Elections '08 • Media • Presidential Race

Angry White People….Hillary’s Hypocrisy….and the Press

April 14, 2008
by Celeste Fremon
16 Comments

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Yes, yes, we all know I’m an Obama supporter, but this sort of thing drives me nuts:


In the 3rd straight day of coverage of Obama’s Guns, God and Bitterness remarks, the center article on the cover of Sunday’s New York Times was this:

Obama, Now On the Defensive, Calls ‘Bitter’ Words Ill-Chosen (NOTE: The headline is slightly different in the online version.) The article then goes on to make Obama sound as if he is a man on the ropes rather than a candidate who has been closing the gap in Pennsylvania, where earlier this month Clinton held a double-digit lead.


Then this morning, the Times followed up with a bizarrely pro Hillary piece that again pounded at the same Obama remarks. (Referring to Clinton, it was titled, in all seriousness: Firing Barbs, But Looking Like a Saint.)


There was at least a reality check over at the Huffington Post, which managed to unearth a few remarks in the same vein, circa 1991, made by then Prez candidate Bill Clinton. For example:

“The reason (George H. W. Bush’s tactic) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death.”

And over at Talking Points Memo, Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol writes:

I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government — and Bill Clinton — and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing.


Yeah. But not nearly so amazing as watching the press hold the hammer for Clinton.

16 Comments

  • White people are bitter and frustrated. Better-qualified white students, employees, etc. face intense racial discrimination. Obama and his liberal comrades call it “Affirmative Action”.
    Millions of white Americans see “people who aren’t like them” illegals and inner-city parasites sucking up on free benefits.
    Millions of tax paying white Americans can no longer use the public school system because “people who aren’t like them” have made the schools awash with violence, drugs, and gangster rap.

  • Corn doggie, I can think of a million reasons not to vote for Obama despite my friend Celeste’s endorsement of him. But fellow (or gal as the case may be), race and the ham-handed bull that you are espousing is not one of them. How about because he has no “plan” but sells “hope?” How about because his tax policies will kill the golden goose of American small business (that’s where the jobs are)?”

    I don’t think that I will list the other 999,998 reasons today, maybe some other time!

  • GMR – I appreciate the context of your remarks, but I’m going to hold your feet to the fire on one assertion. How do Obama’s tax policies hurt small business ? I’m serious – I’m no expert on his tax plan overall, but I don’t see anything there that targets small businesses in any negative way whatsoever. For what it’s worth, the American Small Business League has endorsed Obama – that’s a group that works mostly on issues related to the SBA and contracting and Obama has some specific proposals to increase small businesses ability to compete with larger firms that they’ve endorsed. He also was considered the candidate with the health care proposal most beneficial to small business in an “infoUSA” poll of small business owners. He’s also a supporter of something akin to the “enterprise zones” with tax cuts and incentives for small businesses to invest in depressed areas, similiar to Jack Kemp’s mission some years back. There may be plenty of reasons to disagree with Obama on numerous issues, but I really don’t see where his tax policies or policies overall hit small business. Maybe there’s something I’ve missed.

    On this other brouhaha, I’m confident Obama will handle it Wednesday night. I’d note that Alessandra Stanley is a notoriously incompetent reporter – so I’d take whatever she says with a grain of salt. Wish I’d seen the forum myself. The Clinton camp has begun not just to attack Obama but to attack the Democratic party itself. On Meet the Press Sunday, James Carville in his zeal to promote Clinted ended up leading the charge with the GOP talking points that his crazy wife and some other hack were trying to pass off as critiques of Obama. For a Democratic strategist to attack another Democrat using the “liberal elite”, “culturally out-of-touch” angle was as nauseating as it gets. Especially when it’s in defense of someone as agressively phony as Clinton. She’s done everything but borrow John Kerry’s hunting outfit in the wake of this and looks like a panderer at Mitt Romney levels of cluelessness. Aside from ridiculous tales of duck hunting (where the ducks firing back, like those Bosnian snipers?) her drinking a straight shot of Crown Royal in an Indiana bar was the tell. Nobody who has an appreciation of whiskey neat drinks Crown Royal. The reason they sell so much of that crap is to mix it with ginger ale and coke. Try again, Hil.

  • I also have to say that, at this point, there’s something very, very funny – ironic? – in the Skocpol piece. Handing out “We’re not bitter” buttons at a Hillary rally. I mean, if they’re not bitter at this point, what the hell are they ? (We see one of the most bitter of these maniacs attempting to bully her way through various discussions here and it’s not pretty.)

  • Comments by David Coleman, a lawyer who also attended the SF fundraiser, from the blogs at Huffington Post:

    At the end of Obama’s remarks standing between two rooms of guests — the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana — a questioner asked, “some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?”

    Obama’s response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.

    Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama’s campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer “relevant” in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week’s commentators who have seized upon the remarks about “bitter feelings” in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer.

    First, I noted immediately how dismissive his answer had been about “talking points” and ten point programs and how he used the question to urge the future volunteer to put forward a larger message central to his campaign. That pivot, I thought, was remarkable and unique. Rather than his seizing the opportunity to recite stump-worn talking points at that time to the audience — as I believe Senator Clinton, Senator McCain and most other more conventional (or more disciplined) politicians at such an appearance might do — Senator Obama took a different political course in that moment, one that symbolizes important differences about his candidacy.

    The response that followed sounded unscripted, in the moment, as if he were really trying to answer a question with intelligent conversation that explained more about what was going on in the Pennsylvania communities than what was germane to his political agenda. I had never heard him or any politician ever give such insightful, analytical responses. The statements were neither didactic nor contrived to convince. They were simply hypotheses (not unlike the kind made by de Tocqueville three centuries ago ) offered by an observer familiar with American communities. And that kind of thoughtfulness was quite unexpected in the middle of a political event. In my view, the way he answered the question was more important than the sociological accuracy or the cause and effect hypotheses contained in the answer. It was a moment of authenticity demonstrating informed intelligence, and the speaker’s desire to have the audience join him in a deeper understanding of American politics.

    There has been little or no reaction to the part of the answer that was addressed to the hopelessness of inner city youth who have been rendered “irrelevant” to the global economy. No one has seized upon those words as “talking down” to the inner city youth whose plight he was addressing. If extracted from an audio tape HuffPost Blogger Fowler, those remarks could (and may yet) be taken out of context as “Obama excuses alienation and violence by urban youth.” But in context, Senator Obama’s response sounded like empathetic conclusions and opinions of a keen observer: more like Margaret Mead than Machiavelli.

    As the week’s firestorm evolved over these remarks at which I was an accidental observer, I have reflected upon the regrettable irony that has emerged from Senator Obama’s response to a friendly question: no good effort at intelligent analysis, candor — and what I heard as an attempt to convey a profound understanding of both what people feel and why they feel it – goes unpunished.

  • Hillary only drank Crown Royal because she was tired. As part of her being whatever she needs to be at the time, she thought that she had been offered Royal Crown. “Yours truly, Little Richard, goes for the chicks with the Royal Crown look, because, umm, she’s got it!”

  • Reg, thanks for posting that. In the end, I believe this is why so many college age voters and twenty-somethings support Obama, because they feel in him they’re being offered something that’s more authentic….and complex. These are the Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers who don’t buy the CNN/MSNBC oversimplified, Big Media pablum.

  • I wrote over at Marc’s that if Mayhill had included Obama’s remarks on inner city blacks (and browns whom he missed) the whole remark looks very different and pretty hard todis as “Elitist.” I’m not going to get into Fowler’s “rightness” or “wrongness” here but how did she miss that?

  • Meghan Daum has an amusing piece in Times about Obama as work of art, specifically, in posters. Lost Res, I always knew there was a deeper affinity you had for Obama. Talking about those ubiquitous Obama posters with “Hope,” “Change,” “Progress,” she says: “Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara — which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is — Fairey’s Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop…There’s an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality…”

    The Obama people like this fine, she notes. An admittedly smitten Fairey says, “I didn’t want to hijack his awesomeness.” No, I’m sure it’s all there, in the eye of the beholder.

  • Daum in LAT:

    “On the other hand, have you seen Marc Jacobs’ Hillary Clinton T-shirt, which depicts a frighteningly perky Clinton in a pearl necklace and American flag pin? It’s all commodity.”

    I knew there was a deeper affinitiy you had , etc . etc..

  • Here’s a link to this lovely Jacobs’ tee, which has a decidedly archaic ’30s socialist realism quality IMHO:

    http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2008/02/marc_jacobs_brings_back_the_hi.html

    Here’s one of Fairey’s poster:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/31/shepard-faireys-obam.html

    I thought I’d do the favor of passing along information on this iteration of the candidates’ iconography as opposed to tendentious and/or bitter bullshit.

    For anyone who wants to read “personality cult” or “analogs in moldy communist aesthetics” into these images, here are two images for you to contemplate and compare to these particular efforts by this artist Fairey and fashion maven Jacobs, who also happens to be chief designer for Louis Vuitton, among other stellar achievements.

    http://www.internetvibes.net/wp-content/gallery/stalin-posters/poster27.jpg
    http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Che-Guevara-Posters_i1181_.htm

    It’s interesting that the Obama pix contain words like “progress”, “change”, etc. while the Hillary image is adorned solely with the jewelry equivalent of her pantsuits and one of those ubiquitous flag lapel pins – worn most religiously by newsreaders and politicians facing the camera – as the only spot of color. I wouldn’t acquire either of these – the Fairey because that time-worn aesthetic bores me and the Jacobs for it’s even lamer taste and the bitter, lost cause candidate depicted.

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