I notice that quite a few people on the right are suggesting that due to recent remarks about small town Americans, Obama has become “unelectable” as President.
Let me be clear that I do not support Barack Obama for President, and will not vote for him in November. However, I think anyone who believes that someone who wins the Democratic nomination can’t get elected is being foolish. We have only a hazy notion of what the electorate’s going to be thinking and feeling in November.
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Dean:
The problem with this “gaffe” is that it plays powerfully into the growing negative image of Obama being out of touch with middle-class and particularly rural white America.
Obama gives beautiful, if rhetorically empty, speeches and people fall all over themselves at the empty promise of “hope” and “change” presented by a charismatic young speaker.
But the one constant negative thread in the Obama narrative is that he truly has nothing but disdain and condescension for the average white voter. It started with his unwillingness to show the flag in his official office, then was reinforced with his refusal to wear a US flag pin. The image of his casual rejection of honoring the flag during a pledge of allegience was the first real “Youtube” moment that hurt his campagin. From there we got his wife’s repeated insults against America (particularly “white” America) and then we got Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s refusal to disavow him and inability to explain how he could have sat in that church for 20 years listening to anti-American venom (much less exposing his family to it). And now he reveals in a moment of utter candor that he believes that religion, guns and racism are the natural refuge of bitter “typical white people” when they are abandoned by “corporate America.”
This narrative has become profoundly powerful. The actual impact of all of this together is still flying under the radar because in the world of liberal Democrats, a large portion of Democrats agree with Obama, and the rest are willing to excuse it because in their heart of hearts they know that Obama was talking about “red state” Americans, not “blue state” ones.
But in the general election this is going to be utter poison if McCain latches onto it and uses the power of Obama’s own words and relationships relentlessly pounding home the demonstrable point that Obama is anti-American, anti-white, anti-religious and anti-gun.
I don’t know if McCain has the gonads to run that sort of campaign, but I can guarantee you that a GW Bush or a Ronald Reagan would cruise to a landslide victory given this sort of hand to play in the general election.
Hillary’s position has just been made vastly more tenable by this. For months I had thought Hillary’s chances of getting the nomination were somewhere between slim and none, and MUCH closer to the “none” side. But right now, as I sit here today, I think she now has an almost equal chance to win it.
Obama is much more damaged goods than most people realize. These are not minor issues with most Americans. There’s a reason that Rasmussen is now showing the electoral college race a tossup, when it was hugely in favor of the Democrats only a few months ago. Americans in general can put up with a lot of idiocy and stupidity from politicians, but condescension, elitism and anti-American sentiments create a deep, deep hole to crawl out of.
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Dean,
I won’t say that it has finished him – but it may end up being as bad as “global test” was for Kerry in 2008. It remains to be seen what play McCain will make of this in the fall, presuming that Obama obtains the nomination, but any use of it would be devastating. McCain’s narrative will have to be experience over media stardom – he won’t be able to out “wow” Obama on the stump, but if he can hammer home Obama’s unfitness to govern, then Obama will be beaten, and beaten rather soundly.
Things like this are like an acid on a campaign – like the “macaca” incident in the 2006 Virginia Senate contest. They don’t go away, and they continually errode a candidate’s appeal…and I don’t see how Obama gets out from under it.
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I’m not really seeing it. Yes, I agree that there’s a percentage of people on the left who hold their fellow average Americans in disdain–although I’m amazed at how seldom people on the left point out similar disdain that runs in certain right-wing circles, the “conservatives” who see America as a horribly decaying cesspool of decadence and sin and homosexuality and divorce and adultery and drug abuse and selfishness and laziness and illiteracy and illegitimacy. I’m astonished that people on the Left don’t go after the anti-American Right more often on those terms, but instead prefer to talk about how stupid the average voter is. There’s a deep strain of anti-Americanism just waiting to be exploited on much of the Right, but sadly the Left seems too intellectually incoherent to notice it or to put conservatives on the defensive about it.
Anyway, I think it’s all way too early to suggest that Obama is finished just because he revealed that he thinks poor people cling to God and Guns because they feel they don’t have much else. In fact I think to an extent he’s right about that, and he only needs to re-spin it properly to get people to understand it without taking offense. It’ll all be a question of whether he and his people are smart enough to see how.
Dean:
I guess we’ll see how this plays out. Your comparison of the right’s “disdain” is not apples to apples. The disdain on the right is towards a certain media elite, not the “rank and file” Democrats. Obama’s comments are aimed at common, everyday Americans.
That is a huge difference.
I also love how you say it all depends on how Obama “spins” this. Besides the profound cynicism such a comment displays, it seems to suggest that ANYTHING can be spun, and I don’t think that’s true. There are still some lines that are crossed that are un-spinnable. Kerry learned that with his “Global Test” and his “I voted FOR it before I voted AGAINST it.”
Those things are so raw and clear that attempts to spin them just made matters worse for Kerry, and I think this one is going to prove to be the same for Obama. The more he “spins” the deeper he will dig. It doesn’t help Obama in this case that he has tried to cast his campaign as a no-spin zone and ever since the Wright debacle, he’s been spinning like mad. More and more people are watching that and saying “wait, HOW is this a different campaign? It sure looks the same to me.”
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Al Franken is a big fat hypocrite?
I’ve never really thought there was much sinister about “spin.” Putting a positive or negative face on something is a thing we all do on a daily basis. Take “I voted for it before I voted against it”: it was Republican spin to portray that as anything other than a completely honest statement. He did vote two different ways on the matter. That’s a very common thing for any member of Congress to do, because bills often come up for a vote, get changed, come up for another vote, etc. In fact, it’s very standard spin to rummage through a legislator’s record and make them look bad, or look good, by tallying their votes on countless matters. This is part of why legislators make such lousy Presidential candidates, because it’s so easy to make them look like wafflers; it’s not possible to be a member of Congress and not change your position constantly–literally, it’s not humanly possible, unless you just vote “Present” constantly (which makes you look like an absentee legislator, because you arguably are one). But their opponents do this to them constantly anyway. And there’s a reason it works, at least for legislators trying to become executives: waffling and changing positions isn’t what most people want in an executive.
In 2004, I published several interviews with the Swift Boat Vets for Truth that I conducted personally. They’re in the archives somewhere. What I found was that these men were not Republican/Bushian/Rovian/White House operatives. They were legitimate men with very real anger of decades long standing against Kerry. The Democratic spin (and now item of faith in “progressive” circles) that it was “lies all lies.” This was really stupid, since anyone who’s been in the military, or has close family in the military and therefore understands the culture, knows the truth: it would not have been humanly possible to get that many of Kerry’s fellow Vietnam vets who served in the same place and time he did to say all those nasty things about him if most of what they were saying wasn’t true; the fact is that most of the men of Kerry’s unit hated his guts, and that was entirely obvious to everyone who knows anything about the military.
What would a workable spin for Kerry have been? I said so publicly many times: admit that 30 years ago, in your somewhat callow youth, you said and did some things that really offended your fellow Vietnam vets, and the men you served with. Apologize for that, retract some of those remarks, and ask if people can move on to the important issues of the day. Then he would have been mildly hurt by the issue, but not to anywhere near the extent he was. Had Kerry chosen that angle, the Swift Boat Vets for Truth would have receeded into the background. Indeed, of the men I interviewed, all indicated that they’d accept an apology from him.
Camp Kerry chose not to do this. They chose “lies and Republican trickery, lies and Republican trickery!” as their spin instead. It didn’t work. The candidate himself was ultimately to blame, which is usually the case.
“…the “conservatives†who see America as a horribly decaying cesspool of decadence and sin and homosexuality and divorce and adultery and drug abuse and selfishness and laziness and illiteracy and illegitimacy. I’m astonished that people on the Left don’t go after the anti-American Right more often on those terms…”
Could you give a bit of a fuller picture on the anti-American Right? It seems like you’re saying that someone who thinks that casual divorce is not a good thing, that laziness, illiteracy, and selfishness are not positive character traits, that committing adultery is not the proper way to conduct one’s relationships, and that a child born to two loving, preferably married parents is in a better situation than one born to a single mom who doesn’t know who the dad is, is somehow anti-American.
Is this person anti-American because he is against some behaviors that some Americans happen to exhibit? Or are laziness and illiteracy some sort of American value or ideal, such that to oppose them is to oppose America?
I will grant that being against homosexuality could be anti-American, in the sense that being intolerant in this fashion is against the American value of tolerance, but that would also seem to argue that anti-Semitism would then be an act of anti-Americanism.
Either that, or I was just giving an example of “spin.”
I’d say that anyone who thinks America is a moral sewer needs to have it pointed out to them that they’re as anti-American as any lefty jerk who talks about our oppressive imperialism and crass capitalism and such.
Divorce is somewhat higher today than it was 50 years ago, although it’s lower than 30 years ago. Homosexuality is more accepted. On the other hand, there are explanations for both those things that don’t involve massive moral depravity. I see little to no evidence that adultery is more common, that fornicating outside of marriage is much more common except that birth control and prophylactics have made it safer.
In the meantime, child abuse, spousal abuse, racism and racial violence, and violent crime are much lower today than they have been in the past. Drug and alcohol abuse are far less rampant and encouraged and tolerated now than they once were, and don’t even get me started on tolerance for people who get intoxicated and get behind the wheel.
“We’re going down in a moral sewer” is implicitly anti-American sentiment. Jerry Falwell’s ridiculous claim that “God lifted his protective hand from America” on 9/11 due to our horrible moral depravity is implicitly anti-American garbage. People on the right need to be confronted with this stuff.
We put up with some forms of sin a little more than we used to. Other forms of sin, we put up a lot less with. I see no reason to believe that on balance we are that much worse than previous generations; in some ways we’re a little more morally lax, but in many others we’re a *lot* more morally upright.
“We’re going to hell in a handbasket” is often code, consciously or unconsciously, for “America used to be great but now it sucks.” And if it stings the people a little on the right to hear that, too bad; George W. Bush was absolutely right in 2000 when he went after conservatives for claiming America is “slouching toward Gomorrha.” This is a great country, worse perhaps in some ways than in some generations past, but arguably way better in other ways. And we have a great and glorious future ahead of us, if we want it. People who say we’re a cesspool that God hates are jerks.
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