From a small town in Pennsylvania
<p>A reader asks asks: &#8220;Just what about Obama is so damned elitist?&#8221; </p>
<p>I realize I&#8217;m a bit late to the party, but a bit of unpacking of the now-infamous <a href="http://inkslwc.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/barack-obama-bitter-pennsylvanians-cling-to-guns-or-religion/">&#8220;bitter and clinging&#8221;</a> quote should serve to explain this nicely.</p>
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<p>&#8220;So itâ€™s not surprising then that [small-town Pennsylvanians] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who arenâ€™t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their [economic] frustrations.</p>
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<p>Reading the context of this quote makes it worse, not better.  In Obama&#8217;s universe, small-town Pennsylvanians are too thick to recognize the actual cause of their problems, which is government&#8217;s failure to wave some kind of redistributionist magic wand and make it 1955 again.  Instead of doing what they should be doing, which is &mdash; oh, I dunno, he never actually specifies, but one may guess that it involves voting for nationalized health care and against Republicans &mdash; they &#8220;cling&#8221; to bad, <em>baad</em> things like religion and guns. And &#8220;antipathy&#8221;, which I&#8217;m pretty sure unpacks as &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to actually out and out call them all redneck racist bigots but wink-wink nudge nudge, know what I mean?&#8221;.</p>
<p>There is no possibility in Obamaworld that these people may &#8220;cling&#8221; to religion because religion is an integral part of their traditions in a way that has nothing to do with cultural-Marxist notions of economic determinism. I am <em>certainly</em> more hostile to small-town Pennsylvania&#8217;s favorite religions than Obama is and even <em>I</em> can see that this account is condescending and absurd.</p>
<p>There is also no possibility in Obamaworld that they &#8220;cling&#8221; to guns because they enjoy hunting or shooting, or because they hold a principled position about the role of civilian arms in a free society. No, the only possible explanation is that their guns are a form of fetishistic compensation for their depressed, powerless situation.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the denial of moral agency that is really insulting here, the glib ascription of behavioral choices to &uuml;berpolitical causes their supposed victims are too ignorant or stupid to grapple with. But never fear!  The benign condescension of goo-goo liberals can save them!  Can re-educate them!  Can give them jobs (or, more likely, dole checks) and restore meaning to their sordid, petty lives! Can make them <em>better</em>!</p>
<p>As it happens, I live in a small town in Pennsylvania.  Malvern is a bit too wealthy and connected to metro Philadelphia to be the kind of place Obama is talking about, but I know what those towns are like. My father grew up in one and my wife in another.  I wouldn&#8217;t live in either place by choice, but Obama&#8217;s take on the people who live there is trivializing, insulting, and &mdash; yes &mdash; elitist.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Obama also said the people he had in mind  &#8220;donâ€™t vote on economic issues, because they donâ€™t expect anybodyâ€™s going to help them.â€. It&#8217;s true that they don&#8217;t expect anyone to help them; that&#8217;s because, in general, they&#8217;ve learned to equate &#8220;government help&#8221; with &#8220;fucking things up worse than they are already&#8221;.  Obama thinks he knows better than this.  I think they&#8217;re rignt and he&#8217;s wrong.</p>
