The real "context" of Obama's "bitter" comment

<snip>
Obama's comments came at the end of a lengthy answer in which he rejected the notion that voters were passing him over simply for racial reasons, saying instead that his campaign of hope and change was having difficulty in "places where people feel most cynical about government."

"Everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class . . . don't want to vote for the black guy,' " Obama said at the fundraiser.

"Here's how it is: In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down 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. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism."

Obama then voiced the lines that his opponents have seized upon.

"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 going to regenerate and they have not," he went on. "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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103965_pf.html

It was close to Baltimore, but nobody ever went there. Sort of self-contained, with a suburb mall that met needs that we couldn't have met "in house".

There was racism, homophobia, xenophobia. There were people that clung to their religion, and, no doubt, to guns. Anti-immigrant sentiment wasn't an issue; this was before the latest surge in immigration, legal and otherwise. It was also before the "free trade" movement. But the things that are "clung to", viewed negatively, apart from anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade sentiment were alive and well.

The problem was that almost everybody had union jobs at a large corporate plant; they were all but guaranteed having single-family incomes at a family-supporting level, they had their own homes with 20-year fixed mortgages. They were Everyman and Everywoman. There was no turmoil.

The residents had some problems when they lost their jobs, when the company put so much into wages and benefits that they let their physical plant become decrepit. Then when they tried to compensate, it was too late--"designer" products made in small batches were the rage, for niche markets, and then S. Korea and China squashed them all, pretty much.

However, the people I knew weren't exposed to people that had much more than they were until the local plant closed. The envy would have made them unhappy before, when they were prosperous enough; when they realized they'd never have as much as others, they would easily become bitter. And they did, to a large extent. But it wasn't free trade and immigration; ultimately, it was envy--their conditioned wants exceeded their needs by a fair margin, and they became frustrated.

However, they "clung" to most of the negative things Obama points out before they became bitter, and the bitterness arrived before immigration and free-trade became an issue. If you have A in the absence of B, and then A in the presence of B, you can't claim B is the cause of A however much you may believe that B is the end-all of explanations. He has his theory, but it's not clearly rooted in reality. Although I'm sure that it's "objectively true", to use an outmoded bit of jargon.

Context is so important and so revealing. It must be hell to be in a position where every word that drops from your mouth can be spun to make you look evil. I don't know how they do it. I would be like the girl in the exorcist at this point with my head spinning around.