Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Comments

David Aikman

The rigors of the campaign lead to what may be a landmark moment.

Every presidential campaign cycle has its landmark moments. Television viewers watching the debate in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy were shocked by how unattractive Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow appeared. He lost the debate on television, even though those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had scored more points. Then there was the moment when Ronald Reagan seized the microphone during a 1980 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire and announced that he had “paid” for the microphone and was going to hold onto it. And who can forget Michael Dukakis, George Bush’s opponent in the 1988 election, trying, by driving a tank on camera, to look manly and in-charge and to demonstrate he was commander-in-chief material? Unfortunately, he simply looked absurd.

Future historians might seize on many moments of the current election cycle as having “landmark” qualities. Obama’s eloquent speech on race after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story broke comes to mind, as does Rudy Guiliani’s eccentric (and unsuccessful) focus on Florida to the neglect of states where his rivals were scoring primary victories. But Senator Obama’s “bitter” comments on small-town America at a San Francisco Democratic fundraiser certainly is a recent incident with potential “landmark” dimensions that may come to haunt him if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

First, a disclaimer. Neither in this Musings column nor in any other am I offering partisan advice on America’s choice for the president to be elected in November, 2008. Provocations never has been, nor ever should be, a partisan political forum. I have written that I think this is one of the most interesting presidential races in several years and that the three leading Democratic and Republican candidate are all people of remarkable intelligence, talent, and courage. Americans have every right to be proud of what their system has served up as choices this election season.

Election campaigns, however, are unforgiving venues for public statements. Candidates feel pressured, rushed, tired. They sometimes make gaffes on factual issues and they say things with unintentional clumsiness for which they later have to apologize. At the San Francisco Democratic fundraiser in early April, Senator Obama spoke just in this way. He was speaking broadly about the mood of the electorate in small-town communities of the Rust Belt, of which Pennsylvania has several. The people who lived in these communities, he said, were hurting and were disillusioned about politicians in Washington. He added, “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.”

If the comment had been made privately among Democratic financial contributors, it would not have attracted much attention. After all, Obama is a “blue state” liberal who might be expected to sport some of the prejudices present in “blue states” towards “red state” communities. But in presidential election campaigns, very few things remain private for long. After the Internet’s Huffington Post made his remarks public, there was an avalanche of critical comment, not just from Republican candidate Senator McCain, but from Obama’s own Democratic rival, Senator Clinton. Though Obama was undoubtedly correct in saying that several economically deteriorating communities in the Rust Belt were “bitter” about politicians’ failure to address their plight, his throwaway comments about “religion” and “guns” sounded like a typical stereotyping of “red state” working-class communities by “blue state” urban liberals. Not surprisingly, both Clinton and McCain immediately pounced on the comment as an indication that Obama was an elitist.

It’s unlikely that the “elitist” label will stick. Obama is preeminently a populist, and though he went to private school in Hawaii and later to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, his early political career organizing at the precinct level in rundown areas of Chicago do not support assertions of elitism. But if he was not elitist in his “bitter” comments, he was certainly being condescending, not to mention guilty of stereotyping. It is more than probable that as he rose in the progressive, well-educated Democratic circles of Hyde Park in Chicago, he acquired some of the “blue state” disdain for rural white working people who have a distressing habit of voting Republican in general elections. He was, probably, speaking of the tightly knit, churchgoing crowd illustrated in the Vietnam War movie, The Deer Hunter. These are indeed rural, working-class men who enjoy hunting, go to church, and who today are often angry at the plight of the declining economies of their communities.

So far, so good. But by then attributing to this group of Americans “antipathy to people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama was essentially implying that the Rust Belt’s rural working class had to “cling” to religion, to guns, or to “anti-immigration” sentiment as a way of dealing with their anger.

He should know better than this. More than any of the leading presidential candidates, Obama has publicly defended the right of people to express religious conviction in the public square when discussing public policy issues. As columnist Michael Gerson pointed out in The Washington Post, Obama has cited not just African-American activists Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., but Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan in this connection. Whether from the carelessness generated by fatigue or casual familiarity with urban stereotypes of rural America, Obama managed to conflate two stereotypes; working-class rural whites and red-neck Southern “good ole boys,” who sometimes mix racial prejudice with their own penchant for hunting and churchgoing. That might resonate with San Francisco liberals, but it may come back to haunt him in the country at large.

Much of Obama’s political success hitherto has derived from his ability to convey to white as well as black voters that he is a “post-racial” candidate, someone who thinks in terms of national solutions to national problems, not solutions based on any racial assumptions. There is no need to question his sincerity in projecting that image. What is troubling is that he seems to possess at the same time some attitudes that are not “post-racial” at all. His tenacious—some would say stubborn—defense of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his description of his grandmother as a “typical white person,” and his comments about people who “cling to guns and religion” do not sound “post-racial”; they sound more like the casual bigotry of East Coast urban intellectuals speaking of the South or the Midwest.

The irony is that Obama, if he is consistent with much of what he has said on the issue of religion and politics in the past two years, knows that his own careless stereotyping is not even factually true. Rural, working-class whites were religious and indeed they hunted long before their communities began to go into decline. Obama certainly understands this. It would be sad and ironic if the one Democratic candidate in recent years who really seems to “get” religion were tripped up by the careless and bigoted condescension he has doubtless heard in conversation among liberal whites. As Obama himself has said, “words matter.”  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Society, Sun 27 Apr 2008