[BRIGADE] PJB: In Darkest Pennsylvania
Published: Tue, 04/15/08
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San
Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing
better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.
Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society
on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described
Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa,
Johnstown and McKeesport.
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and ... the jobs
have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.
"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."
This is the pitch-perfect Hollywood-Harvard stereotype of the white
working class, the caricature of the urban ethnic -- as seen from
the San Francisco point of view.
As Linus clung to his security blanket, Barack is saying, out-state
Pennsylvanians, bitter at the world that has passed them by, cling
to their Bibles and guns and naturally revert to ancestral
bigotries against "people who aren't like them" -- blacks, gays and
immigrants.
Though he sees himself as a progressive who has risen above
prejudice, Barack was reflecting and pandering to the prejudice of
the class to which he himself belongs, and which he was then
addressing.
A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about
America with the remark that, "for the first time in my adult
lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." Barack has now revealed
how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation
into us and them.
The "us" are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and
his Ivy League upbringing. The "them" are the folks in the small
towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks,
Obama's attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism.
Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in
their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for
their atavistic beliefs and behavior.
Though neither mocking nor malicious, Barack's remarks are,
nonetheless, steeped in condescension. Inherent in his words is
that these folks in Middle Pennsylvania are in need of empathy,
education, assistance and perhaps therapy.
His remarks are of a piece with his address on civil rights that
liberals have compared favorably to Lincoln's Second Inaugural.
Note, from that Philadelphia address, the highlighted words.
"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that
they have been particularly privileged by their race ... as far as
they're concerned, no one's handed them anything. ... They ... feel
their dreams slipping away ... opportunity comes to be seen as a
zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.
"Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan
Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their
own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators
built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while
dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and
inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."
In Barack's mind, black anger and resentment at "racial injustice
and inequality" are "legitimate." But the anger and resentment of
white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are
born of misperceptions -- and of "bogus claims of racism"
manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and
commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so
the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that
are the real enemy.
Barack has stumbled into the eternal failing of the left-wing
populist. He cannot concede that the anger of white America -- that
its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the
consciences of guilt-besotted liberals -- is a legitimate anger.
The truth that Barack dare not speak is that reverse discrimination
is pandemic and that the folks in Middle Pennsylvania have a valid
grievance that ought to be addressed.
So, Barack sought in Philadelphia to redirect their anger.
"(T)hese white resentments distracted attention from the real
culprits of the middle class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife
with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and
short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special
interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many."
Barack is not wrong here. Corporations, out of naked greed, have
deserted America. And the Clinton and Bush administrations have
been unresponsive to the social impact of deindustrialization. But
Barack cannot concede that white Americans are today's victims of
state-sanctioned racism.
A gifted candidate, Barack, after stumbling for 48 hours, has
regained his footing with his witty ripostes about Hillary being
"Annie Oakley" with her "six-shooter," spending her Sunday mornings
"out on the duck blind."
Obama's remarks about small-town America told us little about
small-town America, but a lot about Barack. He is yet another
cookie-cutter liberal who has absorbed and internalized the
prejudices of that blinkered breed. He is an African-American John
Lindsay, the great liberal hope of the Nixon-Agnew era, of whom
Frank Manckiewicz once said: He was the only populist he knew who
played squash every day at the Yale Club.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=979
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