Barack Obama quote in SanFrancisco:
"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," Obama said. "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."
Senator Obama later explaning his comments:
"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, 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."
After acknowledging that his previous remarks could have been better phrased, he added:
"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.
"And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."
Huh?
1 comment:
Although I acknowledge that both the original and the revising comments could have been phrased far better, you can’t argue that there is a core of Obama’s statements which is unarguably true. In large part, the underprivileged in electoral democracies clings to one or two issues in order to have a grain of efficacy. Rural development in the US has been hugely disregarded in spite of campaign promises, etc. etc. Although Obama came off sounding like an Ivy League jerk, the fact that he acknowledges that huge swaths of the American population has fallen through the cracks is valid. Of course there will be anti-immigrant sentiment when the job situation in the country is in doubt. Of course you will have certain market sentiments from rural voters as we head into a recession which many analysts have have predicted will result in a period of stagflation. No, it is not surprising that the underserved will be unhappy. Yes, it is possible to track the voting patterns and psychology of the underserved back to a lack of service delivery and development. Yes, I agree with Obama, if not in tone, then at least in sentiment.
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