True colors

Barack Obama explained how he really sees small-town Americans in a fundraising speech in San Francisco:

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.

That's right. Obama just described small-town Americans as racist, xenophobic, gun-loving religious nuts -- and it's all because they lost their jobs. I find it hard to believe that's going to play well in Pennsylvania, not to mention the rest of small-town America. This is a display of liberal elitism in its purest form. (The audio can be found here.)

To be honest, I'm shocked -- not that Obama believes those words -- but that he would actually say them publicly. For a candidate who has run, for the most part, and impressive campaign thus far, it was astonishingly stupid.

But these are Obama's true colors. Obama's view is sadly not uncommon among many of his base supporters: upper-class, well-educated, suburban-dwelling liberals who will no doubt agree wholeheartedly with Obama's sentiments. Many will see nothing wrong with those words, sharing the same condescending view of small-town America as largely populated by ignorant, Bible- and gun-toting xenophobic rubes. In fact, I just asked my roommate, an Obama supporter, for his reaction to Obama's description, and he said, "Yeah, well, he's right. They are."

Unfortunately for Obama, most Americans will not agree. They will see Obama's statement as insulting and condescending, and rightly so.

John Podhoretz at Commentary magazine had a particularly eloquent analysis of the liberal elitist mentality as crystallized by Obama:

Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do — he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism. Obama’s statement today that small-town folk “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” may be the most distilled example of this train of thought I’ve ever seen.

Obama’s astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal — the paternalistic attitude that says, “Oh, well, people only do things differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward” — that it has survived and thrived despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims.

For liberal elitists like Obama, rural American culture is unfathomable; why on earth would people want to own guns? What would make them so unabashedly religious? How could they possibly believe that illegal immigration is harmful to our country?

The thought that rational, intelligent people simply have different views or beliefs is incomprehensible. No, instead such people must be simplistic cretins, "clinging," as Obama so appropriately put it, to their anachronistic superstitions and backwards customs. Examples of these are, apparently, enthusiastic belief in God and that puzzling desire to own firearms.

The subsequent fallout from Obama's comments, not surprisingly, has caused quite a negative backlash. McCain's campaign found it irresistible to pile on: "It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking," said McCain advisor Steve Schmidt. Hillary Clinton's contention that "Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them" is laughably hypocritical.

Obama's campaign, furiously trying to spin this, offered a rather weak response, saying "Americans are understandably upset with their leaders in Washington," and reverting to old talking points about McCain supporting "tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans." That's hardly going to cut it.

In addition, I find Obama's "anti-trade" charge amusing for its blatant hypocrisy -- it is Obama who opposes the free trade agreement with Columbia. It is Obama who publicly threatens to renegotiate NAFTA (even while his economic advisers reassure Canadian officials that it's nothing more than campaign rhetoric for the masses.)

John Hinderaker of Powerline thinks Obama just became unelectable. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but I would say that I think his chances of staging a comeback victory in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary just evaporated.