McCain: Obama’s Comments Were Elitist

Posted on April 14, 2008

A carefully played hand here. An ever so gentle push on Obama’s comments. Careful to focus on the positive aspects of the folks Obama insulted, and careful not to call Obama an elitist, but his comments. I guess they don’t call him Maverick for no reason.

Video thanks to Hot Air

Something else that needs to be noted. The Obamites are echoing their messiah’s flawed defense and focusing on the “bitter” part of Obama’s statement. They are being intellectually dishonest. They ignore the most offensive parts. Here is the entire quote:

“You go into some of 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.”

Its the part about clinging to guns and religion out of frustration from the government that is offensive. There really isn’t any way out of this one. The more Obama digs, the deeper his hole gets. I’m guessing that Obama would rather have us cling to the government.

Obama has not helped himself in his efforts at damage control. First, he said he was just telling the truth, but edited the truth he was telling. People are “bitter” because they’ve been let down by previous administrations, he said; his campaign seeks to take up their cause. This ignored the incendiary religion, guns, and xenophobia portions of his remarks.
Obama then argued that he was really complimenting small-town voters. At the CNN Compassion Forum Sunday night, he said, “you know, Scripture talks about clinging to what’s good.” This works only if you close your eyes to the rest of Obama’s original sentence, since surely he wasn’t saying it’s a good thing to cling to xenophobia and racism. Which is to say it doesn’t work at all. Obama also admitted that he didn’t choose his words carefully when he spoke about small-town values in San Francisco. But this was more than a slip—it was an extended riff. …
Ultimately, in trying to explain what Obama was thinking, I run out of string. He wasn’t expressing a sweeping view of the human behavior of small-town people. He was making a tactical point about how politicians appeal to voters at election time, but that tactical point about electoral behavior still relies on an unflattering view of small-town voters. No matter what helping hand you extend him, Obama still claimed that voters have been hoodwinked on Election Day, and no one wants to be told that in the past they’ve been duped into voting for the wrong person.