Bill Clinton on Rural Culture: 'All They’ve Got Is Their Hunting and Their Fishing'

Bill Clinton on Rural Culture: 'All They’ve Got Is Their Hunting and Their Fishing' By Tom Blumer Created 01/20/2013 - 3:50pm

It's hardly news to those who have followed Bill Clinton for the past two decades, and it's probably even more of the same-old, same-old for those who had to endure having him as governor during the 1980s in Arkansas.

Nonetheless, something Mr. Clinton said in a speech at "a joint meeting of the Obama National Finance Committee and a group of business leaders," which was captured without even being deemed possibly offensive by Byron Tau at the Politico, should be noted as exemplifying the deep contempt this man -- and, it would appear, his audience, which had no reported negative reaction -- has for everday Americans (seen in bold after the jump; HT Instapundit):

Former President Bill Clinton warned a group of top Democratic donors at a private Saturday meeting not to underestimate the passions that gun control stirs among many Americans.

“Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them,” Clinton said.

“A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things,” Clinton said. “I know because I come from this world."

... he said that he understands the culture that permeates a state like Arkansas — where guns are a longstanding part of local culture.

“A lot of these people … all they’ve got is their hunting and their fishing,” he told the Democratic financiers. “Or they’re living in a place where they don’t have much police presence. Or they’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that they believe it all.”

Yes indeed, millions of Americans, depending on how you want to parse Clinton's quote, either find their only meaning in life in hunting and fishing, or literally have no other interests.

Really? Do you mind if we take a look at those involved with the government and national media in Washington for a moment, especially those on the left? Would it be fair to say that the percentage of people there where "all they’ve got is their obsessions over poltics and power trips" is exponentially higher than the percentage of rural Americans who think about nothing but hunting and fishing? The overhelmingly likely answer is "yes." CNN correspondent Tom Foreman.

On a personal level, I would ask the political elites, if they can drop their sneering condescension for just a few moments, to get into real conversations sometime with people who they believe would fit the stereotype Bill Clinton worked to advance on Saturday. They would learn how interesting the vast majority of these supposedly boring, one-dimensional people really are. I have. I promise that you'll learn a lot of things you didn't know, and gain a greater appreciation of those for whom you're supposed to be working.

It will surprise almost no one here that a search at the Associated Press's national web site on Clinton's full name (not in quotes) returns nothing relevant.

The press and the left usually have to accuse Republicans and conservatves of "speaking in code" to conjure up accusations of elitism, racism, etc. Clinton's speech shows how no such creativity is necessary. Yet the press consistently finds such utterances on the left not newsworthy.

A problem with so-called "progressives" is the world view they have acquired by the historically-limited ideology they have embraced.

'Twas not always so in America.

Were Alexis de Tocqueville to visit America today, perhaps he would be as impressed as he was in the 1830's, by the vast number of well-informed citizens in what Clinton and his pseudo-intellectual friends might describe as the "red states"--those vast fly-over parts of America where political elitists like Clinton mistakenly believe that "all they've got is their hunting and fishing."

It is there, perhaps, where Tocqueville would find (as he did in the 1830's) citizens who pride themselves on having read their Declaration of Independence and Constitution, along with their newspapers and Bibles, and they understand, with that true intellectual, Thomas Jefferson, "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." It is the "artificial rules" which absorb the "progressives," not the enduring principles so well understood by the rural folks across America.

Contrary to what Clinton and others in the media seem to believe, citizens in every County in every State in the United States now have almost instant access to the literature and ideas that motivated America's Founders. In increasing numbers, those citizens have begun to study and to embrace those ideas. No longer are their intellectual horizons bound by what some evening news anchor tells them about the world, or by what they read in the New York Times.

No longer are they bound by the philosophy of the National Education Association's legislative agenda in the public schools. They have their own independent schools, and the ever-growing home school movement is allowing their children to explore ideas through books and internet access in their own homes.

What has been called "public education" in America no longer is able to censor and control the curriculum for large numbers of citizens. No longer can it successfully censor out the words and ideas that America was founded upon. A free marketplace of ideas has begun to emerge in America over the past 20-25 years, and minds have been enlightened about the ideas of liberty, of freedom of individual enterprise, and of the concepts that motivated the Founders. Check out the popularity of books and seminars on those subjects. Check out web sites where the writings of the Founders and of those whose ideas they studied can be read in the privacy of one's home.

There's more intellectual activity out here in the "red states" than most media people could imagine. As a result, the assorted pseudo-intellectuals who pretend to analyze those who hold the Bill of Rights to be outside the purview of the "progressives" and this Administration do understand their rights.

As a result of home schooling, private schools, and technology, just perhaps, they are becoming as informed about their Constitution as the ordinary citizens Tocqueville visited in the American wilderness of the 1830's, whom he described in the following manner:

"It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where the instruction which enlightens the understanding is not separated from the moral education ...."
The American citizen, he said, "..will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them .. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education ... every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution .... it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon .... It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts [wilderness]. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France."
"Ideas have consequences" (Weaver). The Founders ideas brought forth the greatest experiment in liberty that the world has ever known. The idea of dependency on grants of rights and benefits from imperfect people elected to positions of power in govenment has its consequences too--as we are seeing in the society today.

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