RhetoricVille

Barack Obama has caused a political dust-up with a remark he made last week at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. Speaking of working class Americans, he said: “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 pundits and Obama’spolitical opponents are citing the remark as evidence of his elitism. I agree that he is elitist, but do not see it as a big deal. FDR was an elitist, but got himself elected to the presidency four times, on a populist platform. Of course, that was in the days when the mass media consisted of newspapers and radio. So voters could not actually see FDR’s pince-nez, but they could hear it in his voice and that didn’t stop him. (Or was it Teddy Roosevelt who wore a pince-nez? Well, they were cousins, weren’t they? Close enough. I’m not going to cut a good line on account of historical fact.)

Anyway, that some people are calling a Harvard grad and law professor “elitist” does not strike me as interesting. It’s the “bitter” part of Obama’s remark that I want to focus on.

Are we bitter? Yes, we. I am including myself in the working class. It’s a little stretch, maybe, but I am the son of a working class family. I have lived most of my life in and around a prime example of an American working class city — Flint, Michigan. True, I am now a sort of academic, but at the same time a half-baked labor leader. I go to hockey games. My wife bowls. In my youth, I owned a gun — a beautiful Remington pump-action shotgun, which I used to blast ducks and geese from the sky, or tried to. In truth, I was not much of a wing-shot, and I have long since passed the gun onto a nephew.

Why did I hunt? Why did I own a gun? Because I had friends who did. Were we bitter? We were frustrated? It could be, but I don’t think our gun ownership was a response to anything other than it is hard to kill water fowl with your bare hands.

As for clinging to religion, I never did much. My people were not religious, except at the high moments like weddings and funerals. I married a Catholic, and I consented to having whatever children came out of the deal raised as Catholics, but I have never converted to Catholicism from the vague form of Christianity that I was born into. The Catholics are sticklers on believing in God. And not just any god, either. You either believe in their god or forget about it.

OK. On reflection, I am not the sort of working class person Mr. Obama was referring to. But I think I know lots of such people, and better than he does. I don’t think their gun ownership or their belief in God is a reaction to bitterness and frustration. However, their supposed “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” to the extent that it exists, probably is an emotional response to the changing circumstances of their lives. I can agree with Obama on that.

The working class see their jobs and livelihoods going overseas, cities like Flint becoming ghost towns, and they wonder who or what is to blame.

If not bitter, we’re at least pissed off.

Links:

Obama: “I didn’t say it as well as I should have” CNN

“Obama tries to temper ‘bitter’ comment” Washington Post