Bill's Notes

Wow, Just Wow -- Breathtaking Condescension from Obama
Barack Obama shows he truly doesn't know what the lives of ordinary Americans are like. And now he's proved it:

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.


Well, here's your campaign ad for the Fall. Just run that over and over again. You'll get the 15 percent of the country that actually believes something like that, and the rest will tell you to piss off.

Barack Obama -- officially a dickhead. You're not running for president of Harvard and those who wished they'd gone to Harvard, you know.

John McCain's campaign responds here:


"It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking," McCain spokeman Steve Schmidt said. "It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."



Eric Blair (mail) (www):
You know, that line sort of went past me, but I'm so used to the condescension--hell, I use it myself sometimes, that it didn't even register.

Whatta disaster. This is going to get kicked around for a while.
4.12.2008 1:04am
Bill (mail) (www):
Yeah, we're just a bunch of dumb hicks out here in rural PA, all bitter and xenophobic. Except that the people out here, I dunno, don't seem bitter. They seem happy and don't seem to be looking for a government handout or for what Obama or anyhone else is going to do for them.

However, if you look at the comments in the HuffPost article, you'll see a lot of bitter folks from the left. They admit as much. Maybe the crazies there are unhappy with their lives, and are afraid of people who both aren't like them and who are armed besides.
4.12.2008 9:28am
John (mail):
I don't know what's worse condescension from the left or bullshit from the right. What I do know is that we're pretty much fucked for the next two decades either way.
4.12.2008 9:56am
Harry (yet again) (mail) (www):
This is an example of Obama's brilliant rhetoric. A simultaneous slap at Clinton ("And they fell through the Clinton administration..." - actually, things were pretty good around here during the Clinton years, thank you very much) and a sour grapes defense of his probable loss in Pennsylvania. As I wrote a few weeks ago: "I think if he loses in Pennsylvania, there will be a lot of post-hoc explanations given, most of them portraying Pennsylvanians as a bunch of blue-collar red-neck racist simpletons who embrace the past and reject the future." Perhaps this is just the pre-hoc version of the same thing.

And once again an example of his not-so-brillant strategy: he can afford to lose Pennsylvania in the Primaries, but not in the General Election. Both Obama and Clinton need to be careful about how much collateral damage they do during the runup to the convention, because one of them is going to have to try to undo it by November.

I read something a while back that said that if Hillary wins in November, she'll inherit such an irreparable mess that she'll fail badly enough to spoil any chances of a woman becoming President for decades to come. Ditto for Obama and the next black Presidential candidate. Considering how Bush has ruined chances for white males who want the job, I think we'd better start looking for an Asian hermaphrodite to take the office in 2008.
4.12.2008 4:39pm

Post as: [Register] [Log In]

Account:
Password:
Remember info?
Thank you for choosing to comment on IndustrialBlog. Our commenting policy is pretty simple: Be civil. If you are mean-spirited, tendentious, vexatious, quarrelsome and/or annoying, you just may get deleted. If you are charming, sophisticated and/or funny, on the other hand, you may get a free rein no matter what you say. It depends. Also, please note that commenting is for this post ONLY. Do not comment on other posts here. If I closed comments for a post, I did so for a reason. Thank you. Please enjoy your stay at IndustrialBlog, and remember the Blogosphere can be dangerous place -- be careful out there. The Management.