Katrina vanden Heuvel: Obama is right. People are angry.

[marmar]

from The Nation:




OBAMA IS RIGHT. PEOPLE ARE ANGRY. ...Right-wing ABC radio talkshow host John Batchelor has filled my in box in these last 18 hours with e-mails dissecting and skewering what Obama meant when he said at a private April 6 fundraiser that small-town voters in economically distressed areas of Pennsylvania are "bitter." Batchelor and Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley and Sean Hannity and Rush and O'Reilly are ready and rearing to go, quick to their guns to paint Obama as an elitist. {Read the excerpt from Nation columnist Eric Alterman's "Why We're Liberals" in the April 14th issue of The Nation to understand the cynicism and hypocrisy at the root of the conservative cabal's forty-year campaign.}

The Right has its reasons to play this cynical card. It is the Clinton campaign's rapid-fire, right-wing populist response to Obama's remarks that I find so troubling and cynical, and sure to hurt the party and the country in the general election.

Strip down what Obama was saying: He addressed the trouble his campaign of hope and change was having in "places where people feel most cynical about government." While he has tried to speak concretely about the conditions of peoples' lives, his campaign continues to have trouble making inroads among white working class voters, and "old economy" voters whose idea of change isn't hope but rather losing a job or a pension. Yet he is narrowing the margins.

...(snip)...

The political discontent is obvious--and Obama is trying to speak to that. Americans are fed up with government's failure to do anything much for them, or that they're proud of being part of. " Here's how it is," he said in his April 6 remarks. " In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania people have been beaten down for so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it." Here's where the Right's generation-long attack on government has done real damage to citizen confidence in government. We see it all around us everyday. But. surely the other critical source of citizen doubt is that government has in fact done little recently to measurably improve their lives and give them a sense of national purpose. After all, Bill Clinton, long considered the master politician of his age, was basically in the business of lowering expectations of government even faster than they were disappointed. Obama is trying to amp up expectations which the Right and Clintonism have tamped down. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=309337

[writes3000]

1. She is so fucking smart. I wish she'd run for office. I'd vote for her in a heartbeat.

Thanks for sharing.

[DearAbby]

2. K&R

[panader0]

3. To me it's very simple: If you are happy, you enjoyed the last 7 years

If you are not happy about the last 7 years, like 95% of people who joined DU, you are bitter. You can parse, mince and semanticize words, but that's what it means. A non issue. Let's move on.

[FrenchieCat]

4. She's got this part down pat and concise!

"the Clinton campaign's rapid-fire, right-wing populist response to Obama's remarks that I find so troubling and cynical, and sure to hurt the party and the country in the general election."

[DJ13]

5. Hillary's new campaign staff............

"Batchelor and Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley and Sean Hannity and Rush and O'Reilly are ready and rearing to go, quick to their guns to paint Obama as an elitist."


Nice crowd you Clinton supporters are in league with.

[stillcool]

6. So that's where the money went........

[Cha]

13. These are the definitions of Elitisim..

"You want elitism? Try being married to an heiress to a beer distribution fortune and being stuck in the most exclusive club on earth inside the beltway for the past twenty years. THAT'S elitism.

You want elitism? Try making $109 million over the past six years and running for President by virtue of the fact that your husband has already been President. THAT'S elitism.

You want elitism? Try being a pundit that been ensconsed inside the ultimate insider world of Washington politics, and then poo-pooing telling the truth about the mood in the countryside as being "condescending." THAT'S elitism."


<"Stick Your Elitism Where the Sun Doesn't Shine">...
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/12/111833/793/977/494296

[Dr.Phool]

7. I may just go on the Nations cruise in December.

Get to spend a week dining and drinking with Katrina, Eric Alterman, Jackson Browne and many more!

www.nationcruise.com

[Voice for Peace]

10. Take me with you!

[Nedsdag]

8. Um, Katrina?

Please tell the Sea Hag (yes, I called her that and I'm a woman) this. You're preaching to the choir.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. What is ironic is that

it's not just Obama who should be asking and has asked, but the Democratic Party itself. In 1980, Reagan sealed the deal for the flight of the dispossessed blue collar worker to the repukes from the Democratic Party - this while firing 16,000 union-led striking government workers right after he was sworn in. His spinmeisters redefined the political euphemisms, casting "liberal" as "bad" and "government" as "bad".

Now 28 years later, when pieces of planes fall out of the sky, people wind up in the hospital or in their graves from tainted heparin, people sleep in tents outside of their formaldehyde-fuming Katrina trailers after their insurance companies refused to pay to replace their damaged homes, and contractors have replaced "government" at three times the cost, you have a Democratic candidate named Clinton who plans to have more of this? But then again, Bill Clinton bragged about slashing 250,000 government jobs and declaring that "the era of big government is over".

Yep - they play right into the RW planks because by golly, those people can't possibly be "bitter" because there is so little government around for them to bitch about! They should not worry but be happy!

[Cha]

11. The country needs to know that

bil clinton wasn't such a prize regardless of his inability to stop "flirting"..

"After all, Bill Clinton, long considered the master politician of his age, was basically in the business of lowering expectations of government even faster than they were disappointed. Obama is trying to amp up expectations which the Right and Clintonism have tamped down".

[Justice Is Comin]

12. Yeah right,

so bitter, they scamper for their religious artifacts and guns :rofl:

I guess a snobby wise ass has to snub you in your own life to get you to smell the coffee.

Katrina, you're smarter than that. Come to the light. I really do like you.

[Zynx]

14. We all know that. The problem was not that he said that people are pissed.

They are. The problem is that he equated guns and religion with being a crutch. People from very secular backgrounds don't understand how that sort of language bothers religious people. I don't support Hillary anymore, but this was an ill-advised comment on his part and I won't defend it.

[KoKo]

15. OFGS! EVERYONE KNEW...Obama was talking about Frank's Book..."What's the Matter with Kansas!"

So "What's the BIG DEAL" about it? It's that he talked to folks in San Francisco about "Tin Lunch Pail Pennsylvanians" and so his "High Roller SF Donors could "feel the pain" and donate a little more. What the heck is wrong with Obama Pandering to the same folks Hillary panders to out in Hollywood. Don't they ALL CARE ABOUT ...KANSAS?

This is what Obama was talking about...in case some of his supporters missed it and that other DU Dems might not be clued into the book:

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Hardcover)
by Thomas Frank (Author) "In the backlash imagination, America is always in the state of quasi-civil war: on one side are the unpretentious millions of authentic Americans; on the..." (more)

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker. According to Frank, the conservative establishment has tricked Kansans, playing up the emotional touchstones of conservatism and perpetuating a sense of a vast liberal empire out to crush traditional values while barely ever discussing the Republicans' actual economic policies and what they mean to the working class. Thus the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh will repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, less likely to protect his job, and less likely to benefit him economically. To much of America, Kansas is an abstract, "where Dorothy wants to return. Where Superman grew up." But Frank, a native Kansan, separates reality from myth in What's the Matter with Kansas and tells the state's socio-political history from its early days as a hotbed of leftist activism to a state so entrenched in conservatism that the only political division remaining is between the moderate and more-extreme right wings of the same party. Frank, the founding editor of The Baffler and a contributor to Harper's and The Nation, knows the state and its people. He even includes his own history as a young conservative idealist turned disenchanted college Republican, and his first-hand experience, combined with a sharp wit and thorough reasoning, makes his book more credible than the elites of either the left and right who claim to understand Kansas. --John Moe

From The New Yorker
Kansas, once home to farmers who marched against "money power," is now solidly Republican. In Frank's scathing and high-spirited polemic, this fact is not just "the mystery of Kansas" but "the mystery of America." Dismissing much of the received punditry about the red-blue divide, Frank argues that the problem is the "systematic erasure of the economic" from discussions of class and its replacement with a notion of "authenticity," whereby "there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer." The leaders of this backlash, by focussing on cultural issues in which victory is probably impossible (abortion, "filth" on TV), feed their base's sense of grievance, abetted, Frank believes, by a "criminally stupid" Democratic strategy of triangulation. Liberals do not need to know more about nascar; they need to talk more about money and class.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.