Senator Barack Obama has drawn the charge of elitism from Senator Hillary Clinton and her supporters for remarks about bitter blue-collar white voters. As reported in the left-liberal Huffington Post, these remarks were made before wealthy Californian supporters at a San Francisco Bay Area fundraiser,
"You go into some of 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," Obama said. "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." Mayhill Flower, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html
Clinton and her clique have not suprisingly taken aim at Senator Obama for his remarks The Fox News website reported it thus "Clinton called Obama’s remarks “elitist,” “demeaning” and “out of touch” Saturday morning, and high-powered supporters followed up by claiming the comments would damage everything from Obama’s credibility to his electability in a general election." http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/04/12/clinton-team-lunges-at-obama-hunts-for-opening-over-small-town-america-remarks/
Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a Clinton supporter, responded "“I think it’s difficult for a Democratic candidate to be successful in a general election if he misreads and misunderstands people who live in small communities." (see the Fox News story above).
As a Ron Paul supporter in the primaries who will work for the Libertarian Party’s candidate in the general, I look at this with some amusement. Both Clinton and Vilsack’s responses I quoted were spot on.
But nothing Obama said is exactly new under the sun. Arlie Hochschild in http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-12.htm stereotyped them as NASCAR dads. The linguist George Lakoff whom Hochschild draws on descends in psychobabble indentifying such voters as imbued with "stern father figure model." Nor has the left intelligentsia just started with this sort of analysis under George W. Bush. At least since the 1968 election, they have been trying to figure out why bluecollar white voters are not reliably Democrat.
It should be pointed out that Obama’s interpretation of voter "bitterness’ pointing them to guns, nationalism and religion is what Marxists call "false consciousness."
The problem with the Republicans, especially under George W. Bush, is that they invoke free markets and limited government, rather than practice them. As for Lakoff, Hochschild, Vilsack, Obama and Clinton,they are profoundly wrong. Tthe economic self-interest of bluecollar voters is to follow 100% laissez-faire free market, free trade capitalist policies that respect property rights and individual liberty, especially by separating government from the money supply. Only one political party in America does so consistently–the Libertarian Party www.lp.org. -30-
See also my earlier remarks https://www.groundreport.com/World/Obama-The-Same-Old-New-Thing
(Richard Cooper is the export/import manager of a Long Island, New York manufacturing firm. He ran as a Ron Paul delegate in the February NY primary. Previously he served a Chair of the Libertarian Party of New York www.ny.lp.org and has been especially active against eminent domain abuse).