Analyzing the American political scene, and more particularly the Democratic presidential contest, from 3000 miles away offers some challenges as well as benefits. A big benefit, for example: no 24/7 bombardment by CNN, Fox, MSNBC, on each and every minor matter remotely related to the campaign. The challenge is really just the opposite side of the benefit coin; that is, trying to make sense out of unfiltered information available through the internet. The basic “facts” are still available but the sorting and sifting of what’s important to the political “chattering class” and what’s important to the people (by no means the same thing), are entirely up to me, your faithful blog poster.
Which leads me to a brief commentary on the latest rumblings in the increasingly contentious battle between Senators Clinton and Obama. As you probably know by now, Obama, in response to a question as to why white working-class voters are not embracing his vision of hope and change, offered the following: “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 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.”
When I first read Obama’s comment and the ferocious attacks on it by both
Political experts have concluded, probably correctly, that the vast majority of the American public pays attention only infrequently to the minutiae of the country’s increasingly long and complicated presidential nomination/election process. Instead, the average American citizen, with lots of other more immediately important things on his or her mind, forms an impression based on a candidate’s meta-theme. To be successful, of course, a politician’s positive meta-theme needs to win out in the electorate’s collective thinking over the opposition’s negative meta-theme directed at that particular candidate.
To be a little more specific, let’s take Obama. His meta-theme, we can agree, is based on hope, change, and unity. Both Clinton and McCain, coming from different perspectives, seek to portray Obama through a negative meta-theme as ultra-liberal, elitist, and inexperienced. And here’s where they hope to (and may) succeed. Most people who “cling to their guns” do so because they like to hunt, most believers “cling to religion” because of a deep-seated faith. In neither case do they do so out of “bitterness.” Very few Americans will spend the time or energy sifting through each and every word of what Obama said or what he really meant. Clinton and McCain know that and are betting their negative meta-theme trumps (or at the least blurs) Obama’s positive one.
The fact that he made the comment in San Francisco (not exactly small town) only days before the Pennsylvania primary where Obama is working feverishly to win over working class whites in the small towns and countryside between the big metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on either end of the state, doesn’t help. A counterattack by Obama, directed against both his Democratic opponent and the presumptive Republican nominee asserting that the country is angry (maybe even bitter), with government and Washington insiders (Clinton and McCain more so than Obama) and that that was the real point of his comments, is already underway. The battle of the meta-themes continues.
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