Annie Oakley? Or Calamity Jane???

On Charlie Rose the other night, Joe Klein of Time Mag hit the nail on the head when he said that Hillary Clinton’s campaign dynamic was historically unprecedented — starting with her assertion that both she and the Republican candidate had the experience while the Kid only had a speech. In a moment of “firsts,” this one breaks with tradition, common sense and is completely unwelcome — and it tells something of Ms. [or Mrs., as she prefers] Clinton’s character.

In the spirit of party unity, and in deference to the feelings of those of you who want to see her as the first woman president, I’ve tread lightly on Hil … that means I haven’t posted the gazillion articles indicating that many on the Left are furious at her. I keep waiting for her to put aside the triangulation and personal ambition and ’show up’ — clearly, I’m beating a dead horse. Day by day she becomes more visibly determined to take the good of the nation down with her.

The latest non-sense … the pounce on ‘bitterness’ as she chugged back a boilermaker in order to prove her bona fides with the great unwashed … has left me disgusted, not only with the campaign at large but with Hillary Clinton, personally. Calling Obama ‘elitist’ considering her own pedigree … and giving the Pubs another boost in their fear rhetoric … has my ‘bullshitometer’ buzzing like a [fearsomely angry] bee.

Let’s rethink ‘elite,’ shall we? Obama is a successful man, obviously, with a young family and dependent on his mother-in-law to keep things going while he’s campaigning; he recently paid off his and his wife’s school loans thanks to the popularity of his books. Hil hasn’t done her own laundry or balanced her own check book in decades. And her tax returns punch holes in the ‘just like you’ crapola [if she was ‘just like me’ she’d be experimenting with interesting ways to create family dinner options out of a package of Top Ramen.]

Clinton is all mixed signals, shotgunning sound bites useful in the moment [like her target shooting adventures with Grampa] and discarded in a flash; look for Carl Bernstein’s article, below, to remind you of what those Clinton years were actually like. The Kabuki is getting tedious and shows a ‘take no prisoners’ blind-side to those of us who are ‘buzzing’ at the hypocracy. [For instance, if I was gonna shoot a few with the boys in order to seem a likable old gal and get a photo op, I wouldn’t have gone with the Chavez Regal — I’d have asked for the house scotch … Hil went for the Crown Royal, a bourbon girl. Watch Jon Stewarts excellent send up for the skinny!] And when it comes to the topic of elitism, I’d duck and run lest any of that splash on ME … too much history, girlfriend. You didn’t get those pants suits at Marshall’s.

Hil also jumped on Barack’s truth-telling regarding bitterness in small-town USA — perhaps she thinks of herself as the new Ronnie, giving us all a shot of Vitamin Sunshine in our can-do nation. Lord, keep us from further bubbles!! What part of ‘devastated’ doesn’t this woman get? We’re at a moment of renewed declaration, coming out of years of delusion — a time to get real; this is not a time to blow more smoke up our collective ass!

Let’s stop lying. The Pea Patch is institutionally bitter … it’s their backbone; there are no shotgun weddings in my neck of the woods, nobody can afford a pregnancy without the ‘dole’ — a young friend, now married but not before the two kids and new baby, finds that he can’t get his kids any state health care due to how much he makes … he and my son work what construction they can find, do repairs and odd jobs, sell wood. Their income is laughable, literally, and a daily anxious scramble — but not low enough to get government health care for the kids? Bitter comes with the territory, here where the American dream was pint-sized to begin with … and even that is blocked at every turn by policy and political posturing.

I understand rural America, the hillbilly’s and the rednecks and those who barely scrape by from day to day don’t want to be considered ‘bitter’ — they think of that as a failing, a dead end … and nobody wants to fail. But here’s what I know about denying this particular truth: pride goeth before a fall, and at the end of the day … you can’t eat it, feed it to your kids … or, like the family a few doors down, use it to turn your power back on even with the nights in the 30’s. When the walking wounded have only pride left, they don’t want to give it up — and that’s when a compassionate whole steps up to carry them. We haven’t done that … yet. And that’s what Obama is talking about.

Politics has failed America as a whole, not just rural America — welfare access for many, without further options, ended during the Hil and Bill show, and she can’t have it both ways. Her ‘35 years of political experience’ makes HER the political elite, not Obama. I call bullshit — and I call it at the top of my lungs!

But damage has been done — and now I hear the dreaded ‘e’ word blaring from CNN — read it in every blogpost; nothing riles the Pub’s so effectively [unless it’s the Clinton’s, themselves] as the word ‘elitist.’ Good going, Hil — now they have their agenda ready! McCain is already taking steps toward legitimacy with his reluctant party, giving speeches about how he’s going to ‘help’ the middle class but Big Business even more, how we have to get back the old Amurika — he has all the time he needs to pick up Indy’s while Hil pokes Barack’s soft spots to bring him down.

A blogger recently said this of the candidates:

The three “major” candidates leave the choice between

A socialist
A sociopath
A psychopath

Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers — gimme the Socialist!

The press is giving McRib a pass on most of this — Dana Milbank wrote this today:

For Obama and McCain, the Bitter and the Sweet

So much for the liberal media.

John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation’s newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist…

These are a collection of good reads … emotions are high … mostly about the ‘elite’ and ‘bitter’ issue; they tell truth. Towards the end, you’ll find a link that gives us a running total of lobbying contributions [told ya so.] That will break the collection, and what follows are a couple of articles about Obama, including some considerations he has in store for the Bushies, wearing his calm, collected Constitutional-scholar hat.

This is simple: in a race where style is the only issue of substance, I watch Hil’s canny, practiced, cynical [and surprisingly theatrical, in these last days] moves and think …

Both of these people are heads and shoulders smarter than McCain, both of them could be president. The question now is … what does the nation need. I don’t know who Barack will turn out to be, but I do know about Hillary. In the end, it’s all a matter of character, isn’t it. And it never counted so much in my lifetime.

Jude

ps — none of this seems to have clobbered Obama’s poll numbers, but the advantage goes to Mac at this point.

Moment of truth
San Francisco Chronicle Editorial
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama was hardly the first one in modern American politics to observe that voters who are embittered that prosperity passed them by would “cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”

All you need to do as look at recent history to realize there are political points to be scored by playing to fears that have little or nothing to do with the underlying economic stresses of people’s lives.

Politicians from the right and left pander to these anxieties. They go into towns reeling from lost jobs - and watching their young people go off to an aimless war in Iraq - and the politicians focus on concerns about gun control, same-sex marriage, abortion, an immigrant “invasion” or the horrors of globalization. Whether it’s Mike Huckabee flashing “Christian leader” or President Bush lacing his speeches with code words to assure Christian conservatives that he is one of them, religion is invoked in an open appeal for votes.

So if it’s “elitist” or “insulting” to note that voters who are otherwise left behind in the global economy sometimes have misdirected frustrations - which can be exploited for political gain - then Barack Obama has plenty of company.

Naturally, Obama’s principal foes, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain, are exploiting the remarks for all they’re worth. Who could blame them? It was a rare misstep from a candidate who has been frustrating his adversaries with his deftness at identifying and articulating the electorate’s craving for a message of hope and inclusion.

The fact that Obama said those words in San Francisco - in an off-the-record setting with his contributors - was an “aha!” moment for those who are suspicious of a Harvard-educated lawyer with a gift for the soaring oratory. For his critics, the setting itself proved the context was of condescension.

But the preface to Obama’s “bitter” quote conveyed a clear strain of empathy with such frustrations. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them - like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said. “And they’ve gone 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.”

Obama erred in assuming that a “private” fundraising event was truly private. He also was wrong to try to give perfunctory treatment to something as nuanced and treacherous as characterizing a wide swath of voters.

It was, as he acknowledged, a “clumsy” moment. But it’s neither elitist nor insulting to observe that fear and prejudice too often carry the day in modern American politics. ++

Bitter? Of Course. Here’s Why
Isaiah J. Poole, OurFuture
April 13th, 2008

Honest discussion about the roots of working-class angst and how to address it has gotten seriously burned in the firestorm of controversy fanned around comments by Sen. Barack Obama that working-class people are “bitter” about the economy and government.

However poorly phrased his original comments were, they were based on a fundamental truth: that conservatism, having failed for more than three decades in its promise to bring broad prosperity to all Americans, has exploited the issues of God, guns and gays—and the lie that government is their enemy—to keep their con going.

For awhile it worked, as millions of voters were convinced to vote against their interests by conservatives armed with polarizing rhetoric. But there is no disputing the anger as these same working-class voters are finding that they’ve been duped.

The percentage of Americans polled by Gallup who say that they are worse off than they were five years ago—31 percent—is the highest recorded by the polling firm since it started asking the question in the mid-1960s. And that belief is based in reality: Median household income in 2006, $48,201, was lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was in 1999, the Census Bureau reports. The latest Democracy Corps memo includes a poll finding that 74 percent of Americans believe the economy is seriously off track.

That same memo also suggests that voters have caught on that conservatives who claimed they were taking government “off the backs” of the working class have put in into the pocket of corporations. “The focus of people’s anger are the corporate special interests that dominate government, producing a demand that politicians make it a priority to take back government for middle class Americans,” the memo says.

But there’s been a lot more interest among the punditocracy in branding Obama “elitist” for trying to synthesize this working-class anger than in talking about causes and solutions. As former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes in his blog:

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely “reported on” it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics.

Andy Ostroy of The Ostroy report writes:

Both Clinton and the McCainiacs know exactly what Obama was referring to when saying the nation’s poor and middle classes were bitter. And why shouldn’t they be? Starting with Ronald Reagan in the 80’s, their values were co-opted and their loyalties misused and abused, and they were routinely directed towards hot-button issues like abortion, gay marriage and gun control. These Reagan Democrats, by the time George Bush and Karl Rove got through with them, felt duped, dirty and betrayed. And now they’re still without proper health care, jobs, quality education for their kids, and are mired in a housing crisis. You’re damned right they’re bitter, and they ought to be. They were mercilessly used and abused.

And that’s what Obama was talking about.

Dave Lindoff at Democratic Underground writes of his experience in rural Republican communities in upstate New York that have been left impoverished by conservative government policies and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to the disappearance of thousands of factory jobs.

It’s Republicans who have whispered the poison in their ears that their high taxes are because “the Blacks” are getting all that welfare money and are getting all the jobs through “quotas.” It’s the Republicans who have warned them about “hoards” of Mexicans coming across the border to steal their jobs. It’s the Republicans who have been warning them that Democrats are going to take their hunting rifles and shotguns away. It’s the Republicans and their Christian fundamentalist front men who have been saying that the Democrats have been causing the nation’s decline by supporting licentiousness and a “gay” agenda. And it’s Republicans and Democrats who have been hyping the bogus issue of national defense to keep people from focusing on the deliberate dismantling of the U.S. economy that is underway. (Over years of Republican and Democratic administrations, the tax contribution of U.S. corporations to the national budget has fallen from 50% in 1940 to just 14% today. Between 1996 and 2000, 61% of all corporations and 39% or large corporations paid no taxes at all, and that situation has only gotten worse in the Bush years.)

Anything but the real issue, which is how to provide funds so that the children in places like Spencer and Hancock (towns in upstate New York) can get a decent education without bankrupting the local taxpayers, how those communities can get jobs again, so that their children won’t have to move out, how to ensure that everyone in town can have health insurance and access to medical care.

It is true that “bitterness” does not tell the whole story of these voters. Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, in a study of white working-class voters for Brookings, says that these voters actually have “a bifurcated view of their economic situation”:

On the one hand, they tend to believe that things have changed for the worse—that the economy is doing poorly, that the security that families once enjoyed is disappearing, that leaders just don’t get it. On the other hand, these very same members of white working class believe that they are holding up their end of the economic bargain, that they are working hard and doing right by their families, that their story is one of optimism and hope, not pessimism and despair.

Even today, with most white working class voters embracing a negative economic story overall, many still believe a positive economic story applies to themselves.

Their conclusion: A successful appeal to these voters would “connect economic security to economic opportunity.” It would frame the progressive principles that brought the nation the New Deal and the Great Society and link them to the desires of individuals and families to move forward toward the American Dream. And, as the Democracy Corps has been saying, it is time “to change who government works for”—all of the people, not just the wealthy few.

Campaign for America’s Future co-director Robert Borosage outlined the challenge in his post on working-class voters:

Progressives have to prove that government can work. That it can make health care and college affordable. That it can help generate good jobs here at home. That it can curb the Wall Street casino and insure that increased profits and productivity are widely shared. We have to take reinventing government seriously, not as a slogan or a gimmick, but as a fundamental project of reform.

Republican Sen. John McCain was scheduled to give an address Monday in which he was expected to pile on to the so-called “elitism” of telling the truth of the working-class mood. But if McCain stays within the framework of the conservatism he espouses—a conservatism that truly wants government, as the title of Grover Norquist’s latest book suggests, to “leave us alone,” abandoned in the midst of record economic inequality, instability and injustice—he will be at a loss to offer more than stale, attack-dog rhetoric. With the bankruptcy of conservative ideology as plain as the foreclosure signs popping up on millions of homes around the country and the lengthening lines at unemployment offices, voters have lost their taste for that bitter pill. ++

Who’s Elitist and Out of Touch?
BaldwinParkDemocrat
Sunday, April 13, 2008

Hillary Clinton recently called Barack Obama an elitist and said that he was “out of touch” with every day people. Let’s look at Clinton’s résumé.

Wellesley College and Yale Law School
Partner in the Rose Law Firm
Six years on the Board of Directors of Walmart
Twelve years as First Lady of Arkansas
Eight years as First Lady of the United States
Seven years as United States Senator
$109,000,000.00 income for President and Senator Clinton since they left the White House

Now that’s pretty elite.

Think about Hillary Clinton’s last 27 years in terms of doing every day things and being in touch with every day people.

She has had housekeepers, aides, and other staff to do the “common things” that most wives and working mothers do every day

It’s doubtful that Hillary Clinton did her own grocery shopping during these years (except possibly as a campaign promotion)

Cooked dinner or baked cookies? Not likely in the last 27 years although Hillary Clinton did attend a lot of fancy state dinners

Ironed a shirt or a blouse? Doubtful that Hillary Clinton has even seen an iron in the last 27 years, or a washer and dryer for that fact

Soccer Mom with all that being a soccer mom includes? Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a clue as to what that means

Hillary Clinton’s associations during the last 27 years have been with the “elite”; high level lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, foreign dignitaries, etc. Not with every day people. What Hillary Clinton knows about every day people comes from briefing papers prepared by campaign strategists - not from any recent personal experience. During the last 27 years there is scant evidence that she has had significant personal contact with the normal, hard-working, every day people that she “claims” to champion. It’s not Hillary Clinton’s world and hasn’t been for at least the last 27 years. During this time her life has been one of privilege, money, social prestige, and political power. Almost regal. If that’s not elite, then nothing is.

Hillary Clinton calling Barack Obama an elitist and “out of touch” is laughable.

Barack Obama was raised by his single Mother (divorced) and his grandparents. For a time he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia after which he moved to Hawaii to live with his grandparents in a small apartment. This is not an elitist upbringing.

Barack Obama worked his way through college and according to Michele Obama,”the monthly payments on their school loan debt was more than their monthly mortgage payment”. She said they only got out of that debt when Barack Obama wrote his two books, “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father.” Student loans. Doesn’t sound very elitist.

During the late 1980’s Barack Obama spent four years as a community organizer “with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment”. This was in Chicago’s far-south-side communities of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens. Altgeld Gardens was a public housing project whose occupants tried to survive amid shuttered steel mills, a nearby landfill, and a putrid sewage treatment plant. Barack Obama’s work here was grass roots street work at its best. You don’t see a lot of that while sitting in the Board Room, or living in the Governor’s Mansion or the White House.

After graduating from Columbia University and Harvard University (Harvard is elite, no doubt about that) Barack Obama spent nine years as a civil rights attorney with Miner, Barnhill and Galland where he “represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries”. Again, working with every day people and helping them solve their every day problems. During portions of this time he was also teaching Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Barack Obama an elitist? No way - just the opposite. The same can not be said of Hillary Rodham Clinton. ++

Elitism for Elites
Maha, Mahablog
April 12, 2008

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two.

While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

I concur with many of Obama’s critics that the place of guns and religion in American culture is older, deeper, and much more complex than Obama’s remarks reflected. But don’t tell me small-town, working-class white folks in America aren’t xenophobic. They are, deeply, and they have been going back generations. That’s just a plain fact. Believe me, you don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived among them.

What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left. As Joe Bageant pointed out in his pretty-brilliant book Deer Hunting With Jesus, small-town, working-class whites learn everything they know about the outside world from highly paid media elites like the perpetually angry and xenophobic Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Fear and anger are the bread and butter of right-wing politics; it keeps the rubes compliant.

Limbaugh, btw, may be from southeast Missouri, but his family had tons of money. True Redneckland would have been a place Limbaugh visited growing up, but he never had to live there.

And today you’ve got people like John “Power Tool” Hinderaker (highly paid lawyer; graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law) discussing Obama’s “bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in ’small towns.” I don’t know why Hinderaker put quotes about “small towns”; maybe he thinks there are no such things.

Quoting Oliver Willis:

Apparently Fox, Drudge, and Politico are just tired of a slow news week and are looking for something - anything - to whip up a frenzy over, and of course the go-to people for quotes on this are the elite of elite cons like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove. I mean, when is the last time those guys had a conversation with someone making less than six figures… besides the help?

I’ve long believed you aren’t a real American until you find yourself in some rural Kentucky roadhouse at 1 a.m. singing “Rocky Top” with the rest of the drunks. I dare say this is an experience not many of Obama’s critics have had. I admit that I’m far enough removed from my own roots that I no longer remember the words to “Rocky Top” beyond most of the first verse and the refrain, but I used to could sing it all the way through. I suspect, however, that the small-town, working-class world I grew up in would be utterly alien to the likes of Hinderaker.

From a working-class perspective, the three presidential candidates represent different slices of the elitist pie. You’ve got Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and graduated from Yale law school; Senator John McCain, son of a four-star admiral and U.S. Naval Academy graduate; and Barack Obama, the biracial graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law.

American politicians going back to Andrew Jackson have emphasized the more common aspects of their biographies to appeal to voters. Failing that, one might get away with affecting folksiness as George W. Bush does. But politicians need to be careful when they presume to speak for the folks.

“It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter; well, that’s not my experience,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Drexel University.

Does anyone besides me find that hysterically funny? Of course it’s not been her experience. The only time she speaks to small-town, working-class commoners is when they’re lined up to shake her hand at a photo cop. She’s never been one of them. Obama has never been one of them, either, but he’s not pretending to be.

Senator Clinton may think she’s found a talking point that will help her keep the lead in Pennsylvania, but she might want to be careful about portraying those small-town, working-class folks as being happy and optimistic.

Oliver Willis makes another good point:

It’s intriguing that Dems are never supposed to voice any criticism of rural America (which isn’t what Sen. Obama did) but Republicans are allowed to insult San Francisco, Massachusetts, the coasts, etc. It’s like there’s a double standard or something.

It’s all part of the Right’s elitist program of selling snake-oil to the rubes. ++

Guns, God and Gotchas
Richard Cohen, WaPo
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Long ago I discovered that the word “frankly” often meant a lie was coming. I learned this from an insurance agent, who preceded every attempt to sell me useless coverage with a “frankly.” This is why I distrust what Hillary Clinton said about Barack Obama and his admittedly klutzy statement about guns, church, immigrants and bitterness — “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing,” she said. Frankly, I don’t believe her.

And this, frankly or not, is the trouble with Clinton. Obama clearly misspoke. But there are very few moments with him where I feel that he does not believe what he is saying — even when, as with his lame capitulation of leadership regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I can’t respect it. With Clinton, on the other hand, those moments are frequent. She is forever saying things I either don’t believe or believe that even she doesn’t believe. She is the personification of artifice.

The current fuss is an example. She turned Obama’s statement into an affront to gun lovers everywhere, which it just might be. But since when is Hillary Clinton a gun lover, a hunter or even a weekend skeet shooter? She is apparently none of the above — at least she will not say when she last fired a gun. The truth, if a guess is allowed, is that she does not give a damn about guns and hunting, and when she brings up her “churchgoing family” and “Our Town” values, they are expressions of treacly nostalgia and not the life of incredible affluence and situational morality she now enjoys. To paraphrase Dorothy, Clinton left Kansas a long time ago.

At times, Barack Obama has the air of a maitre d’ who shows you to a bad table. It’s the impeccable suit. It’s the air of consummate confidence. It’s the awesome self-assurance that comes from knowing that he has something you want. In the headwaiter’s case, it’s a good table. In Obama’s case, it’s himself.

That air of self-confidence can sometimes come off as smugness or indifference. The signal moment for that came in a New Hampshire debate when Obama glanced at Clinton and said, by way of dismissal, “You’re likable enough, Hillary” — a kiss-off as head-snapping as when James Cagney smashed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s puss in the 1931 classic “The Public Enemy.”

It is this quality of Obama’s — this sense that you need him more than he needs you — that probably explains why Clinton seized upon his remarks about the poor of Pennsylvania and elsewhere who, in Obama’s artless telling, have turned to God and guns. It was, as he conceded, a bumbling attempt to express an economic truth, and it gave her a chance to imply that you can judge this particular book by its cover. But the spirit of what Obama said was not condescension but empathy. People were hurting. They were bitter. He understood.

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a version of that crack about academic politics — so vicious because the stakes are so small. In the presidential race, the stakes are huge but the differences are small. Both Clinton and Obama are liberal Democrats — the former less liberal than the latter, but no matter. One is more experienced than the other. One is white, the other black, and one is a woman and the other is not. Still, on mortgages, Iraq, Israel and almost anything you can name, they are in general agreement.

That’s why the campaign has increasingly been about what one or the other candidate said or meant to say or should have said. It’s even been about what one of their supporters said — Geraldine Ferraro on race, Merrill A. McPeak on patriotism, Billy Shaheen on cocaine and Bill Clinton on just about everything. Both campaigns have indulged in this silliness, with Obama’s supporters yelling “race!” the way a certain boy cried “wolf!” and the Clintons, on occasion, pretending to a kind of political naivete that ill becomes them.

Obama should not have attributed a yearning to hunt or attend church to hard economic times. The remarks will haunt him — witness how John McCain has also called them “elitist.” But Obama was right about the economic roots of bitterness and anti-immigrant sentiment. And he’s been right, too, about the patent insincerity of Clinton’s criticism. Her attack is hardly based on a touching regard for gun owners or even churchgoers, but on the desperate hope that the smoothly aloof Obama can be painted as arrogant and elitist. It’s old, tiresome politics — the politics of politics — and, paradoxically, more patronizing than anything Obama himself said.

Frankly. ++

Shot and a Chablis
Eugene Robinson, WaPo
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Hillary “Shot-and-a-Beer” Clinton has given us the perfect illustration of what’s so insane about American politics: the philosophical dictum that could be summed up (with apologies to Descartes) as “I seem, therefore I am.”

Clinton spent the weekend bashing Barack Obama for not seeming to be enough of a regular guy — not for any actual deficit of regular-guyness, mind you, but for giving the impression that such a deficit might exist.

The former first lady, whose family has made $109 million since her husband left the White House, then made a show of demonstrating that she’s actually just a regular gal. The point wasn’t really to convince anyone that she, Bill and Chelsea commute between their two lavish mansions in a five-year-old Ford F-150 pickup with a gun rack and a “Jesus Rocks!” bumper sticker. Her aim was to prove to the nation — or at least to Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania and Indiana — that she’s better at feigning regularness than Obama.

This is how we pick a president?

This whole sideshow began when Obama committed what she portrayed as the apparently unforgivable sin of trying to describe the resentment felt by some working-class Americans, venturing that “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.”

This seemed “elitist . . . and, frankly, patronizing,” Clinton charged. Never mind whether it actually was elitist, patronizing or, for that matter, inaccurate. No, the eagle-eyed Clinton took dead aim at a different target: the impression Obama might have given.

As if to show her opponent how it ought to be done, Clinton — a longtime advocate of gun control laws — spoke of her lifelong reverence for the Second Amendment. “You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl,” she said. “Some people have continued to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture, it’s part of a way of life.”

Clinton also made a point of telling audiences about her deep religious faith. The topper — or the chaser — came at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., where Clinton threw back a shot of Crown Royal whiskey and followed it with a beer.

Clinton bristled, though, when a reporter had the temerity to ask at a news conference when she last attended church or fired a gun. “That is not a relevant question for this debate,” she said. “We can answer that some other time. This is about what people feel is being said about them. I went to church on Easter. I mean, so?”

Um, so the issue isn’t whether you regularly sit in a church pew or even occasionally go hunting, but whether you can manage to seem like the sort of person who does? I think I need a shot and a beer, too. Just give me whatever the lady’s drinking.

Obama has apologized for using the word “bitter” to describe some frustrated voters, but managed to have a bit of fun with Clinton’s new persona. “She’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley,” he said, adding that she gives the impression of spending every Sunday in a duck blind.

But I think Clinton is serious at some level. She argued Sunday night that Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry lost because they seemed elitist — not because they actually were, but because they seemed to be. In reality, she said, they were “good men, and men of faith.” So is Obama, she allowed. But they didn’t measure up in the seeming department.

As you’ve guessed, I have a couple of problems with Clinton’s seeming-is-being theory of campaigning for the nation’s highest elective office. First, given the urgency and complexity of the problems the next president will face, who’s going to think it’s a good idea to elect Joe or Josephine Sixpack? I realize that Gore was deemed inferior to George W. Bush on the “Who would you rather have a near beer with?” question, but the 2000 election took place at a time of peace and prosperity. Oh, and Gore did win the popular vote.

Here’s my other problem: Clinton’s argument assumes that “regular” is a synonym for “unsophisticated” — that to communicate with voters who have not attained a certain income or education level, a candidate has to put on an elaborate disguise and speak in words of one syllable.

So tell me: Who’s being patronizing? ++

Carl Bernstein’s View: A Hillary Clinton presidency
CNN
April 12, 2008

Editor’s Note: Carl Bernstein is a CNN analyst and author of A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is also the author, with Bob Woodward, of All the President’s Men and The Final Days, and, with Marco Politi, of His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time. Here, he writes a commentary on the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. For an opposing viewpoint from former Clinton lawyer Lanny J. Davis, click here.

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like?

The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency.

Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don’t go right. Which is to say, often.

And endless psychodrama: the essential Clintonian experience that mesmerizes the press, confuses the citizenry, confounds members of both parties in Congress (not to mention the Clintons themselves, at times) and pretty much keeps the rest of the world constantly amused and fixated.

Such a picture of Clinton Redux is, by definition, speculation. But it is speculation based on the best evidence at hand: the demonstrable and familiar record of Hillary and Bill Clinton coupled together in Permanent Campaign-mode for a generation, waging a continuous fight on the national political stage since 1992, an unceasing campaign for the White House, for redemption, for their ideas (sometimes) and for themselves (almost always), especially in 2008.

The basic dynamics of the campaign, except for the Clintons’ vast new-found personal wealth and its challenges, have been near-constant since they arrived in Washington: through Whitewater, health care, the battle of the budget, the culture wars, the tax returns released only under duress, the travel office, Monica, impeachment, the pardons and through Hillary Clinton’s often repugnant presidential campaign.

In many ways, the characteristic tone, secrecy, and resilience of the Clinton political march have been determined more by Hillary Clinton than by her husband, reflecting her deepest attributes and attitudes, fermented in recognition of the antipathy held against both of them, and often, the foul tactics of their enemies.

As an aide put it (quoted in my book, A Woman In Charge: the Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton):

“She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that’s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it’s only in the warm glow of martyrdom—as a laudable victim—a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior—whether it’s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She’s happiest when she’s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode. . . . That’s what she thrives on more than anything—the battle.”

The latest transmutation of leadership in the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president –- Mark Penn’s departure or non-departure, be it window dressing or window cleaning –- is perhaps the best index we have of the more absurd aspects of her candidacy and evidence of its increasing bankruptcy.

The Clinton folks asserted to donors and reporters alike that this second “shake-up” in eight weeks at the very top of the campaign apparat represents some kind of great electoral moment, an opportunity for Hillary to state her case “more positively,” as if the negative approach had been forced on her; the beginning of yet another “turnaround” as if Penn, rather than Hillary (and Bill), has been the big problem. As if Penn were not an appendage of his two patrons, as if he were some kind of independent contractor twisting the candidate’s arm to do what comes unnaturally to her. The willingness of so much of the press, sensitized to the Clintons’ off-center complaints about one-sided coverage, to buy into this line is stunning.

In fact, the demotion of Penn –- like the departure of Hillary’s acolyte Patty Solis Doyle as campaign manager –- is a confession that, for all her claims of “experience” and leadership abilities, Hillary Clinton has now presided over two disastrous national enterprises, the most important professional undertakings of her adult life, both of which she began with ample wind at her back: the healthcare reform of her husband’s presidency, and now her own campaign for the White House. These two failures -– and the demonizing of her opponents in both instances –- may be the best indication of the kind of President she would be, especially when confronted (inevitably) by unanticipated difficulty and/or entrenched opposition to her ideas and programs.

It is exactly under such circumstances that she usually resorts to the worst excesses that mark her in full warrior-mode — and all its scorched-earth, truth-be-damned manifestations. Bosnia, anyone? Smearing the women involved (or even thought to be involved) sexually with her husband. Responding to Barack Obama with the same mindset, disdain, and arsenal as she did Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, as if Obama’s politics and methodologies were as mendacious and vicious as theirs–and her own. Tax information kept secret (in 1992 to hide her profits from trading in cattle futures; in 2008 to shield the identities of Bill’s foreign clients.) A campaign that openly boasts of throwing “the kitchen sink” at her opponent.

What you see is what you get: Hillary’s cynical view of the larger interests of the Democratic Party, exhibited in her 3 a. m. red telephone ad. And her simultaneous, incongruous suggestion that Barack Obama –- notwithstanding his supposed lack of national security qualifications to be commander-in-chief -– would make a good vice president on her ticket.

And, yes, a sense of entitlement that veritably shouts, “Look, because I believe in good things, and because of all I’ve been through, I deserve to win this.”

And yet, there is no denying that, compared to the Bush years, the accomplishments of the Clinton presidency, in which she was an elemental force (and generalissimo in the often successful fight against the forces of “the vast right-wing conspiracy”) are prodigious, marked by peace and prosperity, whatever the price of the Clintons’ methodologies and personal failings.

In projecting what a Hillary Clinton presidency would look like, there is the conundrum of her senatorial tenure and what had appeared to be a surcease in her Pavlovian resort to trench warfare: a period in which -– until the day drew near for her to announce her presidential candidacy –- she seemed (to her oldest friends, certainly) happier and more at ease, and straightforward in her public dealings, and less guarded, than at any point in her life since she followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas.

Hillary Clinton’s unique star power, her performance as a senator and fundraiser on behalf of her party are what gave legitimacy to the idea that she might be a credible presidential candidate: all premised on her changed demeanor in the Senate years, compared to her embattled tenure as first lady. As a steward of her state’s interest, and a patient student of senatorial compromise and collegiality, she was widely commended by former skeptics in Congress and the press.

True, her most revealing moment as a senator of national consequence was the vote she cast to authorize George W. Bush to go to war, which she’s been trying to explain since with dubious credibility. (”If I knew now what I knew then,” etc.) Twenty-one of her fellow Democratic senators had no doubts about what Bush intended, and voted against the authorization.

The second most revealing moment was her endorsement of legislation to make flag-burning illegal, the kind of pandering she once attacked right-wing Republicans of practicing. Meanwhile, she and her husband have regularly misrepresented their own postures and statements in the run-up to the war, as well as Obama’s record, with Bill Clinton claiming to have been against the war from the start, and Hillary saying she has consistently been more adamant in her opposition than Obama -– except for the matter of his single “speech” against the war before it started.

The assumption of many senatorial colleagues, former Clinton aides, and reporters (including this one) was that her presidential campaign would be much different from the one she and Bill Clinton waged through the White House years.
In A Woman in Charge, I wrote about her ability to evolve, observable especially in the years before she met Bill Clinton and in the Senate: to learn from her mistakes. Events have proven me wrong on that count.

The 2008 Clinton campaign, in fact, has been an exercise in devolution, back to the angry, demonizing, accusatory Hillary Clinton of the worst days of the Clinton presidency, flailing, and furtive, and disingenuous; and, as in the White House years, putting forth programs and ideas worthy of respect and deserving of the kind of substantive debate she claims she wants her race against Barrack Obama to be based upon.

Bill, meanwhile, has taken up Hillary’s old role as defender and apologist, with disinformation and misinformation, but (far less effectively than she defended him). Also with near-apoplectic tirades that have left their friends worried and wondering.

In the process of their search-and-destroy mission against Barack Obama, the Clintons have pursued a strategy that at times seems deliberately aimed at undermining Obama’s credibility if he becomes John McCain’s opponent — heresy in the view of an increasing number of the Clintons’ former suppporters and aides, a suprising number of whom now back Obama.

The choice ahead -– in Pennsylvania, and the remaining primary states, and for the super delegates, and perhaps even the arbiters of a deadlocked convention -– is clear enough at this point, at least in terms of what the 2008 Clinton campaign is about: the Clintons — plural. Theirs is a campaign for Restoration to the White House, not simply the election of Hillary Clinton. Theirs is, has always been, a joint enterprise, a see-saw routine in which the psyches and actions of each balances the board according to the personal dynamics of the moment.

A long-time associate of the Clintons, with whom Hillary has consulted in their quest to return to the White House, said early in her campaign: “She has a very plausible case for president. She had an eight-year super-graduate course in the presidency, a progressive platform…” He paused, and added: “[But] I’m not sure I want the circus back in town.”

That is what the Hillary for President campaign has become: the whole Clinton three-ring circus, with little evidence that moving back to the White House will alter that most basic fact. ++

What the Clintons Do If They Don’t Like Audience Reaction
blogger at Capital Hill Blue
Monday 4/14/08

Hillary on the news speechifying before AAM, and the audience is booing her. I wonder what this same event will sound like after the Clinton Machine edits the audio.

That may sound cynical (who, me?) but at a 9/11 fundraiser in NY for the families of firefighters, EMTs and police who lost their lives, Hillary came onstage and began to speak. The people didn’t like what she was saying. She was booed. She was hissed. I was surprised at the anger of the crowd.

Cut to an audio track of that same event played over the radio several years later. The exact same event. Except this version had no booing and no hissing. Instead, there were roars of approval and much applause.

It was then, listening to the edited tape, that I finally accepted how deceitful the Clintons really are.

My God, that she might be the nominee — Even George Orwell couldn’t have imagined anything quite that scary. ++

Punished for the Truth
Catherin Crier, HuffPo
April 12, 2008

Here are the controversial comments Barack Obama uttered in San Francisco.

“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 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. 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.”

Inartful. That is the only fair criticism of this analysis. Let’s ask the voters in Pennsylvania these questions. If the ‘distracting’ issues of guns, gay marriage and abortion were all resolved to their liking, would their economic lives change? How about immigration? If all illegal aliens were to disappear, would those rust belt jobs return? For so many years, such issues have been used to corral blue collar workers into a party and political philosophy that serves the elites in this country. When someone speaks the truth and acknowledges that this sector of our society has been royally deceived, that issues they rally around have little to do with their ultimate welfare, it is time to banish such a person from the campaign trail.

Heaven forbid we should suggest that bitterness might exist in this country of such optimism or that this emotion might be an appropriate and effective reaction to current circumstances. Hillary Clinton countered with this statement. “Well, that is not my experience,” she said. “As I travel around Pennsylvania I meet people who are resilient, optimistic, positive…If we start acting like Americans,” she said, “and role up our sleeves, we can make sure that America’s best years are ahead of us.” McCain’s spokesman chimed in. “It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking…It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

Are you kidding me? Pulling the curtain back on a very effective political trick, the old bait and switch, is far from elitist. Americans are working harder than ever. Two job families are the norm. Yet the poor and middle class are falling further behind. What is breathtakingly condescending is watching two candidates stroke this group with platitudes about their being tough and resilient. What exactly has that gotten them? Nada. The real stereotype Clinton and McCain are playing on is that blue collar workers are easily manipulated and will ’stay down’ if you just tell them they are hardworking, patriotic, value-driven Americans.

It is time for these people to get mad. Illusion may make us feel better, but it simply serves to keep us tilting at the wrong windmills. It is time to embrace the truth and turn that anger, yes bitterness, on those who created such conditions. The alternative is to pat ourselves on the back for our optimism and ‘can-do’ attitudes while politicians in Washington laugh at such naivite and continue on their destructive course. ++

Elitist My Ass
Erin Kotecki-Vest, HuffPo
April 12, 2008

It has been awhile since I’ve been back to my hometown near Detroit, Michigan. I took the kids there in early 2007; the cold and unemployment were a stark reminder of why I left.

The abandoned buildings. For Sale signs. The way the road goes from smooth to bumpy when you cross the state line. Boarded up windows, failed ‘revitalization’ efforts. Friends laid off. Friends looking for work. Friends moving to get work. Family leaving, family staying, family commuting to other states for part-time jobs and part-time pay.

Make no mistake, I LOVE my hometown. I LOVE the Midwest. I think anyone and everyone should live and work and grow in these cities and towns-but understand when I tell you that Senator Barack Obama is DEAD ON when he talks about the bitterness of residents.

Are you hearing me?

This former Midwest girl is telling you Obama is not being ‘elite’ or ‘out of touch’ -he could NOT be MORE in touch. He’s LISTENING and understanding that many of us who moved away and many of us that stayed are angry, frustrated, disappointed, disillusioned, and UNEMPLOYED.

In what world do Obama’s remarks constitute ‘looking down on’? I’m sorry, Senator Clinton-but are you HIGH? I am watching you right now, speaking in Indiana on CNN, and you are ’somewhat taken aback’ by what Senator Obama said. Are you unaware that when life is as bad as it can possibly be, people turn to religion? Are you unaware that frustrated individuals tend to take up arms when they feel their very well being threatened by their surroundings?

Senator Clinton, let me be as clear as I possibly can here:

Barack Obama is giving voice to millions of us by speaking the TRUTH. He’s simply vocalizing exactly what I hear from my Uncle, from my High School friend, from my former teacher, from my now re-located parents. He is speaking about what he’s heard, what he’s been told, what he has seen.

Senator Obama’s remarks reminds me yet again that he is one of us. He GETS IT. He knows that I LEFT Detroit. I AM BITTER. I AM PISSED OFF. THERE ARE NO JOBS IN MY HOMETOWN. I couldn’t move my family back there if I WANTED TO.

When I do take trips back home it is depressing. My husband NEVER wants to visit because he can’t stand how dejected everyone is and how run down the whole place seems. Are there some amazing neighborhoods and jobs-of course. Is it horrible everywhere-of course not. Is it worse there than in many other places in the US-damn right.

Do you think I like living 3-thousand miles away from my family and friends? Do you think it’s fun for me to watch everyone I know get laid off, go into bankruptcy, lose their house, work two low paying jobs, move into their parents home? Do you think I am NOT bitter about any of this?

Spin it. Go ahead. Talk about how those remarks make him seem elite and condescending. It is so absurd that it only confirms for me that you and Senator McCain are COMPLETELY OUT OF TOUCH with what REAL Americans think and do and want.

I would suggest, however, that you take your rhetoric elsewhere. Because the more you yap about Obama being ‘elite’ -while he’s talking about how we really feel and you’re releasing 109 Million dollar tax returns- the more stupid you look. ++

Here We Go Again
Jane Smiley, HuffPo
April 12, 2008

You know, I just spent seven and a half years disagreeing with the administration that has given us an unprecedented military and economic mess. I saw it coming, it came, and in some ways it was worse, and promises to get worse, than I foresaw. I the course of these seven years, I have had my patriotism questioned and demeaned fairly often. I was even put in a book, as one of a hundred people who were hurting America. When I got into this book, my relatives worried that I would get shot by some rightwing nut, even though several of them were and are rightwing nuts themselves (and they carry guns). All this time, though, I considered myself a patriot and a loyal American because I was able to see the destruction that was being wreaked upon the nation, and in particular, upon the middle and working classes, by the Republican liars and war criminals and job outsourcers and health care destroyers and army wreckers and infrastructure ignorers and media whores and agriculture blackmailers (see this month’s Vanity
Fair).

So now, Barack Obama tells the truth about conditions as we know them–that the countryside and the small towns are dying in many places in our country, and that the corporatocracy doesn’t care enough to do a thing about it. He points out that immigrant-baiting, gay-baiting, gun-baiting, and religious pandering have helped to destroy those towns and that countryside, that those being destroyed have been cynically enlisted by their very own destroyers to provide the votes that help accomplish the destruction. And this is what Senator Hillary Clinton says about it: “Senator Obama’s remarks were elitist and out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”

From Senator Clinton’s remarks, I infer that to actually see what has gone on in the US in the last 20 years is unAmerican. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you were born, what you pay in taxes, what else you might have contributed to the culture, how you vote, who you support. If you don’t support fundamentalist religion, job outsourcing, and free access to guns, then you are not even American.

I cannot believe how angry this makes me. I cannot believe that after the last seven and a half years, I can even get this angry. Yes, I know she is pandering to her audience. Yes, I know she will do anything to get elected. Yes, I know that she and Bill Clinton are corrupt to the core, and that I should have never expected anything better of her. But, please, any of you angry white women who still support this craven shill, don’t mention it to me. Do me the following favor — apologize to your children for not stopping the war that HIllary voted for, the war that is going to impoverish them. Then apologize to them for the effects of global warming that are going to make their lives hell. Then apologize to them for the school shooting they may someday see, the one where the kid gets the guns out of his father’s gun case, or buys at a gunshow. Apologize to them for the meaningless wars they are going to fight and pay for. Then tell them that “American values” killed their hopes and maybe killed them. And ask them if they think it’s going to be worth it. ++

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Obama: ‘Hope and Anger’ Go Hand in Hand
ABC News
April 14, 2008

ABC News’ Eloise Harper and Sunlen Miller report: Barack Obama made a new argument in trying to quell the fire that his remarks over “bitter” Pennsylvania voters have drawn: that hope and anger go hand and hand.

Obama, who has run most of his candidacy under the message of hope, interwove that message with the message that has dusted up the controversy: that people are frustrated and have anger and bitterness because they feel the government is not listening to them.

“Sometimes hope and anger go hand and hand,” he said today at the Philadelphia City Committee’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner. “People really are angry, they really are fed up, some of them are bitter because Washington’s forgotten them. And because it’s not me that’s out of touch, it’s folks who think that folks are happy when they are out of a job and they have lost their pension and they don’t have health care and their schools are under-funded.”

In the comments at a San Francisco fundraiser that spurred the controversy, Obama also said that people “cling” to religion when they are bitter.

Today in Philadelphia he indicated that he is one of those people who turn to