Now that we’re moving into the post-gaffe, damage control mode for Obama’s “small towns” statement, let’s check in with the Boiz!
Over at The Obama 527 Formerly Known As The Kos Community, they had themselves under control for a few days. Oh well.
Meanwhile, Whoever Kidnapped Josh Marshall has had some sort of meltdown, and can’t write any more (at least in grammatical English):
… Obama responds to the “bitter” Pennsylvanians story that Drudge and Clinton and McCain were ginned up about …
Jeebus. When can we have Josh back?
1. “were ginned” is in the passive voice. Not good, WKJM
!
2. Is “were ginned up about” really English? Hard to believe.
Perhaps WKJM means that the story was “ginned up” — i.e., fake, like, say, the Clinton hospital story on how Trina Bachtel died for lack of universal health care, a truly ginned up media swarm that the Boiz fell suddenly silent about as soon as Hillary turned out to be right — because the blogger who broke the story, HuffPo’s Mayhill Fowler, doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind and looks to me, if anything, pro-Obama, and in any case Obama said what he said, the transcript is there for all to see, and as a result the Obama campaign is playing What Obama Really Meant and walking the comment back (not very competently at that, and at the cost of muddying his core message of Unity).
But perhaps WKJM means that McCain has been “gingered up,” an old-fashioned locution meaning “stimulated,” appropriate for a man of McCain’s, er, longevity. Could that be it? We’ll never know.
If Josh were still writing for TPM, instead of WKJM, he might have been able to make a better point, the one that Susie makes: We shouldn’t participate in “media swarms” against Democrats. (And I can hear Leah making the same point as well.)
But Josh isn’t writing for TPM anymore, and WKJM is, so that post didn’t get written. Instead, WKJM tried a cute little “Drudge and Clinton and McCain” rhetorical move, which conveniently shifted the focus — and if we still had a media critique, stuff like this might get noticed — from Obama’s messsage to the purveyors of the message; as if — and the reader who has an attention span longer than a gnat’s will know this — WKJM hadn’t behaved, when Clinton was the target on the Trina Bachtel media swarm, exactly like the fully made man in the Politico-to-Drudge-to-MCM outfit that we now know him to be. Sauce for the goose. Department of Schadenfreude. World’s smallest violin.
So, how should Clinton supporters and C list bloggers like me act when there’s even a potential for a media swarm?
What I say is call bullshit when it happens. Otherwise, we put ourselves in the position of reacting to Drudge, because we’d have to check what Drudge is saying before writing anything ourselves! In any case, we know the pivot toward McCain is going to come, regardless of anything that we might post, or not post. So why worry?
For the record, here’s what I posted on and why.
There were three Obama pre-gaffes vying for promotion to full gaffe-ness and media swarmitude on Friday.
The first pre-gaffe was pushed by Chris Matthews: The “OJ instead of coffee” gaffe. I passed on that, because I thought it was just too stupid and transparently windsurf-y. (If it had been $100 OJ, maybe.) The second pre-gaffe was Obama’s statement that “abortion is never a good thing” (even, apparently, after prayerful consideration). BDBblue posted on that; and I thought Obama’s statement was an outrage (and indicative of Obama’s tendency to sell out the base to appease the right). Of course, our famously free press didn’t promote that one, nor did the Boiz, because who cares about women’s issues and what would Lord Saletan say when we’re in line together for cocktail wienies, anyway? And the third pre-gaffe was Obama’s statement on “these small towns”, which BDBlue also posted on, and which metastatized into full gaffitude over the course of Friday.
Now, I don’t read Drudge or any of those people, and got turned off to Pravda on the Potomac and Izvestia on the Hudson after their coverage of the NH primary, so I had no way of knowing that a media swarm was in progress. So I encountered “small towns” when it was still in pre-gaffe mode, over at Talk Left:
[OBAMA:] 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 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.
What struck me was that Obama was really talking about the income inequality chart* reproduced on the left; that’s the process that made the jobs go away. So it’s Obama who can’t “explain”, because his Unity schtick prevents him from talking about real conflict over things like, oh, money and power. And because Obama can’t talk about that, he displaces the discourse onto class markers like guns, and religion. The real condescension, to me, is Obama’s brand of meta-leadership through personal conversion as a solution to “bitterness” and a general cure for what ails the body politic, not the class markers (cf. Matthew 11:28), since Obama’s meta is analytically distorting and will prove wholly inadequate to the task at hand. Although I’m ticked off at his use of class markers, too.**
Of course, you won’t hear that critique on Drudge—or from the Boiz, either.
Nor will you hear my solution for Obama’s post-gaffe cleanup operation:
Talk about policy, Obama, and fix your broken health care plan. That might resonate with people in small towns who know they might lose theirjobs, and their houses, if they can’t gut it out through illness.
Not that they’re angry about that.
Of course, Obama won’t find that easy, because he’s not about policy. But it’s hardly my problem that Obama now needs to pose as a working class hero when he started out riding the Unity Pony. He’s painted himself into a corner, and I, for one, couldn’t be more pleased.
Please, can I have some boring bullet points about policy?
NOTE * Or, you might say, the “political economy outcome” chart.
NOTE ** Not that we need a national conversation on this, of course. Heaven forfend.
UPDATE Over at Jack and Jill Politics’s new site, they think the problem is Mayhill Fowler’s reporting in HuffPo. No, it isn’t. It’s Obama’s transcript. And much as I like their blog, and I do (remembering Jena), if they think this sort of eruption won’t be a continuing problem for Obama, they’re wrong. Field Negro is a little less sanguine:
Well Obamaholics, I don’t know what to tell you this time, except that your boy is making it very tough for himself. Mrs. Field (a confirmed Obamaholic) was watching CNN tonight and I couldn’t tell if she was madder at the anchor for continually playing the audio or the “O” man for being dumb enough to put himself in that position.
Poor “O” man, I understand his frustrations with small town Pennsylvanians and small town A-merry-ca. But “O’”man it’s not bitterness why some of them will never vote for your black ass, it’s something else. And failing to call out the elephant in the room is fine. But if you are going to do that, you should just not say anything at all. People are questioning your political skills for a reason. A real politician would not have said what you did in public. I don’t care if those big wigs in California were giving you a million a pop. Just shut up. Don’t give the Ice Queen and Mr. Morton bulletin board material. Now they are all over you for this latest little misstep, and once again, you gave the Ice Queen new life.
So Obamaholics, I sure hope your boy survives this latest mess he put himself in. But if he doesn’t, today will go down as “Black Friday” for everybody who ever jumped on the good ship “O”.
UPDATE And about the elephant in the room: Obama’s surrogates have done a fine job with the elephant, so Obama doesn’t have to. For another view, Salon:
I couldn’t trust Obama to lead the country, not with Iraq, Iran and all that bullshit we got,” said Jerry Cullen, a crane operator from Fishtown, one of Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhoods near the Delaware River, with demographics made for Clinton (white, older, Catholic). “She’s a doer.” For Cullen and his wife, Mary, healthcare and the economy are even bigger worries than foreign policy. “We have some serious issues, and it scares me that these young people aren’t really looking at that,” Mary Cullen said. “They’re just seeing him as this young fresh face. He’s got charisma, but I want more than that.” Clinton’s most dedicated supporters want someone who will fight for them, and they’re not sure Obama will. “He ain’t got the clout to do it, and he don’t got the hours,” Jerry Cullen said. “That woman got 30 hours in her day. Ain’t nobody works 30 hours in a day but that kid.”
Bingo. (And incidentally, doesn’t Mr. Cullen get some points on the karmic scale for being ready to vote for a woman President, racist and ignorant though he, by definition, is?)
More boring policy points, please. Anything the press and the Boiz hate has to be good for me. And it sounds like the Cullens would really respond to some actual policy on Universal Health Care.
Front page
Don't Cry For Me, Pennsylvania
Given that the media will swarm regardless, given how important I think it is Obama NOT be the nominee, and given the vastly uneven media playing field that Hillary and Obama have had to compete on, I confess I can’t bring myself to cry any tears over any unfair media attacks on Obama.
John Cole at Balloon Juice lost it too
The part that says “That’s WORM Version II” was my comment about Obama’s latest “clarification.”
John’s CDS is no longer in remission.
————————————————————————
“It’s like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you’re wrong.” - Molly Ivins (RIP)
Wrong About the Politics, Too
One of the things I’ve noticed about Obama and his backtrack is that he now is trying to paint it as merely explaining why Pennsylvanians vote against their economic interests. How the Republicans have used wedge issues on these poor, embittered rubes.
Except here’s the problem, Pennsylvania hasn’t gone Republican in a Presidential race since 1988. And, frankly, you could argue that even then they were voting their economic interests. The recession that ended the Carter Administration was brutal. We didn’t have another recession until 1992 and, guess what, they voted for Clinton. And Gore. And Kerry. They have a democratic Governor. They just threw one of their Republican Senators out and replaced him with a Democrat.
And now they are being told by Obama and his supporters that Democrats don’t need to worry about winning their vote in November because Obama is going to win over red states - you know, the voters in Virginia and Colorado who did vote against Pennsylvanian’s economic interests by voting for Bush, but let’s not talk about that, they’ve seen the light this primary season - and expand the electoral map. So, good news, the Democrats won’t be held hostage to these white working class voters anymore. They can be held hostage by McMansion owning, Subaru driving upper middle class whites in Northern Virginia, who I’m sure only have Pittsburgh’s best interest at heart.
But, of course, the only reason these working class whites would be voting against Obama in the primary is because they’re racists. Yeah, that’s it. They aren’t voting to retain their political power and protect their economic interests at all.
Cole is ignorant
The term Ratfucking
has a clear meaning and a history, and he can’t do it, because he’s not in a position to do so. Unless, of course, he is part of the McCain campaign, or part of the administration, which would carry with it its own set of implications.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Obama Tries Another Walk Back
After the original WORM
failed, he now admits that perhaps he could’ve been a little more careful with his words:
I don’t know if it will work, but it’s always good when you insult someone to at least acknowledge you did so and apologize (even if you didn’t mean to). He should’ve done this immediately instead of trying to WORM his way out of it.
Of course, he repeated his contention that these voters make their decisions based on things like guns, when there isn’t any evidence of that Pennsylvanians have voted on guns (abortion maybe, but we all know the pro-life people are the moral ones, so he couldn’t have meant that).
But then he said these comments in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, so maybe he thinks Indiana goes Republican over guns. Which is just as weird because Indiana has been Republican forever, certainly before the decline of the industrial base. And Muncie, which had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country in the first Reagan term as its industrial base collapsed, has come back pretty good thanks to the university (Ball State) and its medical center. Indiana is also very protestant (with a history of anti-catholicism) and less ethnic than Pennsylvania. So it’s quite different culturally and economically from rural Pennsylvania. Not that the Village or the Creative Class is going to realize that.
As for Cole (and Sully and so many other “anti-Bush” conservatives), I’ve long believed they are all going to vote for McCain. Sure, they hate a lot of what the Republicans have done, but in the end, that’s who they’re going to vote for. Yes, even if Obama is the nominee. Because once the media turns on him, they’ll find a way to turn on him, too. They’re still Republicans, even if they are rightly ashamed to admit it right now.
“when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on.”
O-h-k-a-a-a-y…
And that would be the Unity
Pony
why?
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Bitter Does Not Mean the Same Thing as Angry
If he’d said angry, I’d agree with him. There is a lot of anger. But bitter denotes an outlook and, perhaps I spent too many years as a single woman, but I don’t think of it as a compliment.
Here’s the Clinton conference call today in which various Pennsylvania politicians took turns punching Obama. It was Jeralyn’s belief that they were genuinely offended. I think this comment by a mayor, which sounded more bewildered than anything, seemed to sum it up best: “How could Obama connect guns, faith and bitterness?” The cultural gap appears very large, just as Obama didn’t understand them, they seem confused by how Obama could be so wrong about them.
instead of this insulting bs about what other people believe,
and the endless bs about what he believes—he should be talking about WHAT HE’LL DO.
Amberglow: But that would be
discussing policy.
————————————————————————
“It’s like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you’re wrong.” - Molly Ivins (RIP)
silly me--i thought candidates had policies -
and then—what’s all that “go to the website!” “read the books!” shit they keep talking about whenever policies are mentioned?
completely incoherent, and he’s tangling himself up more and more. “They worship an awesome God in the blue states” was just one of many famous quotes from his 04 speech—now it’s just that they turn to God because they’re bitter and frustrated and unemployed —except for him, of course—his faith is not misplaced or a distraction.
ugh
this is excellent--
“… “The answer to ‘What’s the matter with Kansas’ is not that there’s something the matter with Kansas,” Garin argued. “There’s something the matter with Democrats who can’t make a connection with voters whose economic interests are closely tied to what the Democratic Party stands for.” …” — http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsm…
The comments are hilarious, too
The first one — “whore” right out of the box. Granted, “trade whores” (as if there were another kind), but still.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Pithy
his Unity
schtick prevents him from talking about real conflict over things like, oh, money and power. And because Obama can’t talk about that, he displaces the discourse onto class markers like guns, and religion. The real condescension, to me, is Obama’s brand of meta-leadership through personal conversion as a solution to “bitterness” and a general cure for what ails the body politic, not the class markers (cf. Matthew 11:28), since Obama’s meta is analytically distorting and will prove wholly inadequate to the task at hand.
One of the most pithy (pithiest?) analyses I’ve read. Nicely crystallizes the problem. That last sentence is a dissertation (or book!) waiting to be written.
"flurry of calls to superdelegates...to reassure them..."
NYT— “… By Saturday morning, Mr. Obama was trying to contain the political damage after a series of late-night and early-morning strategy calls in which advisers decided he had to acknowledge that he made a mistake.
His aides made a flurry of calls to superdelegates to explain his remarks and to reassure them about his electability. …” — http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/pol…
& downticket probs already--
“Focusing this time on Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., the National Republican Congressional Committee is trying to damn local Democrats with the comments about small towns made by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
“Jason Altmire Should Stop Flirting With Obama Campaign,” says an NRCC news release sent to local media in the Keystone State. “Time for Superdelegate to Say Who He Supports.”
NRCC Communications Director Karen Hanretty then says, “Congressman Jason Altmire, a superdelegate who’s been flirting with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and who has received $10,000 from Obama’s Hope Fund PAC, should denounce Sen. Obama’s statement that Pennsylvania voters are ‘bitter’ and ‘cling to guns or religion’ because they ‘can’t count on Washington.’ …” — http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/…
Every single recipient of his PAC money and every declared Superdelegate up for election or reelection will now be targeted by the GOP i bet.
Yep.
They went after Chris Carney today, too.
they're gonna go after all of them now, thanks to Mr. Eloquence-
and i just realized—Obama supporters cling to him out of their own bitterness and frustration, obviously—he’s their guns and God ; >
Right, it's not the "bitter" but the "cling to" ...
… that’s the problem.
Or, since turnabout is fair play, was Obama “clinging to” Reverend Wright all those years? Why or why not?
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.