a prophet without honor
by Edward Savoy
Published: April 24, 2008
There is an important point being missed in the furor over “Bittergate.” (Please, someone come up with a better way of naming political scandals other than by the suffix “-gate.” It’s had a good run, but it’s been 36 years now.) It seems every angle of Senator Obama’s remarks about voters, particularly those in Pennsylvania, having been embittered by job losses and turning to “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” has been dissected worse than a frog in a high school biology class. But there is still one massive, important, obvious point that has been completely foregone: the fact that Senator Obama is right.
Of course, like any generalization made by anyone (and especially by a politician, where nuance is Kerryesque and that’s far from a good thing), it falls short of the mark in its specificity and casts a wide net where a narrower one would have done just as well. But there is truth to what Senator Obama says and it’s not truth of an elitist Washington snob. It’s a truth that I’ve seen first hand.
I’m a native of small-town, rural Pennyslvania, I lived there for more than 20 years and I’ve met exactly the kind of people that Senator Obama is talking about. They’re perfectly sane people who have faith in their Creator and nothing else on this Earth. They’re people who no longer trust the government to do anything and have this fantasy of a ravening, primarily Democratic monster that feeds on the blood of aborted babies, the ashes of burned Bibles and the gunpowder of the firearms that they think were stolen away from them.
Slowly, but surely, a bunker mentality has developed among these embittered people and there is nothing that can shake the idea that is in their heads of a government that is only out for its own ends, a government where the object of power is power, where every politician is a crook or waiting to become one, and wreckage to their basic values is the only thing that can come about. Add this to any establishment’s fear of the outsider or the unknown and you have the recipe for bitterness that Obama cataloged.
Of course, Senator Obama made the ultimate political mistake of saying these thoughts out loud, forgetting the inalienable political truth that, bitter or not, those folks vote too. He made the bigger mistake of telling the truth, which lends credence to the thought that Obama really isn’t experienced enough for the White House. After all, if he doesn’t even know when he’s supposed to lie, how can we trust him at all?
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