Typical Condescending Socialist Politician
The Underside of Hope
By Rich Lowry
Monday, April 14, 2008
Barack Obama was caught saying something he believes.
At a San Francisco fundraiser, away from the prying eyes of the press, Obama reflected on why small-town voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest seem resistant to his appeal. He said those areas had lost jobs for 25 years. Therefore, people “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.”
Obama has apologized for his phrasing while defending the substance of his statement. And why not? He was retailing an article of left-wing orthodoxy going back centuries: that the working class is distracted by religion and other peripheral concerns from focusing on its economic interests and embracing socialism.
Versions of Obama’s insight have been expounded by a world-famous 19th-century economist (Karl Marx), by a 1960s New Left philosopher (Herbert Marcuse) and by a best-selling contemporary liberal writer (Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”), among many others. It’s such a commonplace that Bubba-friendly Bill Clinton wrote in his memoir that Republicans wanted to undermine confidence in government so voters would be more receptive to “their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns.”
At bottom, this is a profoundly insulting point of view. Consider Obama’s formulation. He makes it sound like no one would be a hunter or a Christian absent economic distress, that economic circumstances drive people into such atavistic habits. Has he considered that some people simply enjoy hunting? And view the right to bear arms as a guarantor of American liberty? As they used to say, “God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”