner city, eh Obama? I have never heard of the Inner cities with so much pent-up ferocity at ethnicity, or split into balkanized Immigrant divisions. Hell with all of the illegal guns and crime, the only solution is to shoot or get shot. Of course these are the same places where some people have religion so that they can revitalize a community.
However, if maybe a little bit is true that people use these things to revitalize a community, he lumped them in in such a way that it sent a generalization down. It presupposed that the black community using churches as a way for young people to find something in themselves instead of going off to gangs, are racists and bigots. It presupposed that whites who are very poor and maybe need guns in order to get food, are bigots, Anti-Immigrant and only use guns because they are rednecks.
If Obama understood what he really said I don’t know. It is obvious that instead of the sunny characterization of small towns in the old movies(like in The Music Man), he takes the look of small towns in Hollywood movies like Deliverance, or any of the horror movies that make small town people look rigid, paranoid, racist and ready to do murder. In short, he believes that everybody in small town PA was a cast member in Children of the Corn and that he is the lady from The Stand who knows who is on the good side.
In short, Obama is getting a royal beat-down now. Hillary has jumped to a 20 point lead(if a post on here shows), most people hate his comments and the Reverend Wright just reappeared. McCain will beat you anyway, Obama, so try pandering more.
[. . .the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness.]
In the real world this “progressive elite” is usually a corps of ruthless, psychopathic thugs whose own ideology is about absolute power over the masses and the accumulation of personal material wealth.
bump for the morrow
Poor George, ask him the time of day and he describes the functioning of a clock.
Yep. The old tried and true strategy of releasing bad news on Friday so's it'll get buried over the weekend - ain't working.
There is a God.
Heh... great toon!
Hmmm... for a while there, Obama WAS The Music Man, charming and swindling the rubes.
“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
;^)
Bump for later
“Poor George, ask him the time of day and he describes the functioning of a clock.”
LOL
We agree about Richard Hofstadter's condescending views about non-liberals and that Obama probably picked this up at Columbia or Harvard where those who do not agree to go along with liberalism are denigrated as victims of the "paranoid style" of politics which is the standard Ivy League dismissal of pretty much all non-liberal opposition.
There is a good chance Obama read something by Richard Hofstadter or had professors at Columbia who did:
Opposition to liberalism based on "bitter" feelings and "frustrations"
"He is the most bitter of all our citizens....
Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected. It is at this point that the issues of politics, or the pretended issues of politics, become interwoven with and dependent upon the personal problems of individuals. We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives."
"Such status-strivings may help us to understand some of the otherwise unintelligible figments of the pseudo-conservative ideology — the incredibly bitter feeling against the United Nations, for instance."
- Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," The American Scholar, Winter 1954-55.
Then again, maybe George reads FR, huh? Stephanopoulos probably reads Hofstadter. Should make an interesting discussion on This Week George Stephanopoulos .
I would bet money idiot Dem strategists read Hofstadter's arrogant caricature of non-liberals, believing it, and have been since Estrich was running the Dukakis War Room. Obama's comments weren't a casual faux pas. This is what liberal Democrats think about Middle America. This is what they are taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. This is exactly what they are taught in Critical Legal Studies at Harvard and a former editor of the Law Review, someone who had read Saul Alinsky, would be up to speed not only on the text but the footnotes, even when not citing them for appropriation.
That cartoon needs to be posted on every Obama thread.
It turns out he’s right in his analysis, just about the wrong group.
Who is xenophobic, violent, “cling to” rather than worship in their religion?
Great column.
It is likely Obama's liberal "education" at Columbia was influenced by Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and Frankfurt School social theory. Both he and his wife probably had to read cultural Marxism at Columbia and Princeton. What he said in San Francisco reflects that ideology.
A thousand bucks and a door prize to anyone who can track down a reading list for Obama's Poli Sci 101 at Columbia University!
"FDR governed as a liberal but politicked like a populist. When LBJ rightly and to his everlasting credit removed one of the Dem pillars of paranoia - racism, the GOP co-opted populist racism, added the Jeffersonian notion of government and institutional hatred, throw in a dash of paranoid Red scare, now terrorism scare, and you get political victories. "
July 13, 2006: What Barack Obama Needs To Learn From Richard Hofstadter, Abraham Lincoln and FDR. Obama wasn't just speaking extemporaneously. These were strategy points from talkleft.com back in 2006, addressed to Obama.
The subject related to Obama’s condescending comments was discussed as strategy points back in 2006 (above). It’s even addressed to him. This deserves some attention and chatter. What he said in San Francisco is from talkleft.com.
Such wise words; thank you.
Anyone who knows ANYTHING about marketing in the real world knows how utterly idiotic this idea is. The ash heap of business history is littered with the bones of defunct companies that started their business development process by trying to manufacture a product and then find a market for it, rather than by trying to understand what the market was really demanding and then designing a product to meet that demand.
For example, this hot new fad:
Democrat voters routinely walk into their polling places and vote for big government to confiscate more and more money.... from their neighbors. I cannot imagine any behavior more selfish and rude than that.
Agreed. He belongs in Hollywood, California not with us poorly educated hillbillies in East Country. It is like all these Democrats pair themselves with are the Ivy League elitists who make lots of money and not with us rednecks. I do like that the mask slipped. I remember that there was one editorial that I read that suggested that Liberals see all of us as Deliverance people. This kind of thing that Obama is talking about, sounds a lot like one of those Liberals.
This is also a very well-to-do individual. I mean for Democrats to put up a black person who doesn’t connect with most of his community in terms of income, is deeply ironic. It is also ironic that this guy gets a lot of money for doing nothing. His wife makes more money than my Jewish, white mother and she also works for a living in Northrup Grumman though. To the steel workers in Pennsylvania, Obama is just another rich white John Kerry Liberal who brings his too-educated elitism wherever he goes.
It is like the Democrats cry about how many wealthy Presidential candidates there are yet they pick the richest people to lead us trying to pile them into populist tinder boxes. He might be black, but he is richer than a good amount of his community. Which should make him be a Republican. If many of the Democrats have preached that a black man can never make it in society, that it is bad for blacks to strive to be Middle-Class, they are being hypocritical.
May he get ousted by Marian the Librarian before the General Election.
In the few discussions I have had with him, one thing that continually surprises him is that not only do I know that there is other worlds beside engineering, but that I still choose to live in a small town. He often remarked “How can you stay in Iowa after seeing New York and Chicago? “
For him, the only “safe” place to live is in a major city. He acknowledges the crime, but is more scared of me and my friends with guns than with the gang bangers. For him the gang murders are a known risk, and he is freaked about the coyotes that howl in the night by my parent's house. He has traveled the world, but has very little knowledge of the people in the places he has been. He recites the various talking points from the evening news about places he has gone, but can't say that he talked to any of the people there (beyond the hotel staff). In short, he has been brought up in a very insulated bubble. He truly believes what Obama just said, not because he has seen it but because he feels he has to believe it. To truly fit into his chosen class, he has to believe that all others are ignorant, gun toting hicks who cling to God because marijuana is illegal (which I heard him say once). If he started to believe otherwise, he would no longer be welcome in his class.
McCain even discussed it on MSNBC's Hardball tonight at Villanova. Even Chris Matthews seems to know it's a political liability and serious issue.
After I get my money I'll yell, HMMOGod! I got more money for bullets! (and bowling shoes).
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