Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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Is it over yet?
[Read the article: The rubes and the elites]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nothing like a pack of comfortably middle-class college-kid pundits pontificating about the grave insult supposedly done to the voters of the American working class by one offhandedly worded synopsis by Barack Obama...they're projecting the condescension that they accuse Obama of displaying.
As is Hillary Clinton, for that matter- whom, I've read, just got heckled in Pittsburg during a speech, when she brought up the newly minted "Obama elitism" canard.
No surprise to me.
That sort of patronizing shine-up of working class folks is much more the stock in trade of Republican operators. Now, just when it was becoming overwhelmingly obvious what a con it is, when many former Republican supporters are realizing how it was all part of a swindle, the tactic is picked up by...Hillary. And the pack media pumps it up, and insecure middle-class liberals buy into it, and begin discussing Obama's supposedly offensive sentence as if it actually were some terrible gaffe...
It's even worse in some ways than the Republican shell games. Republicans generally stick with shine-ups that play into themes like "big strong guys like you don't get sick, you don't need medical care"...they generally know better than to "champion" working class people as if they were 5-year olds who needed to be herded away by nannies, with hands over their ears.
"Cling? You don't cling, do you, darling...and "bitter"?! Why, I never..."
I think I know who's being clueless around here, and it isn't Barack Obama.
The worst aspects of the media are on full display here- the emphasis on collective identity politics as a significant "news angle", when more usually it's simply a cheap-shot gambit employed to grind out yet another tedious, tendentious op-ed column or TV newtalk circle jerk by the nattering classes; preening, narscisstic media personalities feigning the "common touch"; phony hand-wringing masquerading as insight; pack journalism following the bread-crumb trails of partisan political handlers; the hunt for any stray spark to blow on in the course of a political race- all symptoms of American pseudo-journalism, intensively focusing on even the most trivial minutiae of electoral contests and simultaneously incapable of summoning a fraction of that energy for covering any other aspect of politics.
Barack Obama's comment calls out for further clarification and expansion- not for condemnation and the shutting down of a conversation and dialog that, by all rights, it ought to be opening.
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my advice for Obama
[Read the article: The rubes and the elites]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have a sister who works as a volunteer for Obama in Union County, Pennsylvania. She's done phone work, contacting people registered with the Democratic Party.
She has told me that among her callers, misconceptions are still rampant about Obama- such as that he's a Muslim, and that he won't pledge allegiance to the flag.
She has told me that demographically, Union County is the "whitest county in Pennsylvania"- a fact that I wouldn't make much of, or even bring up- except for the fact that it indicates that many of these folks have never had so much as a single conversation with a black person.
I'd like to see Barack Obama do some personal outreach to address that.
I think he should make some time in his schedule to put in a low-key appearance in a small town or two in central rural Pennsylvania on some Sunday morning- somewhere in the town hall or a city park or other gathering place- even a shopping center- perhaps with a church near enough to get some foot traffic after services. He should simply set up a folding table, and invite the local people to speak to him. The format: he listens to them speak their piece, and hears them out. About anything. He talks to them, but they talk first.
He could do this in one of those little towns on Route 45, like Mifflinburg- or maybe a few miles west, where on the north side of 45 at a bend in the road, there's a small marquee, simply reading in block letters "BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED." Last I saw, that sign had been up there for more than a year's time.
(I realize that sorta throws a monkey wrench into the stereotypical image bank for some of you readers, but it's true. "Stereo" means "solid" in Greek...ever wonder about that?)
I think Obama ought to do this even if he can't arrange an appearance until after the Pennsylvania primary. Win or lose. He ought to do it even if he gets trounced there.
He'll get a lot of respect for showing up, either way. Because meeting and greeting those folks close up will be giving them respect, and he'll get it back, even from conservative Republicans.
I know he was at State College already. But this isn't about pulling a big crowd, or appealing to a college town demographic.
It would be about something else- going past the pundits who presume to speak for those folks, and hearing the views of the people themselves.