The audacity of condescension
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then 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.”
The first problem with this sound bite is that Obama is psychologizing the voters in Pennsylvania. He’s saying that he understands their motivations better than they do themselves. Which may well be true, but it’s a hell of a thing to say out loud.
But let’s look deeper. What does the sound bite say about Obama? It says that Obama thinks that providing jobs is a legitimate function of government. Not so surprising, coming from a liberal Democrat. Obama thinks that cultural or religious or values issues are somehow less authentic, that they are secondary or substitute issues that people wouldn’t even bother with if they weren’t so bitter about the government not giving them jobs.
I don’t know about this. I suspect that there are a lot of people in Middle America with secure jobs that get just as worked up about values issues as unemployed people do. In any event, the voters decide which issues are important, not the candidates. The voters will decide whether arrogant psychologizing is worse than telling tall tales about dodging sniper fire.