Oh boy, is this ever going to cost Barack Obama. Here is what he said (and is now apologizing for) at a fundraiser in -- of all places -- San Francisco:
"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 toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
You poor dears, I understand why you go to church, hunt and worry about sovereignty and cultural loss. You're angry. Well, let me tell you, you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, Barack Obama (Harvard Law, '91) likes you!
God, guns and patriotism: the opiates of the redneck masses. Barack Obama said so. This is precisely what Jeane Kirkpatrick meant in 1984 when she defined the opposition party as San Francisco Democrats. That Obama made these remarks in San Francisco has poetic resonance. If I were running opposition research at the RNC, I would go on vacation now; Obama and his fun friends are doing all my best work for me.
You know, Hillary would never have said anything like that, because for all her faults, she actually had to live in Little Rock for a while, and understands, I presume, how patronizing and false that stereotype is. Obama took a perfectly reasonable and worthwhile point -- that rural and small-town people have been made particularly vulnerable to the economic dislocations of globalization, and ought to be given some consideration -- and turned it into condescending pity for them and their culture. It's the pity that rankles. Patrick Deneen suggests that Obama ought to go to Latrobe, Pa., and say:
"You go to these big liberal cities in California, and like a lot of cosmopolitan centers of libertarian lifestyle individualism, they have benefited from the wrenching displacements you've experienced. They benefited immensely from free-trade and globalizing policies of previous Administrations - Democratic and Republican alike - and they've been told that they have earned their status and they owe nothing to anyone.
"And it's not surprising that they get optimistic, they believe that they can dispense with religion or borders or community as a way to remake the world in exactly their image."
Russell Arben Fox, who has long said good things about Obama, regrets Obama's "stupid, clumsy" remarks, but says Obama and Deneen are actually not as far apart as it seems.
Still, Obama is not going to overcome this easily. Between this and the collected YouTube works of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it's fairly easy to guess how he's managed to get himself defined, at least for white working-class, rural and small-town voters. You know, the kind of people whose sons and daughters make up a large share of those serving in the Iraq War, which McCain is devoted to seeing continue seemingly indefinitely. (But caution! They frequently resent the implication that they are being taken advantage of by Washington politicians, and often feel that their service is demeaned by this sort of rhetoric.) What a shame that McCain, as far as I can tell, offers nothing to these same people who are going to be offended by Obama's condescending remarks -- nothing, I mean, to address the things cited by Obama as things they struggle with because of globalization. Has McCain ever opposed free trade pacts? We know where he stands on immigration (pretty much right where Obama does, in fact). And so forth. If there is any substantive difference between McCain and Obama on free trade, globalization and immigration, I'm not aware of it. And no, I don't for one second believe Obama opposes free trade deals; I believe Austan Goolsbee's assurances to the Canadians that Obama's just talking trash for campaign purposes.
If McCain has any redeeming feature in this regard, it's that he doesn't appear to look down his nose at the sort of people sneered at as rednecks, and therefore doesn't affront their pride. Larison said a few weeks ago that culture-war issues will be hotter than ever this fall. Take this Obama flap as evidence.
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"You've accused me, recently, of having a fundamental misunderstanding of conservativism, which might be true."
For more on this, see my last post on the Huckabee-Paul thread.
"Meanwhile, it is only part of their income. If you think liberals think all income should be taken from the rich, you have confused us with...well, I'd say communists, but even that's not right."
Liberalism/progressivism is simply slow-track socialism. There's no inherent logic in it as to how to stop growth of government; growth of government requires taxation, thus taxes will always either increase or be expanded. It may not start out as 'soak the rich' but it inevitably ends up that way, and eventually it becomes 'soak everyone.'
I'm firmly ensconced in the middle class, yet when you add up all that I pay in taxes, the government gets almost half of what I make. Frankly, that pisses me off.
"Liberals want a progressive tax. That means that poor liberals want to be taxed less, and rich liberals want to be taxed more."
And why should liberals get to say that non-liberals need to go along with this? If you guys want to redistribute your own wealth, more power to you. Why is it your business to make me redistribute mine?
Liberalism/progressivism is simply slow-track socialism.
And conservativism is simply slow-track anarchy. And environmentalism leads to living in trees, and capitalism leads to parents charging children rent.
There's no inherent logic in it as to how to stop growth of government;
Unlike conservativism, which has plenty of logical about how to stop the growth of the government, but does not bother to use said logic and actually stop growth.
However, there is a nice logical place where the growth of the government will stop: When people think it's grown enough, and stop voting for people who want to grow it more.
And why should liberals get to say that non-liberals need to go along with this?
The same reason that people who don't want to be murdered get to pass laws about murder, despite what those who freely want to murder say?
I know, in the conservative universe, not paying taxes is some sort of right, up there with freedom of speech, but it's really not. The government is not forbidden from collecting taxes. (It wasn't even forbidden before the 16th amendment. That just allowed certain kinds of taxes that previously had been disallowed, mainly taxes on income from property.)
"And conservativism is simply slow-track anarchy."
And you've seen this actually happen where, exactly?
Progressive/liberal governments all over Europe have crept/are creeping ever closer to socialism. Can you name a state where conservatism, barring revolution, has developed into anarchy?
"I know, in the conservative universe, not paying taxes is some sort of right, up there with freedom of speech, but it's really not."
No kidding. But being free from confiscatory taxation could certainly be called a civil right, especially when such taxes are instituted by stealth and against the will of the people.
Progressive/liberal governments all over Europe have crept/are creeping ever closer to socialism.
If you define socialism as 'the government providing more services than you want', yes.
In real life, socialism is the government operating the means of production. The government can pay for anything it wants, as long as private industry makes it, and it's not socialism.
So no, the governments in Europe are nowhere near turning into that. Even ones that do have a few socialist industries, England springs to mind with their National Health Service, do not seem like they want to nationalize furniture production, anymore than conservatives appear to be wishing to privatize the roads.
Can you name a state where conservatism, barring revolution, has developed into anarchy?
Arguable, half the problem with Iraq's economy is due to conservative nitwits who pretended 'the free market' could magically rebuild the country. People who decided to go with lowest, non-local bidder for construction instead of hiring the Iraqis who were out of work and needed jobs. And who tried to 'privatize' government services when no existing Iraq company could actually handle anything that size.
We grabbed freshfaced college grads who parroted all the right lines about capitalism and gave them a playground without a working economy or government, and they totally screwed it up. There are actually books on all this, I can't think of the names. But this is an example of conservativism, applied by idiots and managed by a fool, failing to change anarchy into an actual economy, not breaking an existing one.
Of course, the other half the problem with the Iraq economy is people being gunned down in the street, so it's hard to say how much the nitwittery actually hurt and how much it really didn't matter.
But the point of my analogy wasn't that it happened, it was that it didn't. Conservativism doesn't devolve into anarchy, and progressivism doesn't devolve into socialism.
There are a few socialist governments in the world, like in South America, but none of those are evolutions of progressive states...they're all revolutionary populist backlashes against America corporate control, half of them in power 'illegally'. Likewise, anarchies are formed from violent dissolutions of governments, not from people voting their government into nothingness.
No kidding. But being free from confiscatory taxation could certainly be called a civil right, especially when such taxes are instituted by stealth and against the will of the people.
Oh, I completely agree with that last part. And the very first sort of 'stealth tax' is operating at a deficit. Operating at a deficit should be reserved for recessions, and announced publicly with much regret that we're having to do that.
I also think we have too many points of taxation. I don't know how to fix that, thought, considering that many of those points exist so different levels of government can tax different things and people.
OTOH, there's one very big place we're not taxing, namely, we have no import tariffs. I understand the logic, but I think it's entirely faulty. It has started to equalize pay, which sounds nice and all, but actually means that our pay is going down while China's is going up.
But I have no idea what 'confiscatory taxation' is supposed to mean. All taxation is 'confiscatory'. You can no more choose to be free from it than from any other obligation under the law.
I live in a similar town (in this case, in Ohio). Obama isn't saying anything that's not true. The folks who are making such a stink, it seems to me, are the ones who don't live in towns such as these. I have yet to hear anyone complain about his comments where I live.
I'd rather have a person tell it like it is than sugarcoat things like politicians and economists seem to have been doing for the past several years about the state of the economy.
Too much media, folks. Too many soundbytes, too many opinions and too little real information being passed on.
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