Guns, God and Gotchas

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Guns, God and Gotchas
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; Page A15

....That air of self-confidence can sometimes come off as smugness or indifference. The signal moment for that came in a New Hampshire debate when Obama glanced at Clinton and said, by way of dismissal, "You're likable enough, Hillary" -- a kiss-off as head-snapping as when James Cagney smashed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's puss in the 1931 classic "The Public Enemy."

It is this quality of Obama's -- this sense that you need him more than he needs you -- that probably explains why Clinton seized upon his remarks about the poor of Pennsylvania and elsewhere who, in Obama's artless telling, have turned to God and guns. It was, as he conceded, a bumbling attempt to express an economic truth, and it gave her a chance to imply that you can judge this particular book by its cover. But the spirit of what Obama said was not condescension but empathy. People were hurting. They were bitter. He understood.

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a version of that crack about academic politics -- so vicious because the stakes are so small. In the presidential race, the stakes are huge but the differences are small. Both Clinton and Obama are liberal Democrats -- the former less liberal than the latter, but no matter. One is more experienced than the other. One is white, the other black, and one is a woman and the other is not. Still, on mortgages, Iraq, Israel and almost anything you can name, they are in general agreement.

That's why the campaign has increasingly been about what one or the other candidate said or meant to say or should have said. It's even been about what one of their supporters said -- Geraldine Ferraro on race, Merrill A. McPeak on patriotism, Billy Shaheen on cocaine and Bill Clinton on just about everything. Both campaigns have indulged in this silliness, with Obama's supporters yelling "race!" the way a certain boy cried "wolf!" and the Clintons, on occasion, pretending to a kind of political naivete that ill becomes them.

Obama should not have attributed a yearning to hunt or attend church to hard economic times. The remarks will haunt him -- witness how John McCain has also called them "elitist." But Obama was right about the economic roots of bitterness and anti-immigrant sentiment. And he's been right, too, about the patent insincerity of Clinton's criticism. Her attack is hardly based on a touching regard for gun owners or even churchgoers, but on the desperate hope that the smoothly aloof Obama can be painted as arrogant and elitist. It's old, tiresome politics -- the politics of politics -- and, paradoxically, more patronizing than anything Obama himself said....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR2008041402453.html?nav=most_emailed

[Warpy]

1. The WP is off base, as usual

and is proving once again that they have no clue what people who are making far less than their own golden six figure salaries are thinking.

People do turn to things they find comforting when times are tough and those things do include churches and that symbol of self reliance and personal power, the gun.

The suggestion that this is not the case only proves that they need either to be booted out of their ivory towers or to confine their reporting to people like themselves who also have those golden six figure salaries.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. I'd only make the point that Cohen, an op-ed writer, speaks only for himself.

I haven't noticed if the WP has editorialized on this issue; it has covered it, of course, in news articles.

Good points, Warpy.