Monday - April 21, 2008

Can Barack Obama survive his remarks?

But maybe those voters would never have gone for Obama anyway - certainly not if they had studied his voting record in the Senate and fully taken in his plans to refashion the American economy on the European stagnation model.

By Janet Daley
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/04/2008

When I left America last week, it was looking very much like the end of the road for the Great Female Breakthrough: time had run out for the first woman whom people expected to reach the highest rung of US public life.

But then, of course, there was Hillary Clinton, who was still slugging away unbowed.

Barack Obama’s remaks have alienated, perhaps irrevocably, those known as ‘Reagan Democrats’

The woman whose career aspirations seemed to be definitively crashing was Katie Couric, the first female anchor of a network television evening news programme.

Her appointment as the face of CBS’s main nightly news had pushed the show’s ratings into freefall and the media, being as self-obsessed over there as over here, were almost as interested in the fact that Miss Couric had tanked as in Mrs Clinton’s chances of survival.

The two phenomena may have been unrelated, but somehow you felt that the one did not bode well for the other. In about 48 hours, we will know whether that other formidable female pioneer has gone down in flames.

The primary in Pennsylvania has got to be the last stand: not only has the state always been one where Mrs Clinton should, if she was to maintain any credibility at all, have had a strong win but it is now going to be a telling indication of how much damage has been done to Barack Obama by his disastrously misjudged comments about small-town, working-class Americans.

If you do not have the advantage of having been born and raised in America as I was - that is, if you are familiar only with British cultural assumptions - you may not fully appreciate why Mr Obama’s remarks caused the political earthquake that they did or why they have been subjected to even more detailed exegesis than his previous most important utterances after the Rev Jeremiah Wright debacle.

So bear with me while we look again at precisely what he said: “It’s not surprising that they get bitter, that 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.”

In Britain, such sentiments about working-class people are expressed every day by politicians of all parties. They are the common currency of the patronising Left-wing snobbery that pours out of every orifice of the BBC.

Indeed, in the terms that Mr Obama gave to them, they would be seen as the kinder paternalistic version of the disdain that takes really visceral forms in more robustly contemptuous circles (for which organs such as the Guardian speak).

He clearly believed himself to be offering a sympathetic account of why Americans in (or out of) blue-collar jobs turned into gun-totin’, Bible-bashing, benighted bigots. And given that he was addressing what was supposed to be a closed fund-raising meeting in San Francisco, we must assume that he believed himself to be among friends who would all discuss the redneck issue with frank loathing: by their standards he was being pretty gentle.

Since the Sixties, when a diluted and incoherent Marxist ideology took hold of higher education, and university became a Left-liberal sheep-dip through which every middle-class professional had to pass, respectability in America has generally involved contempt for precisely the people Mr Obama characterised as being so ignorant that they could not even understand the causes of their economic disadvantage.

In her analysis of this farrago, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan has written: “To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind.”

In other words, if you are somebody who came up from poverty, you cannot afford to buck the intellectual hegemony of right-thinking people (which is to say, Left-thinking people).

So yes, the US has discovered bourgeois guilt. It now has an educated class that believes, in the face of all the comparative evidence, that Big Government and enforced wealth redistribution must be the answers to poverty and that the wealth that is created by free markets is somehow tainted.

To hold on to socially or economically conservative views in this climate is to risk appearing backward - common, vulgar and comically downmarket.

While there is certainly a flourishing intellectual movement of the Right in America, it still takes real nerve to risk any association with the opinions of those who (as the old redneck joke goes) think that a family reunion is a great place to meet girls.

But all that is unsayable in the official public discourse of American political life. Mr Obama, as we have noted, thought he was at a private meeting where he could talk the liberal lingua franca.

Unlike in Britain, where the opinions of ordinary people are held in pretty much open contempt, at least insofar as they do not conform to the acceptable limits of what might be called BBC received orthodoxy, in the US (which takes mass democracy very seriously indeed) they are treated with immense, electorally significant respect.

That is why Mr Obama’s remarks were jaw-dropping stuff in the course of a presidential election: no politician with serious ambitions ever, ever insults the great mass of small-town, working-class America.

It is regarded not only as the economic motor of the country but as its true heartland, not to say the starting point of the next generation of snotty educated professionals whose aspirations will take them away from their provincial roots.

What Mr Obama did was to alienate, perhaps irrevocably, the constituency known as “Reagan Democrats”, which is made up of much the same sort of voters who made it possible for Margaret Thatcher to win three election victories: working-class people who understood that their best interests were not served by Left-wing paternalism or class war but by the freeing up of economic opportunity.

But maybe those voters would never have gone for Obama anyway - certainly not if they had studied his voting record in the Senate and fully taken in his plans to refashion the American economy on the European stagnation model.

So is there a lesson for Britain in any of this? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly, ordinary people here are much more inured to being insulted and condescended to by their political class and even by their unelected bien pensant broadcasters, but that does not mean that they are incapable of the same outrage as their counterparts in America.

Are they going to find their voice and take their revenge? For the moment, it’s an open question.

http://tinyurl.com/52cfzc

Posted by Drew458     on 04/21/2008 at 10:44 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Politics •  
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