Ivy League Conservatives

If you're new here and like what you read, subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!

Hoo boy. Barack Obama has done plenty to make conservatives’ blood boil in the past few months, but the comments he made in San Francisco last week are still raising heart rates all over the country. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week, here’s the clip that started it all:

and here’s the text of what he’s saying:

“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,” 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.”

So to Obama, small town communities around America ‘cling’ to guns, religion and racism to cope with their frustrations that the government isn’t working for them. You can see how expertly tied to the middle/working class Obama is.

Roger Kimball had this to say yesterday about the debacle:

Indeed, for connoisseurs of political savvy, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Obama’s mini-diatribe was the contrast it revealed between the oleaginous, feel-your-pain evangelism of hope he has on an infinite playback loop and the disabused arrogance that crackles just beneath the burnished, campaign-trail mask.

The moral? Well, there is at this this one positive thing to come out of Obama’s statement: we now possess, much more precisely than before, some measure of the contempt in which Obama holds most Americans. Obama knows this, and he doesn’t like it. Which is why his replies to the widespread criticism of his remarks are instructive. “I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he objected a day or two ago. But that was completely disingenuous. He said it plenty well.

[...]

And so it was with Obama’s bitter, small-town, gun-toting, God-fearing, xenophobic, unemployed isolationists. Really, he says now, he meant all that in a Pickwickian sense. What do you think? I think we all know exactly what he meant. He meant that he regarded most Americans as bitter, small-town, gun-toting, God-fearing, xenophobic, unemployed isolationists who needed help. That is bad enough. Even worse, however, is the disgusting pretense that he actually meant something more emollient. Most of us have gotten used to being treated with contempt by politicians. But Obama has upped the ante. It isn’t pleasant. But it is, at any rate, useful to know just how stupid he thinks we are. I for one will not forget it.

How funny that the ‘change’ Obama has brought to the campaign has been to ostracize potential voters at every possible turn. This was an insult to those from small towns and middle America. 

Hugh Hewitt also weighed in:

There is a furious amount of spinning underway to save Senator Obama from the consequences of his candid assessment of Americans who don’t live in the big cities or on the coasts.  Howard Kurtz, for example, wants to narrow the impact of Obama’s slight to just small town Keystone staters, and also asserts that everyone knows what Obama meant.

“And yet, most people (and most journalists) know what he was trying to say,” Howard opined. “Not that small towners are gun nuts. Or religious nuts, not from a regular churchgoer. The senator was trying to say that these folks voted on social issues, distracting wedge issues, when their real problem was economic.”

I don’t think that’s what he meant at all.  He meant that most Americans are bitter. And Senator Obama agrees with me.

Isn’t it funny how the liberal media still tries to cover up for Obama, spinning their stories silly?

John Hawkins’ assessment is also funny:

Barack Obama is an ultra-liberal, phony, racialist snob who holds ordinary Americans in contempt and is running for a job he’s unqualified to hold in the first place. However, there is one thing he has been able to accomplish that no one else ever has: he’s the first person who has ever been able to make Republicans see any good in Hillary Clinton.

John Podhoretz on Commentary Magazine:

I wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in the last year of his presidency, and what I discovered, reading through the archives of his addresses, was that he was never hortatory. He never told his audience what they “must” do; he did not even say what “we must do.” It was not his place to do so; he worked for the American people, he was not their boss. He did talk about what politicians must do or should do to fulfill their compact with the people who elected them, but he did not place himself in a position superior to his employers. It was his view, rhetorically, that the American people were the repository of wisdom and he was just trying to discern what they believed and act according to it.

Obama is often likened to Reagan, but the Obama movement promises something very different. In Michelle Obama’s words:

“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed.”

A campaign that believes its role is to “require you to work,” and is partially based on the demand “that you push yourselves to be better,” really does have it backwards. It’s the president who is “required to work,” who needs to “push himself to be better.” His role is not to analyze and address the shortcomings of the voter and the voter’s spiritual, political and ideological weaknesses, which is what Obama’s remark the other day portends. His role is torepresent the voter. This is a crucial distinction, and if Obama is unable to make it, he will not become the president.

Newt Gingrich’s take, h/t Right Wing News:

“If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be weird ideas. 

They can’t really believe in the right to bear arms.

They can’t really believe in traditional marriage.

They can’t really believe in their faith in God.

They can’t really want to enforce the law on immigration.

Therefore, they must be “bitter” and “frustrated.”

 

This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife’s view that “America is a mean country”. Not since Governor Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.” – Newt Gingrich

What do you think?