{"id":302,"date":"2008-07-01T03:39:03","date_gmt":"2008-07-01T08:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=302"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:51:27","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:51:27","slug":"from-a-small-town-in-pennsylvania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=302","title":{"rendered":"From a small town in Pennsylvania"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A reader asks asks: &#8220;Just what about Obama is so damned elitist?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>I realize I&#8217;m a bit late to the party, but a bit of unpacking of the now-infamous <a href=\"http:\/\/inkslwc.wordpress.com\/2008\/04\/12\/barack-obama-bitter-pennsylvanians-cling-to-guns-or-religion\/\">&#8220;bitter and clinging&#8221;<\/a> quote should serve to explain this nicely.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;So it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not surprising then that [small-town Pennsylvanians] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their [economic] frustrations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Reading the context of this quote makes it worse, not better.  In Obama&#8217;s universe, small-town Pennsylvanians are too thick to recognize the actual cause of their problems, which is government&#8217;s failure to wave some kind of redistributionist magic wand and make it 1955 again.  Instead of doing what they should be doing, which is &mdash; oh, I dunno, he never actually specifies, but one may guess that it involves voting for nationalized health care and against Republicans &mdash; they &#8220;cling&#8221; to bad, <em>baad<\/em> things like religion and guns. And &#8220;antipathy&#8221;, which I&#8217;m pretty sure unpacks as &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to actually out and out call them all redneck racist bigots but wink-wink nudge nudge, know what I mean?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>There is no possibility in Obamaworld that these people may &#8220;cling&#8221; to religion because religion is an integral part of their traditions in a way that has nothing to do with cultural-Marxist notions of economic determinism. I am <em>certainly<\/em> more hostile to small-town Pennsylvania&#8217;s favorite religions than Obama is and even <em>I<\/em> can see that this account is condescending and absurd.<\/p>\n<p>There is also no possibility in Obamaworld that they &#8220;cling&#8221; to guns because they enjoy hunting or shooting, or because they hold a principled position about the role of civilian arms in a free society. No, the only possible explanation is that their guns are a form of fetishistic compensation for their depressed, powerless situation.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the denial of moral agency that is really insulting here, the glib ascription of behavioral choices to &uuml;berpolitical causes their supposed victims are too ignorant or stupid to grapple with. But never fear!  The benign condescension of goo-goo liberals can save them!  Can re-educate them!  Can give them jobs (or, more likely, dole checks) and restore meaning to their sordid, petty lives! Can make them <em>better<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>As it happens, I live in a small town in Pennsylvania.  Malvern is a bit too wealthy and connected to metro Philadelphia to be the kind of place Obama is talking about, but I know what those towns are like. My father grew up in one and my wife in another.  I wouldn&#8217;t live in either place by choice, but Obama&#8217;s take on the people who live there is trivializing, insulting, and &mdash; yes &mdash; elitist.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Obama also said the people he had in mind  &#8220;don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t vote on economic issues, because they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t expect anybody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to help them.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. It&#8217;s true that they don&#8217;t expect anyone to help them; that&#8217;s because, in general, they&#8217;ve learned to equate &#8220;government help&#8221; with &#8220;fucking things up worse than they are already&#8221;.  Obama thinks he knows better than this.  I think they&#8217;re rignt and he&#8217;s wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A reader asks asks: &#8220;Just what about Obama is so damned elitist?&#8221; I realize I&#8217;m a bit late to the party, but a bit of unpacking of the now-infamous &#8220;bitter and clinging&#8221; quote should serve to explain this nicely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2347,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/2347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}