Rural voters shrug over Obama’s ‘bitter’ comment
Dante Chinni
Posted: 04.16.2008 / 2:29 PM PDT
For days, Sen. Barack Obama’s words about how “bitter” voters in small towns “cling to guns or religion” have been front-page, lead-story news, blocking out much of the other campaign coverage since they hit the Web last Friday.
(His actual comments were much longer. They can be heard in context here.)
Even so, his comments have not fully reverberated from the East Coast mediaplex to the public consciousness of the rest of the Patchwork Nation.
In some places, Senator Obama’s words have created something of a stir. Note Monday’s blog entry on this site from Ed Pratt, down in Baton Rouge, La., our Minority Central community, who said the topic had come up on a local conservative talk radio program. “The once relatively quiet conservatives, grumpy because they really can’t get fired up for John McCain, have a target to whoop and howl about,” Mr. Pratt wrote.
But in other communities the response has been muted, according to our Patchwork correspondents. Curiously, it has been particularly quiet in two areas where an angry reaction might have been expected: Sioux Center, Iowa (Tractor Country), and Nixa, Mo. (Evangelical Epicenters). Those places, and the communities they represent, are the kinds of white, small-town, religious environments that Obama was describing in his comments.
“I’ve heard a little about it from a few people. I don’t think people are overly excited,” says Steve Hoogland, editor of the Sioux Center News. “If we were two or three months down the road, it might be a bigger deal.”
Mr. Hoogland was surprised, more than anything else, by the comments. Obama, he says, generally speaks in more measured language. “It’s changed my image of him a little bit,” he adds.
John Hansen, grain manager at the Farmer’s Coop, says the story hasn’t really broken through in Sioux Center – at least not yet. “We saw it on the news and my wife said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ I found it in the [Wall Street] Journal and read it to her. … We both kind of thought: Well, it’s a campaign. Whatever.”
The bigger issue, Mr. Hansen says, is if more such comments turn up. Candidates who misunderstand rural America, he says, is nothing new.
In Nixa, Matt Roberts, editor of the weekly Xpress, said people there just aren’t very interested in what the Democratic candidates are saying. This is conservative country: Christian County, Nixa’s home base, gave more than 70 percent of the vote in 2004 to President Bush.
“Honestly, I just haven’t heard people talking about it,” Mr. Roberts says. “He might be talking about small-town, white America, but I don’t think small-town, white America is listening.”
The Rev. Gary Swearengin, pastor of Nixa’s Church of the Nazarene, says the public understands that presidential candidates misspeak on the campaign trail, but, again, what the Democrats say isn’t really news for many in Nixa.
“I haven’t heard about it yet,” he says. “On the Democratic side we’re looking at Obama or Clinton. I’m not going to vote for either one of those people. They would have to come in here to my altar and recant being a Democrat.” He chuckles.
Even down in Clermont, Fla. – the representative community for Emptying Nests, which tend to be mostly white and to have some evangelical influence – our correspondents say there has been little to no talk about Obama’s comments.
Still, some Patchwork correspondents note that just because there isn’t a lot of talk in public doesn’t mean people aren’t talking privately.
Nick Lantinga, who directs an international network of Christians in higher education based in Sioux Center, says the comments by themselves don’t disqualify Obama from winning rural votes, but “they suggest someone who has a hard time getting his head around why people believe what they do around here.”
Mr. Lantinga just returned from a trip to New York, and on the way home, he says, he spoke with the woman sitting next to him on the plane. “We talked. She’s a Manhattanite. And she’s fascinated by the idea that a religious person is not one of those crazy right-wing nuts.
“I look at what Obama said, and I say that’s pathetic. We don’t live the lives we do and believe what we do because we’re bitter. Sometimes we do what we do because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of institutions that don’t respect religion and think it has no place in the public sphere.”
In other words, the media may have overplayed the impact of Obama’s comments in some areas of Patchwork Nation, but his comments will harm any future effort of his to make inroads into its more conservative communities.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:00 pm PDT
I am a small town man. I do love God and I have guns. And I am bitter about how the Republican globalization has eliminated manufacturing from small towns in America. The lost jobs also mean lost tax revenues that the remaining tax payers must make up. And you can be sure that I am bitter that after a lifetime of saving and sacrifice I am still not secure because Corporate America will not keep their committments. I have been personally responsable as our President has dictated. I just wish that he had been as didicated to making Corporations responsable. Where would we be today if the Republican’s had been successful in privatizing Social Security?
April 16th, 2008 at 6:14 pm PDT
We’d be better off, Larry. Look, I don’t know how old you are, but my spouse and I are of the age that we’re looking to retire. Only, we won’t be able to retire, because all that money we’ve paid into Social Security all these DECADES has been money down a rathole. We’ll never draw a dime of it. The Feds took our money and acted as if they were putting it away for us for later. They gave it to–I have no idea who they gave it to. What I know is, it won’t be there for us.
As for the “Republicans’ globalization”–that’s the one place were the government has been bipartisan. I understood why the Republicans wanted NAFTA–it would increase profits. I NEVER understood why the Democrats wanted it. All I can figure is that it’s part of their redistribution of wealth. They’re redistributing it out of this country and into some other countries.
When I had the chance to vote for Ross Perot, I didn’t. I voted for Bill Clinton because he gave such wonderful speeches. The media made fun of Perot, and I went along with all of it. I would have been so embarrassed to vote for the dweeb with the charts. I voted for the guy with the great speeches, the charisma.
I will never fall for wonderful speeches again.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:02 pm PDT
I don’t think fallout from Obama’s comment will come during the Democratic primaries — it will happen during the general election. The press wants to hear conservatives’ shock and surprise that Obama said something elitist — what they don’t realize is that only the press and Obama supporters are shocked to find he actually said this out loud. What do they want us to say — “who knew liberal intellectuals look down on the rest of us as common rabble?” What’s been funny is to hear Hillary become the gun-totin’-hymn-singin’ Girl of the People! I love election year politics…
I’m with you, Shel. My father used to tell me that when a politician says we need to INVEST (I’ve been watching the debate), he wants more of our money and it will never see the light of day again. I wouldn’t be nearly so bothered by taxes if someone could show me where the government has ever made ANYTHING it touched better. Not poverty, not estate planning, not health care, not infrastructure, not education (I’ve got kids in grade school — don’t try to tell me our system is the “envy of the world” anymore!) — it’s staggering what we pay to get back, at best, dizzying mediocrity and a staggering overhead of bureaucratic deadwood.
Soon, we’ll be paying to exhale, thanks to Al Gore and the Kyoto Accord. And Obama wants to know why I’m bitter!
April 17th, 2008 at 1:04 pm PDT
Well, I live in rural Appalachia, albeit in a university town, and everyone I know out here didn’t regard it as elitist, but rather a somewhat mispoken statement of fact. The electorate in economically depressed regions is bitter; the failure to acknowledge that is either elitism or denial. So Obama comes across as the first guy who is willing to admit the truth. Hillary comes across as completely out of touch by claiming that there is an undercurrent of resilience or optimism amongst the economic victims. Religion and guns? You bet. Religion because it is, in fact, a source of stability in a taxic economic environment. Guns, perhaps, for implied actions I don’t countenance. In any event, Obama comes the closest any politician has for years in openly acknowledging the thinly-mufflked rage of the decimated middle-class in rural America.
April 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm PDT
I don’t understand the flap over being elite.
All three candidates are running for the most elite job on the planet, that makes all three of them elite.
I don’t need a leader who can sit down and have a beer with me.
I need a leader who can see the larger picture and comprehend the global stakes of this election.
Obama has the best shot at bringing the USA into the future, and inspiring the next generation whose future we have mortgaged.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm PDT
It is my belief that Obama was referring to all the blogging and forums where ordinary people display their bitterness toward government. If you have read his books you would understand where he is coming from better. He certainly isn’t an elitist. He didn’t come from that kind of background. If he is elitist it is newly acquired along with the four million dollars he raked in with those books. I like him and believe he is honest and forthright even if he offends some people. And what’s the saying about pleasing all the people all the time?
April 17th, 2008 at 9:29 pm PDT
Patrick Holleman seems like an obamabot from the wording and phrasing. pathetic.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:36 pm PDT
Hillary, do you have anything to say on the issue? Repeating personal attacks just hurts your candidate’s cause.
I am glad that Social Security has not been privatized, it would be as inefficient and ruinous as our health care system. Probably Halliburton or one of its cousins would be given a single source contract to do the privatizing and more billions would disappear down a black hole.
shel, when you reach retirement age, Social Security will be happy to pay you monthly– unless you have so much money that you don’t need it at all, in which case, thank you for helping out others less fortunate.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:12 pm PDT
Ms. Change, you do your candidate no service by employing wording and phrasing typical of Fox “News”. Pejorative characterization of a candidate’s adherents says nothing about that candidate’s ability to serve, nor does it redound to the credit of that candidate’s opponent. Obama is the first candidate in a very long time who has attempted to raise the level of discourse in a presidential campaign above what could be overheard in a middle school corridor. Why not take the invitation?