Wading Into Bittergate
I want to say from the outset, I am extremely reluctant to discuss this whole matter of Obama’s recent “bitter” comments, with which I’m sure everybody’s familiar. There is an obvious and explicit desire on this blog to discuss things that are important and interesting. The trouble is that oftentimes, situations will arise in which a news story is both wholly irrelevant and highly reported on. It is a struggle to know how to deal with those things. On the one hand, they deserve to be ignored. On the other hand, to ignore them entirely is to leave the issue to be discussed only by demagogues and political opportunists. So it’s a tough spot for somebody who tries to engage in value-adding commentary rather than noise, even if only on a meager blog like this one.
All that throat-clearing by way of saying I’m gonna talk about this, but I think it’s really dumb.
What I want to talk about in particular are two instances of the same criticism of Obama’s comments that I encountered within a few minutes of one another. It’s a criticism not without merit (unlike, say, Hillary Clinton’s absurd grandstanding). First, Tyler Cowen, in a post that is only partially critical, notes that “guns and religion do not closely track economic decline.” Second, I asked on G-chat what co-contributor Billy thought about the subject, to which he in part replied:
him saying that economic conditions compel their frustrations was dishonestbecause i don’t honestly see the correlation between economic conditions and religion or hunting, but it is possible to see a nexus between economic conditions and anti-immigrant or anti-trade sentimentsthose people would be just as religious and prone to hunting no matter the state of the economy
As I think is made clear by this clip, Obama’s argument is not that people hunt and believe in God
because they are in dire straits economically. Rather, it’s that people who are in dire straits economically base their votes on the fact that they hunt and believe in God. It’s not a causal relationship between being poor and having particular values; it’s a causal relationship between being poor and voting based on those values. The argument is that these people don’t trust politicians to actually help them recover from their economic problems, so they just vote for the politician who is saying that the traditions and values that they can rely on will not be assaulted and taken away (even if that politician in reality makes their economic problems worse).Is that a generalization of the rural working class and the rural poor? Yes. Is it a generalization that in large part relies on the assumption that this is a group of people (though not the
only group of people) that is not invested in the details of public policy? Yes. Does that make it elitist and out-of-touch? I don’t think so.Whatever one can say about Obama’s statements, I don’t think one can fairly listen to his tone and find any
judgment of the type of people he’s talking about. Indeed, he tends to make this argument as a way of criticizing the Democratic elite for not being respectful and conscious of the cultural values he’s talking about. These people are busy working at whatever jobs they can find, trying to raise their families as best they know how, he seems to be saying. We have to do a better job communicating to them, and more importantly, when we do get in power, we need to actually help them.In the end, it’s about delivering the goods - Democrats, because of their stances on cultural issues, cannot win over these voters unless they can be trusted to help improve these voters’ lives. But Democrats have failed to do that in any really big way since the days of FDR (and, to a lesser extent, LBJ). Given the current political conditions in the country, I suspect Obama will get his chance to deliver those goods starting next January. We’ll see how he performs.
Comment by J. Prescott on 14 April 2008 at 4:10 pm:
The problem with this isn’t that it was a verbal misstep, but that it was Obama that compelled the press to so closely monitor his words. He begged for it in Wisconsin when he told a packed house: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream’, just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all me are created equal’ - just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself?’ - just words. Just speeches?…It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems, but what is also true is if we cannot inspire the country to believe again then it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have…That is why we just won eight elections straight, because the American people want to believe in change again. Don’t tell me words don’t matter!” Lets ignore for a moment that he is already comparing himself, by implication, to MLK, FDR, and JFK. Obama begged for others to judge him on his words and the appearance of his platform.
It was Obama, not any other candidate, that compelled the press to pay so close attention to his words. He begged and pleaded for it, and he got what he wanted. His entire platform is not based on what he has done or who he was but on what he will do based on what he says. His rhetoric is his only weapon and it cuts both ways.
So Obama doesn’t get to say “words matter, but only these words over here. Those words over there don’t matter because I never intended them to be heard or intended them to matter.” Obama, because of the demands he made early on, always has to be on point and always has to measure his words. It is unfortunate that this is the case when there are genuine issues to address and debate, but Obama created this situation for himself. He has to deal with the fallout from it.
Comment by tet on 14 April 2008 at 4:53 pm:
As someone who has been both rural and poor, I’d like to comment on your interpretation, Brian.
In my opinion, the poverty is geographical and not correlated to anything else. If you look at the distribution of wealth in this civilization and every other Western and Asian one historically, there have been consistent pockets of poverty. One is in the countryside and the other in the crowded portions of major cities.
In the United States, the rural areas correspond to counties where there is a large white Protestant population with a long-standing tradition of viewing temporal governments with distrust. Therefore, in spite of their poverty, they are inclined to vote for those who either support their faith and values (conservatives) or who promise to leave them alone (libertarians).
An interesting thing happens in the crowded portions of cities in the US, though. For the most part, they’re filled with black Americans, whose churches have an equally long-standing tradition as a place where their grievances against the white-controlled government were aired. As the debaters at the Affirmative Action lecture pointed out, whites do not fully understand the importance of this radical influence in black culture.
In short, neither group will be influenced in the least by changes in the economy–they’ll vote the way their fathers and mothers did. The important swing voters that you should watch will be the white- and blue-collar middle class voters in places like Ohio and Michigan. They’re justifiably angry because the high-paying factory jobs present in those cities just twenty years ago are gone. Whether or not this is good for the country or world in general matters little to them. An entire generation there believes that their children will not be as well off as they were.
As I mentioned last night, this has happened before, to the generation were born around 1900–they grew up in a boom-time and watched their kids have to struggle much more than they did. I believe that the anger over this during the 1930s was so severe that if FDR had not appeared to be doing something about the situation, there could have been either a fascist or communist revolution in the US. Huey Long, left alive, could have fueled such.
This time, if something is not done, we can easily fall into a police state, especially with the paternalism in parts of the progressive movement and the tendency for people to trade unappreciated liberty for ephemeral security on the terrorism front.
An additional factor will be the military, many of whom are swinging toward Obama because of his promises to end their cycle of deployment in war zones. This has been notable enough to surprise me.
Tom
Comment by Brian on 14 April 2008 at 4:56 pm:
Hm. That’s an interesting argument, and one I haven’t heard before. But I’m not sure saying, “Words matter” is the same as saying “I am not entitled to make verbal mistakes like everybody else.” It would be a problem if Obama, in response to criticism, had just said, “Aw, come on, that was just a lot of talk, get over it.” But he didn’t. He apologized for choosing his words clumsily and clarified what his meaning.
Comment by Brian on 14 April 2008 at 5:05 pm:
Tom,
That’s an interesting take, and I originally had a sentence in my post saying that the urban poor, like the rural poor, seems to vote based on values, it’s just that those values are different in urban communities than rural ones and thus lead them to vote Democratic.
The problem I have with your interpretation is that for a long while the rural poor was a reliable base for the Democratic Party, before civil rights become a dominant issue and drove a lot of them away. Those people did NOT want government to leave them alone. They wanted FDR to come in and have the government help them out. And because cultural and social issues were not as significant as they are today (no major civil rights movement, no gay rights, no abortion, etc.), they couldn’t be distracted from voting their economic interests.
Comment by tet on 14 April 2008 at 7:16 pm:
I disagree, Brian, about the rural poor, especially the Southern ones. You’re looking at the sanitized history of the Democratic Party, one that neglects an important factor in the US prior to 1960:
Those Southern rural poor people voted Democratic because it was the party of segregation, and segregation was the major cultural and social issue and the first and formost value that they wanted to preserve. Only white people were allowed to vote anywhere outside of major cities, and including major cities in the Deep South. Any economic aid that FDR promised them was secondary. Keep in mind that America’s most racist president (called so by Dr. Eric Dyson, of your Georgetown University) was an earlier Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. You cannot untangle the history of American politics while ignoring this ugly part. (I find it interesting that the two parties have all but reversed their roles during my lifetime).
While there were issues like the TVA and rural electrification where the government was seen as important, the poor in the first half of the century looked to their state legislatures and their governors (like Huey Long) for protection from outsiders and help in their lives, not the Feds.
I can’t speak for all of the Northern poor, but there was a large isolationist faction in the poor rural areas (since their boys were the traditional pool of cannon fodder) that opposed US intervention in WW2 and therefore Republican. It was certainly notable in the pre-WW2 generation in Northern Illinois.
Tom
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 15 April 2008 at 10:29 am:
I feel like Brian paraphrased me a little poorly, but I forget exactly what I said…but I do know that I said one thing that Brian did not put up there…Obama in that quote makes it sound like anti-trade sentiments are ignorant or irrational, yet he has espoused anti-trade sentiments himself…it’s a curious thing for Obama to criticize what he promotes.
Comment by Anonymous on 15 April 2008 at 10:37 am:
When Obama suggests things like rewritinng NAFTA its a metered, measured, and intellectual stance. When someone suggests that NAFTA is bad with a southern accent or with bad grammar, its anti-trade.