Obama and the elites… or best mind what you say – eh? April 14, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Hmmm… the latest row to hit the Obama campaign was inspired by the following. Speaking of working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses at a fund-raising event, Obama said:
“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.”
It’s hardly class war, now is it? If anything this is an explication of a dynamic that Obama probably knows too well, one which has to some extent hobbled his inexorable rise by curtailing his appeal to the white working class. Indeed, as related here, the preceding words contextualised the speech nicely…
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. 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.
Still, no better woman than Hillary Clinton to come out all guns blazing at this display of… er… ‘elitism’.
“I don’t think he really gets it that people are looking for a president who stands up for you and not looks down on you”
Is that what he’s doing? Seemed to me that he was reflecting on the campaign and the dynamics within that campaign, and… to no small extent a reality of US socio political demographics. It was clumsily put – no doubt there. Elitism? Don’t think so, unless by elitism we mean that it is now impossible to critique a demographic (but wait, isn’t that what so-called political correctness is meant to be about, curtailing speech?). But I’m not certain that he’s taken the best path to move beyond this.
“Now it may be that I chose my words badly. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. But when I hear my opponents, both of whom have spent decades in Washington, saying I’m out of touch, it’s time to cut through their rhetoric and look at the reality,” he said in Pittsburgh.
That’s okay… to an extent, but… surely a better tack would be to say that there is a distinction between feeling bitter and being bitter. That’s a distinction that both Obama and, ironically, Clinton must be aware of. And the problem with the other aspect of his apologia is that it is very much an appeal to the head rather than the heart.
“After all, you’ve heard this kind of rhetoric before. Around election time, the candidates can’t do enough for you. They’ll promise you anything, give you a long list of proposals and even come around, with TV crews in tow, to throw back a shot and a beer. But if those same candidates are taking millions of dollars in contributions from the PACs and lobbyists, ask yourself, who are they going to be toasting once the election is over?”
All true, but to some degree unnecessary. Better by far, better by far, to watch what he says. Still, that would make for a less than riveting campaign, and the way the polls have been shifting slowly but steadily towards him, well, who knows how it’s going to go in the next round of primaries… For reading Slate today one discovers that:
On Monday, Barack Obama trailed Hillary Clinton by 7.7 points in Pollster.com‘s Pennsylvania poll average. By the end of Friday, he had narrowed that to 6.1 points in a state that is supposed to be a sure thing for Clinton. Today’s newest Pennsylvania poll shows Clinton ahead by four points among Democrats in the state, with 8 percent of voters undecided. Obama leads among Protestants, young voters, and men. Clinton leads among Catholics, white voters, and women.
How will the ‘elitism’ issue hurt, if at all? Who knows? And to note in passing, as related on the Slate Gabfest at the weekend, all of this is so redundant and futile in some ways. As soon as the Democratic party has a nominee the failed candidate will have to be out there pressing the flesh and pumping the pavements to express their complete support (unless of course they do as McCain did in 2000, and as Bush sort of did earlier in the Spring this year). So really, isn’t this a waste of energy that ultimately would be better directed elsewhere.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Funny thing about McCain is that he’s not promising anything that these voters want. Makes me scratch my head. More war and fewer jobs seems to be his mantra. Yet, in the polls he’s actually moving ahead of Obama.
The trouble with Obama is that white working class people don’t think he’s ever been in touch with them. He grew up in a middle class house in Hawaii; he went to Harvard, he moved to inner city Chicago, built a political base and four years ago got lucky when all opposition evaporated in the Illinois Senatorial election. He’s never had to be “in touch” with white working class people and they seem to know it. Clinton, however, gets the benefit of the doubt because Bill was so 100% in touch with their reality.
McCain was in touch with their sense of patriotism, which wins him some points.
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But then, what of Bush… recall his Washington dinner in front of the glitterati where he announced that those attending were ‘his base’?
Is the crucial thing to connect, or is it to have policies?
Incidentally, I’m still no Obama partisan.
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Well, both, I guess. Because policies of a President aren’t worth a damn without the wind behind your sails. Otherwise, Congress calls the shots. And, if you don’t have a fair wind at your back you’ll never get your policies passed anyway. You must have that popular support, that sense that there’s a connection – strong enough to get Congress’s attention – before your policies can begin to be debated in Congress. It’s completely different in the British/Irish system where the head of the government has the legislature tied up behind him.
Wasn’t that remark by Bush as the Al Smith dinner (he said that the audience was the “haves and the have mores”, right)? That’s a very light-hearted affair where the chief guest generally sends himself up. Bush was having fun there, if I have the right occasion.
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Yeah, this is the reference, I think.
Bush gazed around the diamond-studded $800-a-plate crowd and commented on the wealth on display.
“This is an impressive crowd – the haves and the have-mores,” quipped the GOP standard-bearer. “Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”
That was during the 2000 campaign.
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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 was pretty dangerous stuff for Obama. He’s on thin ice here. This was a stupid remark. Politically stupid. He’s asking for his opponent to point out that small town Americans are not actually bitter, angry people who only keep going so long as they can fire off a few rounds and sing Hallelujah.
That will play well in San Francisco and New York, but this will make it much harder for him to win in Ohio & Pennsylvania in the fall than it should be.
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I think this demonstrates a lot about Obama. Essentially, he is the voice of the liberal upper-middle classes (and those who consider themselves to be whether they are or not). He has demonstrated contempt for those who he needs to compete effectively for if he is to beat McCain. I think Hilary would be the stronger candidate, but it looks like the Democrats feel otherwise. More fool them.
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Cheers for the ref Eagle. I agree with you that he was on thin ice, but I think he compounded the initial problem with his own response.
I’m still not sure Garibaldy that it demonstrates ‘contempt’ though. I’m also genuinely unsure as to which of the two would be more electable.
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The trouble with Obama is that white working class people don’t think he’s ever been in touch with them. He grew up in a middle class house in Hawaii; he went to Harvard, he moved to inner city Chicago, built a political base and four years ago got lucky when all opposition evaporated in the Illinois Senatorial election. He’s never had to be “in touch” with white working class people and they seem to know it.
Yes, as opposed to Panamanian-born admiral’s boy multi-millionaire Senator John McCain, I guess.
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Or indeed Clinton, who was no slouch in the money making department pre and post Whitewater. And meanwhile Bill is raking it in…
Perhaps it’s the common touch.
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It is a sad fact that Obama is being attacked for pointing
out how the white working class have been abandoned
by successive administrations and hence have turned to
things like NRA extremism or Televangalists for a panacea.
WBS is right in his comments about political demographics-what Obama said is what people like Thomas Frank or
Garry Wills have been saying for years-but because it
was in a speech rather than the “New York Review
of Books”, it causes a outcry.
If I were living in the US, I would definitely vote for
Obama now.
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Speaking of the common touch, interesting article on what Splintered would call the decents here
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2008/04/next_stop_is_euston_where_this.html
On Obama, well if not contempt, shall we say a certain lack of sympathy for? I think service in the military will have given McCain some sense of the lives lived by the type of communities derided by Obama, and Hilary and Bill made their reputation on it (and in Bill’s case that’s not all he made with the female part of this type of community). Obama has never really had the need. Or it seems the inclination. His is a message primarily for college students and young people professionals.
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I might have added black people to that list, but I suspect he feels pretty much the same about poor black people as he does about poor white people, and in fact poor people of any colour. And ironic to see someone who made a big deal out of his attendance of a black church with a radical reverend (until it embarassed him) complain about others grasping on to religion.
The more I think about him, the more I find him more superficial than Tony Blair and Posh Spice put together.
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Yes, as opposed to Panamanian-born admiral’s boy multi-millionaire Senator John McCain, I guess.
Yes.
McCain was born the son of an admiral (Panamanian-born? Is that a slight?), but he that doesn’t make him a spoiled rich kid. McCain was, as he admits, not that comfortable with Naval discipline, but he proved himself a leader when he opted not to avail himself of the easy way out of Vietnam when his captors offered it to him. That resonates with the working class. (The rest of his story – marrying wealthy, his political views put him at odds with the working class white people.)
Clinton may be wealthy, but he grew up poor. Very poor. Only Reagan comes close in the 20th century. As Clinton himself observed about the less well-off in America, they don’t want everyone to be poor, but want a chance to be rich themselves.
Hillary, however, is only riding on Bill’s coattails among working class whites. They like and trust him, instinctively, which is why they give her the benefit of the doubt.
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Garibaldy,
I didn’t see your message 12 before I posted mine, although I think Obama does have a sympathy for poor urban black people. People like his wife and her family.
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He might do, but I’m not so sure. Don’t religion and guns play a prominent part among poor urban blacks too? Or I wonder if he sees that as different because they are certain to vote for him as long as he doesn’t try and deny his colour?
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Don’t religion and guns play a prominent part among poor urban blacks too?
Well, I don’t think urban black voters are overly exercised by their 2nd Amendment rights. The religion angle is definitely there, but he’s already got into difficulty thanks to that.
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Well I particularly meant young urban black males of low socio-economic status for whom firearms are culturally very important. Although not always in terms of the Second Amendment I’ll grant you.
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I have to admit I love how Obama refers to anti-trade sentiment as a reaction due to the bitterness brought about by their economic frustrations. If he knows this is true, shouldn’t he NOT pander to that by uttering the most anti-trade statements made during the campaign and instead take McCain’s view which is that free trade is good even if there are short term costs?
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You’re right Eagle. Obama speak with forked tongue. Especially on this issue as we saw before.
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Wow, he must be really bad… 🙂 Look, I’m not saying that he’s God’s gift. But really, don’t you think you’re both drawing a rather large conclusion from thin material. If I say that I think, as I do, that there is a bitterness in parts of the white working class in the US that that indicates that I’m an elitist? I’d say precisely the same about the Irish working class…
…grabs hat and coat and mutters as he strides off into the night – application to join Fine Gael in hand…
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Just like the rest of your DL buddies!!! 😉
This isn’t the only thing I’m basing this on, however. It’s on the tenor of his campaign, and the people he’s been aiming his message at. I’ve said right from the start he has shown no sign of any principled positions or bottom line. All style and no substance. And utterly, utterly concerned only with the middle classes and upwards. Even Hilary makes nods towards the workers.
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I think service in the military will have given McCain some sense of the lives lived by the type of communities derided by Obama
Really? The flyboy naval aviator who’s the son of one admiral (and grandson of another!). I’ve seen his squadron command touted as his ‘executive experience’ in places; but there’s more ways to rise in the military than by talent alone.
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Surely. I meant he might have actually met some people from the type of communities Obama was talking about. Or at the least have heard the way the mechanics etc who looked after his plane talked about things.
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Obama has never really had the need. Or it seems the inclination.
Obama’s past as a community activist in Chicago’s inner city isn’t exactly a secret, so I’m unsure of why some people appear oblivious of it;
“In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn’t fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation–community organizer–it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change. Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.” […] Obama’s work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight the city for things like job banks and asbestos removal.”
http://www.pickensdemocrats.org/info/TheAgitator_070319.htm
All I can think of is that some people really are objecting to the colour of this man’s skin, but just don’t want to say it out loud.
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Or at the least have heard the way the mechanics etc who looked after his plane talked about things.
Let me ask a straight question – aren’t you even the slightest bit embarressed by having written that?
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McCain was born the son of an admiral (Panamanian-born? Is that a slight?),
No more than referring to Hawaii – or anywhere else.
but he that doesn’t make him a spoiled rich kid. McCain was, as he admits, not that comfortable with Naval discipline, but he proved himself a leader when he opted not to avail himself of the easy way out of Vietnam when his captors offered it to him. That resonates with the working class.
Not wanting to be drafted to go fight in the shitty, pointless war that was Vietnam also “resonated” with the working class, and look where that got John Kerry four years ago.
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On post 25. Nope. The point I was making was that the nature of military life will have given McCain an insight into the attitudes of the types of communities that Obama was deriding. And deriding in the manner of a fully paid-up member of the US elite, for whom everyone outside of the north east and LA is a barbarian. I’ve met lots of people from Columbia. Every one of them has been a pseudo-liberal elitist prick with little understanding of the world outside the bubble of elite American educational institutions, and contemptuous of it. Mc Cain may be an admiral’s son and grandson and a millionaire, but he will have garnered more experience in the military of such communities than Obama will have at Columbia. Or during his time in Chicago.
As for the not so subtle suggestion that I am a racist. That says a lot more about you than me. I’ve been consistently critical of Obama for having shown absolutely no sign of a bottom line that might actually be of use to ordinary people in America. Hilary has a commitment to healthcare – what does Obama have? Spin, presentation, saying what he thinks people want to hear – this latest trade thing is hilarious. If you can’t recognise a class-based critique for what it is, and can only see it as racism, then maybe you’re contributing to the wrong website. But to be clear – I don’t think Obama is the best candidate because he is so fundamentally representative of a certain type of US liberal elitism, and has pitched his campaign at that type of person. As for his work in Chicago. Spare me the glorification of the NGO sector – an impediment to progressive politics the world over. That critique has precisely fuck all to do with the colour of his skin.
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Not wanting to be drafted to go fight in the shitty, pointless war that was Vietnam also “resonated” with the working class, and look where that got John Kerry four years ago.
Actually you’re wrong there EWI. Not wanting to fight in Vietnam resonated with the college-educated, not the working class white people.
No more than referring to Hawaii – or anywhere else.
No, wrong again. McCain was born in Panama, but grew up on Naval bases around the US and overseas. His father was serving his country, which the white working class actually hold in high regard.
Obama was raised – mostly – in middle class Hawaii. To working class white people that sounds almost like being raised on Fantasy Island.
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EWI,
I think you’re confusing the nature of the US Navy and how it’s perceived by white working class people with the Royal Navy and (I think) how it’s perceived by British working class people. I’ve always had the impression that an Admiral (or General) in Britain is a position of privilege. That is not the case in America.
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Garibaldy, the gun lobby is drawn overwhelmingly from rural whites, not urban blacks. Polls consistently show greater support for gun control in urban areas and among blacks and other non-whites – not really surprising when you consider they’re the most likely to be victims of gun crime.
Those to whom firearms are, as you interestingly put it, “culturally important” aren’t really bothered about the laws anyway, and not generally about elections either.
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If I say that I think, as I do, that there is a bitterness in parts of the white working class in the US that that indicates that I’m an elitist?
First of all, there’s a lot of stereotyping in his statement. Let’s face it, he’s basically calling white working class people red necks.
It sounds like he’s saying “if not for the economic situation they’d be better educated and more like me” and they’d jettison their faith and their guns.
The problem is that he connects their economic backwardness with their primitive adherence to superstition (religion) and violence (guns).
He may well believe this, but it’s hardly a winning formula for gaining the votes of those ‘gun-wielding, religious nuts’.
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Wednesday
I’ve been looking for those polls on gun control. Have you got a URL for any of those polls?
While I believe you’re right about support for gun control among urban blacks, my (admittedly limited) experience has been that Hispanic men love guns. In fact, every middle class Hispanic man I worked with in New York owned a gun.
I would have guessed that urban Hispanics (well, men really) were less supportive of gun control than urban white or black people.
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Let’s face it, he’s basically calling white working class people red necks.
Well, no. He’s basically calling white working-class red necks red necks.
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I would have guessed that urban Hispanics (well, men really) were less supportive of gun control
And now what are you saying? That these hot blooded Hispanics with their machismo are ion love with guns?
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ejh,
Like I said, I was looking for poll numbers. I only knew a few Hispanic men and they all owned guns. Two of them liked to have the guns for whenever they returned to their old neighborhoods to visit family. Probably just says a lot about how violent New York was at that time.
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He’s basically calling white working-class red necks red necks.
Fair enough. But, he’s supposedly trying to win their votes, no? Probably not a winning gambit.
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What have I started? What have I started?
I’m still profoundly dubious about this ‘elitist’ Obama stuff. More so than Bush – a scion of an almost parodic East Coast super-wealth? More so than Hillary, teen Barry Goldwater supporter and later lawyer as well? She was pretty middle class in word and deed.
And to carry it on where is the evidence that the supposed tribunes of the ordinary man and woman in US politics (Bush et al) have done a bang up job in supporting them in any fundamental way? If Obama were indeed an elitist, who knows, he might actually be better. But all this comes over to me is that it provides a handy stick for the RNC and its allies to hit Obama with while entirely ignoring their own base and structure. Genius, but not entirely lovely.
That’s not to argue that Obama is any good at all, but merely to suggest that discussions about ‘elitism’ in the US context, particularly when made from the right (or the further left) are a bit suspect really and not to be taken seriously.
And I’d tend to agree with ejh that he wasn’t calling all white working class people rednecks, but a very specific group who have been negatively affected by political and economic developments. I agree Eagle his tone could have been better and the religion reference is just silly (and strikes me as the sort of unnuanced thing one might say in a private context). But then, if that’s elitism as I said before perhaps we’d better shut down the blogs because clearly any comment that critiques them or anyone else is elitist!
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Wednesday,
I was of course talking about the glamorisation of violence and guns in popular culture in the US, especially movies and music. Added to which the status having a firearm affords people in the eyes of their peers, especially young males in an urban setting.
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Two views on this from The Nation. Absolutly opportunist bullshit from Hilary, a child of privilage with not a hint of Michelle Obama’s expereince of working class America. Hilary now cliams to be into hunting as well. mcCain is the one who will benefit from this.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=310029
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080414/alterman
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While I’m at it…
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=309462
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I’m still profoundly dubious about this ‘elitist’ Obama stuff. More so than Bush – a scion of an almost parodic East Coast super-wealth? More so than Hillary, teen Barry Goldwater supporter and later lawyer as well? She was pretty middle class in word and deed.
WBS,
I’ll try to explain this one, but I’m not sure I’ll get it 100% right.
Bush is, as you say a “scion of an almost parodic East Coast super-wealth” (that was great, by the way), but he doesn’t give off this aura of being better than the average American. I think Hillary, again, is a beneficiary of Bill’s ‘ordinariness’ and also working to stake her claim to being an ordinary American. Obama is in so many ways not ordinary and seems unwilling to make the effort to appear ordinary.
There’s more of an anti-intellectual attitude in America than an anti-wealth attitude. Obama exhibits a lot of traits of those who consider themselves to be intellectually superior to the average American. That’s the elite that Obama is being lumped in with.
Sure some of the average Americans might even accept that they’re not as smart as the intellectual elite, but through long experience they don’t equate intellect with good judgment. So, an intellectual candidate is loved by the national media – many of whom consider themselves smarter than the average American – and the world of academia, but the voters shy away.
Obama is the intellectual candidate. His job as candidate was to make average Americans like him/trust him sufficiently to vote for him. Unfortunately for him, his missteps are putting a lot of distance between him and the average voter.
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WBS,
This might be better: when you hear the word “elite” in American politics, think snob.
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“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.”
The “anti-trade sentiment” part is a real lead balloon. That part of it, reminds me of Greg Palast’s take* on Clinton/Gore’s sneering at blue-collar workers’ worries and fears. The resultant support for the contrarian Perot, and the terrible defeat to the Republicans, is also notable…
This will not get social conservatives, ‘thinking class’ come election time. Which is surely what a Democrat should be aiming for, in a possibly close election and with all the various suppression and rigging likely again.
(Of course to qualify; it’s not like they’re getting a real choice anyways,
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
— Karl Marx )
*
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/116537.shtml
In his book, Palast recalled just how Gore responded to Perot’s challenge to the “free trade” orthodoxy of both major parties. “Perot and his 19.7 million workers who feared for their pensions and union cards were called ignorant fools, suckers for labor union fear-mongering, confused, economic dummies, and cowards before history,” Palast wrote. “Gore, the rich prep-school kid, looked so pleased with himself, taunting the funny little man who’d made his way up from the working class. And 19.7 million Americans knew Gore was making fun of them, too, telling textile workers losing their health insurance they were unsophisticated little schmucks who knew nothing about economics. … Gore followed his put-down of labor unions, which unanimously opposed NAFTA, with praise for Rush Limbaugh as a ‘distinguished American’ (really) and accolades for NAFTA-backer Lee Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler Motors. Gore didn’t mention that Iacocca had moved Chrysler engine assembly work to Mexico in anticipation of NAFTA. But the unemployed Chrysler workers knew that.”
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In US politics ‘elite’ is code. It’s the US equivalent of ‘D4 Liberal’ and is the standard technique used by the Republicans to portray the Democrats as out of touch. If you look at the last election, one of the main planks of Bush’s attack was to paint Kerry as an elite, New England liberal – the famous windsurfing ad being a good example.
Now McCain is using the same tactic, refering to “a certain out-of-touch elitism.” Sadly Hillary is playing along, although now Obama has accused her of “deploying most of the arguments that the Republican Party will be using against me in November.“
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Obama an elitist? His mother, a single mom, was on food stamps. McCain, father and grandfather admirals, his wife’s company sells 20 million cases of beer a year.
The Clintons, now worth more than 100 million. Bill, grew up comfortably in Hot Springs where his uncle was the local Democratic Party bigwig.
McCain/Clinton are using the techniques of Karl Rove against Obama.
Obama and small town voters-he expressed the same sentiments in 2004, and its not inherently controversial. Its been made controversial by brain-dead pundits and the corporate media.
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CL
Again, elite does not equate to wealthy in America. Damian O’Broin has a good analogy there.
And, Obama had an ‘unusual’ upbringing by American standards, but he did not grow up poor. He went to an expensive from the age of 10. The average American sends their kdis to public school (maybe Catholic schools in the big cities). I went to public school.
Obama went to a school that costs way more than the average American spends on their kid’s grade school education. Sun Yat-sen went to the same school.
Obama’s mother wasn’t ‘a single mom’. She was married, divorced, remarried (divorced again?) and eventually sent Obama to live with her parents.
His grandparents were loaded and they raised him after his mother sent him back to Hawaii from Indonesia. Spare me the food stamps.
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That should read, “He went to an expensive prep school from the age of 10”.
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This Orwellian attempt to paint Obama as elitist is laughable.
And yes Obama’s mother was on food stamps.
The wealthy, anywhere, are the elite, especially in America,-Republican propaganda nothwithstanding. The elite are those at the top of the class pyramid, and because of their class position wield power.
Certainly in America the Republican propaganda machine has tried to attack Democrats as ‘elitist’-and this provides a convenient cover for the class interests they represent.
Limbaugh, a multi-millionaire, regularly, and with sinister echoes of Fr. Coughlin, rants on about the ‘Democrat elites.’ Hillary has now joined McCain in this dangerous tomfoolery.
That Obama, a black man in America, is somehow a member of the elite is laughable: he has no power based on wealth or on his social background. That prospect that he might gain power is whats giving conniptions to corporate America.
McCain is a graduate of Annapolis naval academy. And Obama and the Clinton’s are graduates of top schools. But this does not make them members of the elite: there are Ph.d s driving taxis.
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“That Obama, a black man in America, is somehow a member of the elite is laughable: he has no power based on wealth or on his social background.”
So a leading member of the US political class is not a member of the elite because he is black? I don’t swallow that at all. Not in the slightest.
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C.Wright Mills in The Power Elite, analyzed the interlocking upper echelons of the American political system, the corporate world, and the military, and how those at the top of the hierarchy have the power to affect the lives and deaths and livelihoods of millions of working people.
McCain is a multi-millionaire from the upper level of the war-mongering elite.
Hillary Clinton is a multi-millionaire board member of Wal-Mart, and wife of the two-term President, the man from Hot Springs.
McCain and Hillary are clearly members of the Power Elite.
To assert that Obama is a member of the Power Elite and that McCain and Clinton are not, is surely nonsense.
One could make the case that all members of the Senate are members of the power elite. But then the question is why single out Obama and not the other 2?
Obama is black man in America. That’s a fact with all the connotations that has with respect to power, privilege and prestige. A recent book has shown how slavery in America lasted right up to WWII. Obama is, I think the 3rd black to ever sit in the U.S. Senate. I am not saying that Obama is not a member of the political elite because he’s black. I am merely saying, in terms of wealth and social background, Obama is much less ‘elitist’ than either Clinton or McCain. And for McCain and Hillary to attack Obama for ‘elitism’ is absurd.
And for the pundits to join in the attack is a fine example of what Mills called the ‘higher ignorance’ (it could have been Veblen)
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Yeah but elitism here clearly meant snobbery, and not membership of the elite. No-one has said that McCain and Clinton are not members of the elite. But what I am saying at least is that that remark betrays contempt towards the people he was talking about.
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I don’t see contempt in this clip where in 04 Obama is making basically the same point for which he is now attacked for ‘elitism’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkrL0G9wonE
Here’s some more bitter elitism
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=310029
If people mean snobbery they should use that perfectly good word: in political discourse, and in sociological investigation the term ‘elite’ clearly refers to those who hold and wield political, economic and military power.
And Clinton and McCain are clearly in that circle of power. Attacking ‘elites’ and ‘elitism’ is now a commonplace in the lexicon of rightist propaganda: it serves merely to hide the real source of power and privilege in society. Hanging the elitist label on Obama is foolishly regressive obscurantism.
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Eagle, see for example here.
Garibaldy I realise what you were saying, but you’re wrong in thinking that translates to a general opposition to gun control in those communities, and particularly to an opposition strong enough to hurt Obama for supporting gun control.
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But the problem with the ‘elite’ charge is… was he an elitist last week? If so why wasn’t this charge made then? Or did it suddenly appear from the air?
How can we tell? None of us can see into his mind. Only his track record and his policy positions.
He makes one statement that seems far from controversial in any left wing or indeed liberal analysis, explaining in part why his campaign has foundered in parts of the US. I’ve said the same about parts of Dublin, Cork and Belfast, and less so in the US analysis. Yet suddenly he’s an effete layabout bent on crushing the working classes in between having expensive French cuisine? Doesn’t wash guys. Incidentally, it particularly doesn’t wash considering the last charge we heard against him vis Rev Wright was that he was some sort of supporter of Black separatism, or as good as… now he can be one, or he can be the other, or he can be neither, but he really can’t be both. I really am with CL on this one.
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CL,
If we’re going to be pedantic about the meaning of elitism, then clearly it has usually if not always meant a form of snobbery, usually centred on access to special knowledge or power. So the INLA accuses the Provos of being elitist because they don’t take their political pretensions seriously. Or the non-Irish speaking Provos in Long Kesh complained about the Irish speaking H-Block because it was elitist because the people in it looked down on those who weren’t in it. Or the people in a revolutionary vanguard party (self-proclaimed of course) were elitist because they looked down on those who weren’t/ This has been the usual meaning of elitist, and that is how it is being used here.
As for the idea Obama suddenly became elitist. I’ve always thought the campaign he was running was aimed primarily at the younger members of the social and educational elite in the US to the exclusion of other, more traditional – and often more progressive – Democratic “demographics”. So it’s no problem for me to call him an elitist. And moving to Chicago to build a political career in his mid-20s through NGO activity does not convince me otherwise.
Wednesday, what I was trying to say was that the claim could be made that sections of the US poor who were excluded from his criticism could be seen as just as guilty of clinging to religion and guns, albeit it in different forms. I don’t hear much criticism from him or anyone else of urban religiosity, so why target it in rural areas? It’s hardly like religions are automatically more progressive in towns than countryside on a vast range of issues. Yet he has presented himself as a religious man when it has suited him. I also suspect very strongly that his association with that reverend was about playing to that part of his voting base. But in moving to distance himself from it, then we can see who the real people he wants to impress are.
I wasn’t referring to whether the glorification of firearms had an impact on opposition to gun control among those who vote in urban poor communities. I’d say having the streets awash with firearms does indeed understandably make them more pro-gun control. I saw an interview on the Guardian website yesterday with the Vermont socialist senator yesterday who is in fact pro-right to bear arms. I think the matter of an armed populace is not as simplisticly an issue of left versus right as some people sometimes assume.
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The power elite, said C Wright Mills, “are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim the prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure..”
This has nothing to do with snobbery which is usually a lower-middle class phenomenon,- arse-licking one’s social ‘betters’ and sneering at ‘lesser’ beings.
The multi-millionaires McCain and Clinton are deeply embedded in this
military, political and corporate elite: Obama just paid off his student loan.
For Clinton and McCain to call Obama an elitist is an Orwellian use of language: pundits who support McCain/Clinton are engaging in obfuscation and backward politics.
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Ok, so everybody who speaks English is wrong apart from C Wright Mills is wrong. And elitism has never, ever been used to refer to anybody apart from those defined above. I think that there is some obfuscation here indeed.
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I don’t hear much criticism from him or anyone else of urban religiosity, so why target it in rural areas?
Urban religiosity has a different character. This is obviously a generalisation, but it’s broadly the case that the real nasty side of religion, where it becomes an us vs. them thing and tolerance for other religions (or for the even greater bugbear of secularism) is low, is found mostly in rural areas. It seems obvious to me that that was Obama was talking about.
As for Bernie Sanders, he’s in an extremely rural constituency and I’d imagine he looks at it from a hunting angle. There is also a difference between thinking that there is a right to bear arms and thinking that that right should be unlimited, as the gun lobby generally do. Note that according to his Wiki page he only gets a rating of C- from the NRA.
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I’m not as sure as you that urban religiosity is not as nasty as rural can be. Ignoring what his pastor may or may not have said, there are other extremist forms of religion that thrive in urban areas, not all of them Christian. He was coming at it from the hunting angle, and about people shooting their own dinner.
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I have a relative, a Catholic priest as it happens, who went to the US in the mid to late 1960s. He was on the east coast, a relatively rural part, somewhere south of New York for some months, and he went to a parish where the presbytery had within the previous five years had a burning cross placed on its front lawn. Let’s not underestimate the dynamic that Wednesday refers to of urban/rural. Actually, he has some great stories about going into the parts where the Scots-Irish, of a distinctly Protestant hue, had settled. He was fascinated (he went in civilian clothing) to discover that they had a strong if diffuse ‘Irish’ identity, but he noted their submerged anti-Catholicism and the fundamentalism of their religious identity. Quite a paradox – or perhaps not… It goes without saying – which is why I’ll say it(!) – that he’d be liberal in his inclinations – which is not to ignore the conservative and reactionary aspects of Catholicism in the US.
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Sorry Garibaldy, I have to say I think you’re simply wrong on this, and I’m speaking from years of experience living there. The type of religion Obama was referring to is primarily a rural thing – and primarily a Christian thing as well. The only vaguely urban or non-Christian equivalent I can think of (not just in terms of nastiness, but also in terms of attracting bitter people in the manner Obama spoke of) would be the Nation of Islam or even more marginal groups like the Black Israelites and their numbers are so small at this point they’re hardly relevant.
And he was talking about the sort of people who fetishise guns, not hunters in general.
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By he there I meant the Vermont guy. I realise that was unclear.
From what I recall of the remarks, he didn’t say they clung onto religion that was bitter, or specify any type of religion at all. It seems to me we are then assuming he meant a certain type of religion. I agree the type of religion we’re assuming he meant is primarily a rural thing, but I’d qualify that with reference to the size of some of the towns or small cities this type of religion has a hold. And with the fact that in some of the major cities, especially in the south, you can find this type of religion too.
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Well, Obama was explicitly talking about rural people, I mean that’s where the whole controversy started. He didn’t say “they turn to right-wing fundamentalist Christianity” but are you seriously suggesting he was thinking of anything else?
in some of the major cities, especially in the south, you can find this type of religion too
Show me where I said you couldn’t. The point is that you find a lot less of it in the major cities. That’s true even in the south (and midwest), although in some cities it’s not true to the same extent that it nearly always is in the coastal states. Admittedly I’m going purely on anecdotal evidence here, as I’ve never lived in the south and can’t find a good statistical survey on the matter. But it’s a lot of anecdotal evidence.
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