Words, words, words–they’ve long been a blessing for Barack Obama. But it’s clear now that they can be a curse, too.
If you happened to encounter a television, newspaper or Internet-enabled computer device over the weekend, you’re probably aware by now that Obama is enjoying an extended dip in the proverbial hot water for remarks he made at an April 6 fundrasier in San Francisco. Attempting to explain the electoral psychology of blue-collar Pennsylvanians to the limousine liberals in attendance, Obama noted that in “these small towns… the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them”–even though “the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate.” So far, so good–that’s an accurate enough analysis of broken political promises and working-class decline. But then Obama went a step further. “It’s not surprising then they get bitter,” he said. “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.”
Cue firestorm. The original blog item appeared on the Huffington Post at 6:43 a.m. last Friday. At 2:54 p.m, I received an email from a pro-Hillary source alerting me to its existence. Exactly a half-hour later, Obama’s remarks surfaced on Ben Smith’s Politico blog–one of the most influential and highly-trafficked outlets of the cycle. Within minutes, Matt Drudge had placed a link to Smith’s post at the top of his eponymous report, and television producers and newspaper editors soon took the baton, filling the rest of the weekend with untold hours and column-inches of commentary on whether or not Obama was slighting small-town USA. Welcome to “Bittergate.”
With a few days of distance, it’s probably fair to ask: did Obama’s remarks actually expose “elitist” tendencies? I suspect that, in some sense, they did–but not necessarily in the ways his opponents would have you believe.
So far, much of the commentary has focused on two competing interpretations of Obama’s remarks. The first comes from his critics, who claim that the Illinois senator has suddenly, inadvertently revealed his secret view of “Pennsylvanians as bitter, gun-toting, racist, religious fanatics.” Unfortunately for Obama, it’s not particularly challenging to construe his remarks, if read literally, as condescending. For starters, he seems to suggest that blue-collar voters “cling to” “religion” and “guns” because of their economic “bitterness”–when, in reality, people own guns because they like to hunt and go to church because they believe in their religion. Secondly, he appears to equate “guns” and “religion” (which most blue-collar Pennsylvanians value) with bigotry (i.e., “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and “anti-immigrant sentiment.”) Because everyone agrees that bigotry is bad, the parallelism makes the senator sound as if he believes guns and religion are bad, too–as if he is, in effect, dissing rural voters’ religiosity and fondness of firearms. Which is why Clinton has spent the past few days saying Americans want a “president who stands up for you and not looks down on you,” and the McCain camp quickly accused Obama of “show[ing] an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking.” Charges of Democratic elitism are catnip for conservatives–just ask Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry. So there’s no doubt that the calls of “condescension” will continue as long as the senator remains in the race.
Understandably, Obama and his supporters are clinging to an alternative interpretation. While conceding that he “regret[ted] some of the words [he] chose,” Obama said Friday at a town hall meeting in Terre Haute, Indiana, that his San Francisco slip was simply shorthand for the argument that Thomas Frank made in his 2004 bestseller, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”–i.e., that Republicans use social wedge issues to convince lower-income Americans to vote against their economic interests. “They don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them,” Obama said. “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.” In other words, I didn’t mean that small-town voters suddenly discover religion or guns because they’ve lost their jobs, but rather that they feel so “bitter” after decades of empty economic promises that some now “cling to” guns or religion as electoral issues.
Truth be told, this strikes me as the more plausible interpretation of what Obama “meant to” say–even if Clinton and McCain are under no obligation to pretend that it’s what he actually said. The problem for Obama going forward is that the San Francisco slip was an aberration only because it was inartfully worded; in reality, such remarks–remarks that seek to capture in sympathetic, inclusive language how dissimilar swaths of the American electorate see certain issues and then to convey those differences across geographic, racial, economic or party lines–form the foundation of Obama’s governing philosophy. This is what Obama did in his famous 2004 convention speech, when he said that “we worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States”; it’s what he did last month in Philadelphia, where he said that “resentment builds over time” as white people “hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed”; and it’s what he did in San Francisco, where he attempted to put the “alien” concerns of downscale Pennsylvania into language his upscale audience would understand.
Obama’s pledge to create a “coalition for change” relies not on his politics, which are decidedly (even divisively) liberal, but in his ability to speak about two sides of particular divide in a language that helps each side see the other as that side sees itself. With words, Obama wants to serve as a sort of conduit, constantly pointing out common ground and encouraging consensus. Until now, this meta- approach has worked wonders, and that’s a testament to Obama’s unrivaled political agility and instincts. But as the San Francisco slip demonstrated, his greatest strength may also be his greatest weakness. Explaining everyone to everyone is dandy when everyone agrees with your explanations. But sometimes–like now–they don’t. So while the intended content of Obama’s remarks was probably not condescending, per se, the fact that he was making them at all has certainly exposed him to the charge. As we’ve seen over the past few days, what’s meant to sound empathetic can, when worded incorrectly, easily come off (with help from your rivals) as sort of superior (“Only I fully understand everyone”), sort of reductive (“this is why you feel the way you do”) and sort of patronizing (“let me explain to you”)–in other words, sort of snobbish. Whether or not you think Obama’s analysis was essentially accurate, perception is everything in politics. For that reason, most pols resist putting “the people” on the couch and stick to partisan talking points instead. Obama does not–and that’s why he is who he is. Such is his promise and his peril. If Obama is already being labeled an “elitist,” you can bet he would hear much worse come fall. Bitter or not, that’s a pill his supporters should probably be prepared to swallow.
