What's the matter with Obama?(2008)(Barack Obama)

BARACK OBAMA campaigns as the man who can heal Divisions--between blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, people you respect and people you don't ...

That last pair wasn't on Obama's usual list of dichotomies, but it is now, thanks to his remarks at a fundraiser 16 days before the Pennsylvania primary: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania [where] the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.... And it's not surprising then [that] 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."

How bad was this? Let us count the ways. Obama gave these remarks at a San Francisco-area fundraiser (as in "San Francisco Democrats," Jeane Kirkpatrick's old slam at the party's Lefties--in this case, wealthy lefties). He spoke, like a naturalist on a Lindblad tour, of "these small towns," suggesting something alien, probably unpleasant. He imputed anger to the small-town dwellers: justified, since they are jobless, but also ignorant. Why? Because they misdirect their anger toward "people who aren't like them," immigrants, and trade (but hasn't Obama been assuring Democratic voters, except when his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee talks off-message, that free-trade pacts are indeed ill-advised?). Or else these misguided small-towners turn their anger into a political defense of gun ownership and their religious beliefs-probably the intended meaning of what Obama said, this being the thesis of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? and similar critiques of conservative values politics popular among liberals.