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 to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
This is Obama’s latest gaffe. He accidently told the truth that everyone knows: liberal elites don’t love Americans so much as they feel sorry for them. Flush with confidence after dodging the Rev. Wright bullet, Obama has fallen back on the old liberal standby: poor and middle class whites need to recognize their real interests are economic and similar to those of poor minorities. In other words, what they seem to think is important is in fact an illusion at best, a type of vice at worst.
This was Bill Clinton’s New Democrat formula; he wanted to unite the poor and middle class through broad government entitlements, and the key to this was to put the government in charge of health care. He wanted in effect to bribe the middle class to look the other way on government privileges for minorities, women, gays, and the like by making middle class whites part of the group feeding at the trough. Clinton knew that the old canard of “welfare queens getting rich” carries little weight among recipients of Medicare and Social Security, whose beneficiaries consist mostly of people who have worked hard most of their life. He wanted to promote this thinking among younger working people, as well.
Obama’s whining about the mass hysteria of Pennsylvania’s poor whites is obviously selective and results-oriented. Obama is calculating and contradictory in his rhetoric. Obama cares quite a bit about social issues, in particular those involving race. He knows that man does not live by bread alone. That’s why liberal wedge issues are often symbolic in nature and have little to do with over-turning capitalism. It’s why Obama retreats into vague generalities about “hope.” It’s why rich Hollywood moguls and hundred-millionaires like the Clintons support raising taxes on the “rich.” As liberal globalists, they are scared of the the gun-toting Christian peasantry, care a lot about gay marriage, are wedded to sexual politics and feminism, and are very concerned with showing their moral superiority to poor whites by supporting things like affirmative action.
What Obama’s really saying is that the social issues of his supporters are legitimate, while those of whites are the illegitimate epiphenomena of fear, hatred, and resentment against their declining power as a group. Black rage is good; “angry white men” are bad. He wants poor whites only to consider economics (in Obama’s mind the primary culprit), while he wants poor blacks to consider all of their resentments, as their economic circumstances, racism, and the like are all rooted in the same economic forces in his Marxist reasoning. Rich whites, finally, should only consider the wedge social issues of the Democratic Party. In spite of his reputation for sophistication, his philosophy is typical for a politician: whatever you do, vote for him.
It’s why Obama asks us in his great race speech to forgive the rantings of a Reverend Wright, even as we must recognize the intrinsic evil of his white grandmother’s representative fear of black criminals. As for the elephant in the room–the liberal program’s privileging of minority groups against whites–for Obama it’s just a question of understanding and recognizing your own collective guilt. It’s the right thing; economic interests must take a back seat. (Once again, moral considerations must trump economic ones when the power of minorities is involved.) There is also a hedge; Obama promises a payout from the coffers of even richer whites, so he’s really dodging the issue suggesting it won’t be a big problem. Rich whitey will raise all boats, black and poor white alike.
Remember his speech, “Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.” It’s apparent from his on-again/off-again concern for social issues that Obama only employs his economic rhetoric selectively. Everyone is well within their rights to vote for him for any reason. The poor are promised a payout. They should think with their wallets. Wealthier whites, however, should embrace “hope” and vote for Obama, even if it will hurt their bottom line.
Subscribe To This Feed
Obama is right.
No condescendance, it’s true !
This post sure takes a lot of willed ignorance. Did you imagine this entire reality yourself?
I think you’ve detected far more in a man and a quote than actually exists.
“…social issues of whites are the illegitimate epiphenomena of fear, hatred and resentment against their defining power as a group.”
You’re right, you nailed how this candidate feels and the racist reasons he’s really running for president. There’s nothing calculatedly contradictory in his rhetoric, only in your analysis.
It’s “declining power as a group.”
So what’s he saying, genius. He says whites should vote with their wallets if they’re poor and with their heart if they are rich. Blacks of course should vote with their race.
This guy sucks and is a fraud.
People like UA have so much faith in the self-evident truth of their homo economicus-based worldview that they seem to think that unsupported assertion and ad hom constitute argument.
Can you explain this?
“Clinton knew that the old canard of “welfare queens getting rich” carries little weight among recipients of Medicare and Social Security, whose beneficiaries consist mostly of people who have worked hard most of their life. ”
Seems to me that it carries a LOT of weight.
I realize that’s a little unclear. I meant that criticisms of ordinary welfare programs are not made against older social security beneficiaries. They don’t see themselves as welfare cases, and neither do other Americans, not least because the program is universal and most of its recipients are hard-working people. As government benefit recipients, though, they fight for more than their fair share all the time and vote more Democratic than their attitudes on other issues would suggest. Clinton wanted to bring middle class and working class whites into the beneficiary fold through nationalized health care.
“Obama’s whining about the mass hysteria of Pennsylvania’s poor whites is obviously selective and results-oriented. Obama is calculating and contradictory in his rhetoric.”
You only think that because you’re clinging to old canards out of desperation and loathing. Let Obama free you. Let Obama elevate you. Turn your sins and griefs over to Obama. Take everything to Obama in care. Let go, and let Obama.
One thing Obama got right: working class white people ARE bitter. They are bitter about being ethnically cleansed from once stable neighborhoods and being made to pay for the sins of the wealthy in the form of affirmative action.
Of course, all income redistribution is income redistribution, but from this stiff’s perspective, Social Security is not the same thing as AFDC. The incentives ARE different, as are the recipients.
Yeah, there are anomalies and inefficiencies in the former, but the latter is simple theft. Coupled with affirmative action, and crime, it’s a Holocaust against the white working class.
Yeah, we’re bitter.
Good work, Mr. Roach! I read your recent articles over @ Takimag.
I especially liked your discussion of the POW-MIA flag; I had never thought about it in that light.
I’m curious, are you the same Mr. Roach who occasionally posts @ Chronicles?
I’ve commented there, but not sure if anyone else may have “stolen my identity.”
Thanks for visiting.
The fact is, Obama DOESN’T know much about Race. In today’s PC environment, no one who is hand-picked (that’s the right word) to be front and center will only ever utter platitudes and various freeze-dried thought-cliches. That’s what they are there for. The brutal facts are that the lower you go on the Cultural ladder the more repetition and resistance to change and the less one can tolerate prolonged periods of intense concentration and the cognitive tension that goes with it. And Race is an issue that requires the sort of careful thinking virtually no one in the States or anywhere anymore, has an interest in.
That people, especially Whites, trip over themselves at Obama’s verbal facility is more a sign of how low we’ve sunk, and not of any particular intellectual gift of his.
It’s also a showy, people-pleasing, nauseating embarrassment.
I wish to be blunt. I do not see how it is possible to do something at all, let alone well, for someone else, when you can not do it for yourself; or worse, when society says you can NOT do it for yourself, you ONLY can do it for someone else. Whites are expected to FEEL for Blacks in a way they dare not feel for themselves. If they truly did, and not enough do, then things would literally change over night in America.
Today, we live in an Inverted World that is quickly becoming a Twisted World; and in this world even thought and feeling suffer. Thought and Feeling being two words for the same thing -our Humanity.
“In today’s PC environment, no one who is hand-picked…”
In that sentence above I obviously meant “anyone”, but wrote “no one”. It’s late, what can I say?
Oh, and as far as Obama thinking that Whites should engage in collective guilt, I’ve said it before and will say it again because it’s worth repeating – I have NEVER felt guilty about the suffering of this world; and that includes Blacks, and not just Blacks. Never.
When you come, as I did and as millions – MILLIONS – of poor, and working class and middle class, Whites have, from an abusive background that essentially rips your life apart before it starts, and when your primary offenders bury their guilt and memory in abstractions like Liberal politics, ie; Sentimentality; when you come from a place that feels no guilt when they should, and feels guilt when they shouldn’t and then turns to their victims and ask them to join them in this bizarre ritual of abstract, sentimental, unreal guilt SO they can never feel the pain that will come from looking at themselves, ie; so they can NEVER grow, since pain and self-reflection are the essence of any spiritual growth; when you come from that, and then are turned over to angry Blacks who have no empathy for themselves and even less from you, and you are subjected to their cruelty and violence, and then told that no matter how low you are on the totem pole you are still expected to feel for them, and told by people who are beating you – well, then you know what is meant by the phrase “Inverted World”. Actually “insane” is about the nicest thing I could say about that world. It took me years to untie the knots in my thinking and feeling, but I did it and will never go back – ever. As it is, the whole Obama thing is simply bizarre, cowardly and dishonest. Poor them.
icr spends time trying to be witty with insults instead of reading the evidence and facing the facts. Tragic.