Remember when Bush couldn't think of a single mistake? I always thought that was a pretty challenging question. Obama shows us how you can answer it with grace.
Speaking to the New York Times in an interview set to be published Sunday, Obama said his now-infamous comments at a San Francisco fundraiser last April — during which he said some small town Americans "cling" to guns and religion — was "my biggest boneheaded move."I love this. It is not particularly risky politically, indeed, he may even be preempting a McCain-Palin attack. But that's now how it comes across to me. It comes across honest and thoughtful. Ever since his race speech, I've had very high hopes.
"How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters," Obama told the Times. "And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they've been ignored. And because Democrats haven't met them halfway on cultural issues, we've not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition."
5 comments:
we've not been able to communicate to [the white working class] effectively
Listing his cling comment as his biggest mistake whilst attempting to make a point about miscommunicating to them makes my irony glad hurt.
Why is it ironic? He was identifying a general failure, and listing as his biggest mistake a specific mistake that has made it more difficult for him to overcome this general failure.
Frankly, when I heard the comment I understood it exactly as he explained here. He was trying to suggest to the group that they needed to not be so harsh in their view of people on the other side of the culture war. He was trying to point out that they have suffered, too.
As I understood the explanation he gave:
A) he wanted to explain to wine-sipping, gay-loving San Franciscans that they need to get better at communicating to the working class.
B) in trying to explain to these liberals this thing, he used the term "cling to their guns" in a clearly pejorative way
C) inadvertently using a pejorative slang while explaining to people that pejorative slangs cause trouble is enormously ironic.
It's possible I am misunderstanding the chain of events.
Oh, and while I believe Obama sincerely wants to not think pejorative thoughts about poor whites in Appalachia, I am pretty convinced he *does* think pejorative thoughts about them.
Okay, now I see the irony, but I don't think Obama was encouraging people liberals to do a better job of communicating, I think he was encouraging them to empathize.
Re: Obama's view of poor whites, hard to say. I mean, he surely thinks he is smarter, better looking, more eloquent, basically better than them. I would assume he thinks he's better than everyone. For me, the issue is whether he desires to help them as much as he desires to help folks more like him.
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