“Bitter”
A certain tone deafness has emerged with Barack Obama.
We have long since established this narrative of the “Prince” versus, I don’t know what the other archtype is named so I’ll call it the “Brawler”. The candidate skewing toward the upper class and collegiately educated who sounds the notes of change and reform versus the candidate of the lower classes and lesser educated socio-economically not much able to afford that luxury of dreaming of reformation and willing to have someone wade through the muck and slime to get it done. The quintessential example was Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, but Gary Hart and Walter Mondale work just as well. Things get slightly murky after that, but Howard Dean treaded to the former demographic, and after Gephardt fell Kerry had to schlep to the status of the latter.
Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton. But this is largely a matter of personality and rhetoric, policy differences relatively microscopic, as is the level of feigning toward what amounts to pandering regarding trade agreements — the main crux for the economically stranded making up the politically dismobiled at the heart of Obama’s controversy.
Just as Barack Obama was closing the gap in the machine-oriented blue collar rust belt laden Pennsylvania primary race, he managed to throw himself a grenade in speaking before a crowd at a fund raiser in, of all places, San Francisco. Throwing out that “What’s the Matter with Kansas” hypothesis on rural Pennsylvanian voters, “cling”ing to cultural values by way of “guns, god” (and the third ‘g’ is “gays”, but that half falls into the “god” category and only half drops simply into maintenance of cultural mores), with economic deprivation extending through Republican and Democratic administrations, and so we came that fatal word: “bitter”.
With that, forward momentum in the polls stopped, Bill Clinton’s bizarre backing over to Hillary Clinton’s phantom sniper controversy was replaced in that 24-hour news cycle, and with that my own desire — along with that of Senator Bob Casey, Jr’s, to get Obama’s inevitable nomination over and done with before June eroded. Would it have been better if Obama had somehow included the adverb “justifiably” before the word “bitter” to suggest a fighting spirit and desire to work on behalf of their betterment, or is that parsing not going to happen due to its still being an elitist looking down on those Guns and that particular God?
Barack Obama’s response shows he knows this is a trifling annoyance, and shows the stubborness in knowing that it is hard to dignify this controversy with a response. As he must, he spots it as a “slip of the tongue”. Those three words are becoming a bad habit, following as it does the more meaningless controversy over the five word phrase “just a typical white person”. This is theater review, only tangeantly connected to the matter of what a Barack Obama administration might bring, but it is what it is, and should we wake up in November to see that John McCain has been elected president, this is the personality trait which will be at the root of Obama’s failure.