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Monday, April 14, 2008
Surprise! Obama talks himself into trouble.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For some time I’ve believed that Barack Obama would talk himself into trouble — and out of the White House. The weekend brouhaha concerning his remarks at a closed San Francisco fund-raiser a week earlier is an example of the trouble he’s apt to buy whenever he starts winging it.
He was explaining working-class voters in Pennsylvania reacting to economic conditions. Said Obama, as reported by The Huffington Post:
“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.”
Obama tried Saturday to quiet the criticism. “If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” he said in North Carolina.
Obama’s views, which are as Hillary Clinton said Sunday, elitist, reflect those of a guy who’s lived his adult life in a liberal cocoon. When you listen to the liberal elite describe America, it’s hard to like the nation they see. It’s evil and predatory, a nation composed of the unenlightened and embittered, a populace seething with rage, drugged on religion and talk radio, unable to adjust to a changing world they — we — can’t comprehend.
It’s what you sense when you listen to Obama’s preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, describe America.
Call me old fashion, but I want a president who gets a tingle when the Stars and Stripes pass, who drives through working-class communities of Pennsylvania and marvels at the resilience of struggling families pulling together and through difficult times. I want him to see families whose sons and daughters march off to war out of a sense of duty and for love of country, not because they’ve been tricked or have no other options. I want him to see them, the men and women in uniform, not as heroes and certainly not as victims, but as patriots answering the call of a country they know is worth defending.
I want Barack Obama, if he does become President, to see something in the working class communities of Pennsylvania that he does not now.
