Barack Obama is right. Plenty of Americans are bitter — not only in small towns, and not only in Pennsylvania, as the presidential hopeful suggested at a private fundraiser in San Francisco on April 6.
They're bitter about losing jobs overseas...and about the obstacles that make it difficult for entrepreneurs to create more jobs at home. About the war in Iraq...and about opportunistic politicians willing to score cheap political points on the backs of our men and women in uniform.
About a Congress too timid to touch entitlement or immigration reform, corporate executives who bag multi-million dollar bonuses as their businesses go down the tubes and a popular culture that shows utter contempt for traditional values. You better believe there are some bitter Americans.
So the focus on that term, as though the b-word had suddenly become a stinging epithet for main street America, is a bit strange. Stranger still is the sight of Hillary Clinton lecturing about the code words of elitism
About the same time Obama was sweet-talking San Francisco sophisticates, the senator from New York and her sometime campaign partner at long last made public their tax returns from 2001 to 2007. During those years, the Clintons reported earning $109 million, mostly in speaking fees and book deals.
It's a tough life being a critical elitist. Which is perhaps why Clinton and so many others have missed the greater significance of Obama's "bitter" observation. When people lack evidence of progress in their daily lives, Obama said, "it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Now set aside for a moment Obama's own churchgoing, which is an essential prerequisite for street credibility for anyone pondering a political career on Chicago's South Side. And forget his anti-trade sentiment while campaigning in the Rust Belt, which is merely another example of political opportunism.
Obama says his choice of words in San Francisco was clumsy. He clearly did not mean to imply that only the economically marginalized value their Second Amendment rights and go to church, or that all those demanding the federal government control U.S. borders are racists. And it is undoubtedly true that bigotry flourishes in places and times of economic hardship. Think Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
Still, it would be difficult to overlook the elitism peripheral to Obama's analysis: The gun cabinet and the house of worship as refuges of the resentful are not much different from the hanging tree and the Klan. Frustrated people cling to guns and G-d. And those gun-toting, church-going folks tend to be racists and xenophobes.
It's impossible to separate this analysis from a prevailing liberal conceit, made popular in the best-selling book, "What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America." According to author Thomas Franks, conservatives trick the dimwitted residents of red states to vote against their economic self-interest by baiting them with emotional wedge issues like gun control, gay marriage and other cultural and religious issues.
That was the background to Obama's Bay area talk — explaining to his donors why so many people are so cynical about a political pitch from a black man named Barack Obama. The problem, however, is not the color of his skin or the origins of his name. It is that a vast number of Americans are embittered by the liberal impulse to trivialize their beliefs about self-defense, religion and secure borders.
In 1984, Democrats held their national convention in San Francisco. A month later at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Jeanne Kirkpatrick delivered a keynote address in which she decried the tendency of "San Francisco Democrats" to look for the worst in America.
First it was Princeton- and Harvard-educated Michelle Obama finally being proud of her country. Then it was Jeremiah Wright's tirades. Now this.
Pandering to $2,300-a-head donors on San Francisco's Billionaire's Row, Obama was right at home.
