This thing just won’t go away. The press — with a great big assist from Hillary Clinton — seem intent on keeping this so-called “bittergate” controversy in front of the voters faces, regardless of whether the voters have any interest in it at all.
Not that there haven’t been some good pieces written about it. The almost-always enlightening EJ Dionne Jr. outlines a Democratic strategy that seems interested only in keeping the White House in GOP hands. Bob Herbert also offers an interesting take.
The silliest piece of twaddle comes courtesy of a former GOP speechwriter, that bow-tied eminence George Will. Will follows the old GOP script, one that Dionne had deconstructed in his piece, suffering in the process from a logical tautology that may work well on cable television but that someone with a reputation for intellectual rigor (an undeserved one, I believe) should know better to make.
Will reads his own bias into Obama’s comments, playing off Herbert’s observation that Obama had taken his eye off the ball. Herbert writes:
One of Mr. Obama’s strongest points early in this campaign was his capacity to make people feel good about their country again. If I were him, I’d try to re-ignite that flame.
During his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, he told a tumultuously cheering crowd: “They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.”
Mr. Obama needs to get back on that message of unity and hope, appealing to the better angels of the working classes, while at the same time fashioning an economic message more compelling than what we’ve heard to date.
The various groups, ethnic and otherwise, are not interested in being characterized. They’re interested in being led.
This is true, as was the critique offered by Obama of an economy that has been off track for workers — especially those in small towns — through too many presidential administrations.
But Will uses this change in tone — Obama’s slipping from the role of leader to the role of critic — and ties it to a version of liberalism that bears only a nominal resemblance to what most liberal Democrats have been saying and proposing.
Will — quoting an outdated sociological tract — calls Obama the “‘prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.'”
Will accuses Obama of being dismissive.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program.
That, of course, is not what he said. His point was not to dismiss the working-class, but to explain the anger that many feel at being left behind and ignored during the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations.
Will’s column doesn’t acknowledge the rest of the Obama speech — the criticism of past presidents and politicians — and purposely misreads Obama by stripping his comment of context. It is no different than what Hillary Clinton and John McCain have done, but Will offers his commentary in the form of analysis, painting a disingenuous attack with a thin veneer of psuedo-intellectual pap and quotations from long-forgotten political science books.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Hank Kalet 