Yesterday afternoon, we had some company over to the house, and I excused myself briefly to do a quick post about the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s comments on the frustrations people feel in small towns hit hard economically in recent decades.
When I rejoined the folks in my living room, who hadn’t heard the news and had no idea there was a controversy, I went ahead and read them this quote, without telling them who said it, when, or why.
“[T]he truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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. So it’s not surprising then that 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.”
One person who was in the room is religious, and another lives in a town of 10,000 people. When I explained that the quote I’d read had become the single biggest political issue of the day, they thought I was kidding. When I said the comments came from Barack Obama, and that many seriously believe that the quote could undermine Obama’s chances of becoming president, they looked at me as if I were from another planet.
Days before the controversy broke, Elizabeth Drew presciently noted the significance this year of “molehill politics,” which she described as “making a very big deal in the press about something that’s a very small deal.” Drew argued that the Clinton campaign has mastered molehill politics, “pounc[ing] on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride.”
I can’t help but feel like this “bitter” flap is playing molehill politics to the extreme.
I’ve seen several comparisons between this flap and the controversy surrounding his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I think that’s probably the wrong analogy. This story reminds me far more of the “party of ideas” flap from January.
Remember that one? Obama gave an interview with a Nevada newspaper in which he said Reagan and JFK, during their respective eras, put the nation on a “fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” He added, “The Republican approach I think has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time over the last 10 or 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies, when they’re being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we’ve done that, we’ve tried it.”
Obama’s critics pounced, saying he preferred Republican ideas to Democratic ideas, and had an affinity for Reagan’s conservative worldview. Bill Clinton announced at one rally, “[Hillary’s] principal opponent said that since 1992, the Republicans have had all the good ideas. I’m not making this up, folks.”
The “controversy” hung around for a few days, but it was based on transparent intellectual dishonesty. Everyone knew what Obama said and meant, but by distorting the comments, and adding a few words that Obama never uttered, his detractors manufactured a controversy, ascribing beliefs to the senator that he didn’t embrace.
I feel like something similar is happening here. In the hopes of making Obama unelectable, Clinton and Republicans insist that he must hate working families and small towns. We’ve reached the very odd point at which the Clinton campaign is distributing talking points from Grover Norquist and Ed Rollins.
I sometimes feel like I’m watching some kind of bizarro presidential campaign. This is one of those instances.
As for the coverage of the story, which is extraordinary, I found Ezra’s take especially compelling.
All the older reporters tell me that this is supposedly the greatest campaign of my lifetime and the thing that makes political journalism worthwhile, but seriously, look where we are today: Discussing an off-the-cuff comment in which one of the Democrats suggested that economic anxiety manifests in cultural conservatism. This is not a new idea. And in most forms, it isn’t even a particularly objectionable one.
It’s worth saying that I’m not defending Obama here. I see nothing that he needs defense from. There’s no actual attack being levied that anyone can rebut, or ideas being tossed out that anyone can argue. Instead, Obama has said something Politically Damaging. And it will Damage him. And we’ll all watch to see how badly.
But let’s be clear: It’s not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It’s not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry…. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it’s Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It’s a hollow scandal…. And this is why I don’t like writing about the campaign. It’s full of hollow scandals and ignored travesties. But you have to cover the hollow scandals, because they’re are blown up until they’re definitional in the campaign. And that leaves me writing about high-profile non-events in a way that helps cement their importance, even if I’m writing to deride their legitimacy.
