Today on the elitist NPR show “All Things Considered,” David Brooks and E.J. Dionne agreed that Obama’s comments re working class people clinging bitterly to religion and guns because their jobs went away are going to hurt him with ordinary people. Brooks said that people want a president who they think they can sit down with and who can relate to them. The president may come from an elite, but he has to know how to chat with ordinary people and feel what they’re feeling. Kerry and Dukakis lost because they were elitists from Massachusetts. Chris Matthews has said the same thing: he’s guffawed at the fact that Obama went into a diner and when the owner offered him coffee, Obama asked for orange juice. He was so uncomfortable, said Matthews. Why can’t he take the coffee and then say, Thanks, man; Oh can I have some orange juice. He can’t sit down with people and chat about the Phils, says Matthews, who is maybe planning to do just that.
The last tiime I stood up for Obama on this issue, Todd Hanvy justly blasted me, I’m going to try and refine my argument. Obama comes from a humble background but he is an elitist by character. It’s who he is. He’s intellectually superior and he knows it; it makes him arrogant. He’s not as wealthy as McCain or Hillary, but he’s aristocratic thru and thru. I don’t think Hillary has the common touch either, but she can try. McCain can relate to anyone.
Brooks–a fair weather populist–is right that people prefer someone with a common touch, but it’s not everything. Kerry lost because of the climate of fear and his gutless reaction to the swiftboating, not because of his mid-Atlantic accent purely. In Obama’s case, people will overlook his hauteur because his strengths are so outsize. People recognize that the country is in a profound mess, and they want dramatic change and intelligent leadership. Those things Obama can provide. Think what a thrill it will be if he is elected, the shock waves it will send through the world and through our society. A lot of voters are surely curious about that, and will vote for him on that basis alone, and could give a damn about his cold personality. McCain doesn’t know the difference between Shi’ites and Sunnis; his atherosclerotic mind is a lot more important consideration than what a personable guy he is. Richard Nixon wasn’t the kind of guy anyone felt comfortable sitting around with; but people overlooked that, saw his intelligence. FDR was the last thing from ordinary, and he fixed the Great Depression. Lincoln was an awkward man who freed the slaves. JFK wasn’t an ordinary guy, but the air of glamour and change was winning. Even Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, is described as a shy private man, very difficult for anyone but Nancy to warm up to.
So ordinariness is a false value. We’ve had two presidents you would love to have a beer with and look what we got for that. Obama’s handlers should tell him never to wax sociological again, never to condescend, but they shouldn’t hide his cerebral detached side. That’s who he is. Aristocrats can be great reformers. Just because he’s not good with ordinary people doesn’t mean that he won’t care deeply about them as a group.
The cult of personality is alive and well in the US. It's about time people started to think about the issues instead of all this vacuous pablum about arrogance and elitism.
Bush is the sort of politician who can sit and have a beer with rednecks, and look what he has done to your country.
FDR was as pure an aristocrat as America can produce. That image of him with the cigarette on the holder pointed up with his chin up was not that of the common man. But he had the support of the Farmer/Labor people in the midwest, the industrial workers and the loggers and fisherman from the west coast. I know because these were my parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts. They absolutely loved him. FDR somehow connected with them and I believe Obama has that same attraction. I don't know what that is, but I agree with Phil that Obama has it.
Unfortunately Phil has embraced the line that America is going to be saved by a man on horse…who will lead us out of all the dumb wars and stupid policies of the Bush administration. Continuing this descent Phil is caught up in the debate about Obama's style, but really what matters is the content of the change he promises. Isn't it clear by now that he has tied himself to the same zionist line of Israel's security being America's duty. Sure he may favor Israeli labor over Israeli Likud. But the track record of Labor hasn't been anything really different when it comes to Palestinian rights.
Now as far as the "bitter" flap. I doubt that people embrace having guns as their right because they don't like what is happening in their life. And if they don't particularly like homosexuality its not because they are frustrated with their lives..that is a condescending view.
Now Hillary, the more evil of the lessors, suggests Obama is terrible because of the company he keeps..ex-weathermen and radical preachers. But here is the real question.
How come nobody, even Phil questions Hillary's relation to Haim Saban, her sugar daddy who makes no bones about his support for the Israeli Defense (sic) Force…he organizes fund raisers for them, and makes it known he has only one issue he cares about: "and that is Israel"…
link to haaretz.com
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That connection friends; is what Americans should be talking about…
I think I've seen this national sit-com before–All In The Family, the rip-off of the Brit blue-collar family back in the 1970's. Who's going to get Årchie's vote?
This is news? Why doesn't anyone question the inflexibility of the the person offering coffee? Is it so much more work to make it an orange juice instead?
*correspondent David Shuster*
The chattering class:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200804110004?f=h_latest
MSNBC correspondent David Shuster stated to host Chris Matthews: "Well, here's the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, 'I'll have orange juice.' " Matthews replied, "No," to which Shuster responded: "He did." Shuster continued: "And it's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, 'Here, have some coffee,' you say, 'Yes, thank you,' and, 'Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?' You don't just say, 'No, I'll take orange juice,' and then turn away and start shaking hands." Matthews added, "You don't ask for a substitute on the menu," and then said: "David, what a regular guy. You could do this. … I mean, go to the diners." Matthews then began an interview with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), an Obama supporter, by asking Casey: "Isn't that interesting, Senator Casey, that Barack Obama, your candidate, can walk before 15,000 people with complete calm and assurance, but he seems a little out of place in A) a bowling alley and B) a diner? What is the problem with your guy?"
We call that agenda setting over here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+agenda+setting&btnG=Google+Search
Isn't it wonderful these people know so well what people do and what they don't? And what a pleasure it must be to find fault in Obama's behavior, however irrelevant it may be.
Reminds me of a funny girl in an alternative restaurant in Berlin, who once carried the wrong wine to a table, when the customer complained, she answered:
You either take this one, or you don't get anything at all!
;)
Sorry:) Forgot that our dear Phil loves Matthews.
still; Ugh, bletch:
"Matthews then asserted: "What's so hard about doing a diner? I don't get it. Why doesn't he go in there and say, 'Did you see the papers today? What do you think about that team? How did we do last night?' Just some regular connection?"
What is the meaning of aristocrat today in the USA? Karl Rove and Hillary wish to tell you.
What should we take from the political Obama's view, made at a private meeting with presumably well-off potential contributors?
“You go into 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 going to 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.”
1.) An American taboo: Class alienation deep within white fly-over country, millions of working families (not destined to be an ethnic minority across the entire nation for about 40 more years) facing increasingly difficult economic circumstances, bitter over the sequential refusal of the political establishment, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, to help them.
2.) Obama suggests to the well-heeled that white working people are not only materially distressed, but also ideologically misled. Popular anger over vanishing jobs and falling wages has been diverted into various blind alleys by right-wing political campaigns over guns, abortion, immigration and trade (the first three mainly from Republicans, the last mainly from Democrats, including Obama himself).
3.) Implicit equation of religion with the other nostrums used to misinform and confuse ordinary white workers. If only they embraced their true economic self-interest, these pure [poor] saps wouldn’t need religion and they wouldn’t dislike non-white immigrants.”
WSJ & William Kristol denounced Obama as a closet Marxist.
Republicans, ever defensive of the USA's wealthiest citizens, cast themselves as pork-rind-eating, NASCAR-watching, gun-toting populists.
Limousine Leftys link bitterness over economic hard times with America’s "romance with guns and embrace of religion and say, "Get a grip. What we ought to be worked up about is the racism that still prevents some people from giving a candidate a fair chance because of his skin color." 50% white skin color, that is.
One drop rule still applies, even if Whitey know longer wants it.
Racist Archie Bunker lives forever, the core engine for all our problems.
Where is the MSM pundits confronting in pity detail the extraordinary scale of the economic disaster facing millions of working people, not only in the de-industrialized towns of Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina, a focus of the current stage of the presidential campaign, but throughout the country, in large cities and their suburbs as well as rural and small-town America?
For men in the prime working years (age 25-54), the official unemployment rate is 4.1 %. This is artificially low since it does not count people who have given up looking for work. The US Labor Department reported that in March the actual proportion of men in this age group without jobs stood at 13.1 percent. (The highest during the Great Depression was 20%).
The government breaks down the figures by race, and those figures show that over the last year almost all the jobs lost by men in the 25 to 54 age group have been lost by whites, with most of those losses affecting men ages 35 to 44.
These figures suggest that while unemployment for black men has been and remains high, the biggest change in the past year has been a sharp increase in jobs lost by white men in the prime working years—precisely those who were the focus of Obama’s remarks in affluent private San Francisco.
"Just because he's not good with ordinary people doesn't mean that he won't care deeply about them as a group."
Ordinary people? Dreams Of My father just might be bizarre in its rambling concentration on his ‘blackness’, which verges on monomania. At the same time, the white side of his family, although far more central to his upbringing, is treated as a shadow world.
Charles, I like some of your latest comments.
But concerning monomania about Blackness, don't forget there was no father. But his skin always marked his absence. So isn't a search for the absent father always the search for something that has always been visible there. And in that case: Blackness. Africa.
One of my best friends in highschool was albino. He turned into the best pupil the school ever had, simply since kids did not want to play with him, since he was different. So he started to read books, who turned into HIS friends. A black in Indonisia must have been something similar.
LeaNder:
Astute point. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Similarly, nearness blindly irks. The irony I tried to suggest is that ordinary white people like those who as a practical matter did the most for him growing up, are his reverse abstraction, not heart-felt. And they know this when they hear and see him. Let's call it his own special brand of Hillary bugaboo. At least, unlike Hillary, he has his relative youth as an excuse for his lack of maturity. I'll take his book over hers any day. McCain? Ha! He never grew up at all, and, to my knowledge, don't need no book at all.
David "Bobo" Brooks, as Glenn Greenwald has recently hilighted, likes to pretend he can wet his pinky and tell what direction the zeitgeist is blowing, but in reality he speaks only for his own agenda-driven sorry ass. MSM pundits like Brooks are nothing but whores, spreading their legs for any pro-war John who can buy their services (such as they are). (Excepting scabrous anomalies like Bill Kristol, who had the war-lust spooned into him as a babe, and perhaps is not to be entirely blamed for being such a vulpine fraud.)
Talking about class issues and bowling certainly beats talking about war crimes, the loss of civil liberties, the growth of a Unitary Executive, hyperinflation, and a gutted economy.
Lickspittles like Brooks, maundering in their MSM echo-chambers, are employed by press baron war pigs not because they're intelligent, or clever (and they may be), but to serve as reliable fonts of perpetual horseshit with which to distract the electorate from hearing real questions asked.
"Talking about class issues and bowling certainly beats talking about war crimes, the loss of civil liberties, the growth of a Unitary Executive, hyperinflation, and a gutted economy."
When would Vietnam have ended if it weren't for the military draft existing back then? The on-going war's persistence regardless of party in power is directly tied to the "volunteer" US Army & Marines. The number of people in the upper government of all branches with children in those services speaks volumes. The state of the economy is tied directly to the cost of the war & foreign policy, as is the plight of the masses.
Gotta love Glenn Greenwald (commenting on a NYT article about McCain painting fast and loose with the "al Qaeda" brush):
——————–
"Moreover, the article, to its credit, does quote, for once, a genuine war critic: Professor Juan Cole. Cole, however, is identified as a "fierce critic of the war" — that sounds radical — while the other two "experts" the article consults (Pollack and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute) are simply identified as think tank experts, even though those two think tanks are the most pro-war, stridently neoconservative organs in the country (as well as being, not coincidentally, two of the top 3 most frequently cited think tanks by our very-liberal-media). Here is the mission statement from Pollack's boss and chief funder at the "Saban Center for Middle East Policy," billionaire Haim Saban:
"I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel". . . . While Mr. Saban is a vocal opponent of President Bush — "I think Bush is just messing it up every day more" — he supports some of Mr. Bush's policies. "On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk."
Is it really any wonder that Saban's Ken Pollack thinks it's "perfectly reasonable" to call various sundry Middle East groups — including Iraqis defending their own country from foreign occupation — "Al Qaeda" terrorists? To do that is actually called "lying" — of exactly the type that led us into Iraq in the first place. It's extremely revealing that John McCain does it and Ken Pollack thinks it's a "perfectly reasonable" thing to do. "
——————-
Oarwell. Great observation! Keep peeking at the sneaks!
There's no way Obama can lose this election. He basically called blue collar workers in Pennsylvania racist, gun-loving, Jesus freaks and what happened? His poll numbers went up. McCain is too old. His synapses don't snap fast enough. If he lost 20 pounds he'd be a lot more electable. But he'll probably have a heart attack before November.
As for Kerry, I think he lost because his chin was too long. No one could stand looking at it for four years. By the same token, Obama has Dumbo ears, but not so much as to make your stomach churn.
In a MSM-designed political landscape drained of any real substance, symbolism is all. Gene is correct with his points about Kerry's chin (too French?), Obama's ears, the windsurfing and the Dukakis tank and Bush's codpiece and faux-Reaganesque "brush-clearing." It's all that matters in the Distractosphere that our media has become. Keep waving some synthetic red meat in front of the pea-brained T Rex populace.
Sop to Cerberus!
Oarwell. Another good point about the power of image, especially in our sound bite MSM. By Dick Nixon's blau bart
& JFK's clean smile, by the hair of our chiny-chin-chins.