The problem with genies

Obama's Little Pink Houses tour has now become his explain himself tour, which he tried to do Saturday:

“There are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my home town in Illinois, who are bitter. They are angry… So I said, well ya know, when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on. So people, ya know they vote about guns or they take comfort from their faith, and their family, and their community, and they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country, or they get frustrated about how things are changing. That’s a natural response.”

Again, the impression is that folks only turn to those things in bitterness, not when things are good. He did correct one of the poorest of phrasings by inserting "illegal" in front of immigrants and dropping 'xenophobia', which isn't generally part of the small town vernacular anyway, explaining better why some of these folk might be bitter.

Interestingly, he's now included his own small town megacity of Chicago into the mix, a hamlet with an ever-growing reputation as the windiest of windy cities. Perhaps in Obama's tiny village people only cling to their guns when the authorities pass another law trashing the Second Amendment or reach for the Bible when local politicos use public schools to stage political stunts, places where the Word is not part of the modern curricula and even seen as hate speech at times:

Blagojevich urged the rally's participants to make their voices heard in Springfield and Washington. "How many more children have to die before the men and women who make the rules wake up and start responding to the needs of communities and kids that go to our schools?" he said.

National Rifle Association lobbyist Todd Vandermyde said he questioned whether students should be taken out of classes "to serve as cheerleaders for a political stunt."

Chicago "has some of the strictest gun control in the nation ... They said this was going to solve the crime problem, and their panacea hasn't done anything but disarmed law-abiding citizens," Vandermyde said.

Yet despite all this talk of bitterness Obama once again doesn't offer any solutions, just dreamy observations. We know he's not very hip to conceal-carry, wants to tackle the immigration problem partially through amnesty and "working with Mexico", and is trying to close the racial divide by pretending he didn't belong to a church with an unhealthy fixation on the past, best cured through black liberation theology and awards to nutcakes who believe in orbiting mother ships.

That said, nobody in their right mind denies there's some bitterness in small town America, including some Obama mentioned. America is changing and change isn't always comfortable. As is often the case, grains of truth can exist in offensive remarks (unless they come from conservatives). The issue here is mainly the causation of some of this bitterness.

But let's not lose track of the original issue. Obama skillfully moved the goalposts in the Wright brouhaha by giving a generic speech on race, and in this he's trying to turn it into a generic debate on small town bitterness. The question asked was why people in rural Pennsylvania aren't warming to his candidacy and rather than saying "I don't know, maybe they just don't like me" or "we're still working to gain their trust" he assumed the entire group simply must be a pack of racist, fearmongering, Bible-thumping, buggy riding, backwards-thinking dung slingers afraid of a black man with an Islamic name peddling change.

So the point is, even if some do feel that way, all of them don't and he cannot possibly know the ratio. That's not to mention the black and Hispanic people living in small towns, say for instance Jena, LA. Obama is supposed to be the man who rises above lumping people into groups. As we see, he's a garden variety liberal on that count. Of course, he has many allies out there if you're keeping score, so the game isn't over.

But in a normal world the DNC would be seriously considering making anyone else their candidate in November. In the world we live in all they've got is a serial liar who wakes up to a new political world every morning. Hillary's response to this gaffe was reminiscent of a 12 year old playing a board game with a younger sibling. So the DNC has no choice. Or wait, hey, Jimmy Carter is still eligible!

MORE 4/13/08

Huffpo dug up an old Bill Clinton quote from 1991 in an attempt to compare political condescension. Not close, in my opinion.

Slickdog bashed 41 for trying to scare white guys about economic competition from racial quotas, but in order for it to have been similar he'd have needed a behavior byproduct, ie, "that's why they get those transparent rebel flags on the window of their pickups right under the gun rack...and cling to things like Promise Keepers or organizations like the Minutemen. It's understandable". But he didn't.