Jessica

Vozel

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April 14, 2008

Barack Obama and the Many Fake Working Man’s Heroes

When Barack Obama made his controversial remarks about disillusioned Pennsylvanians at an April 6 fundraiser in San Francisco, he could not have anticipated the burst of working-class pride that would follow, especially from those who are not working class and generally have no interest in the working class unless it benefits them politically.

Of course, in the aftermath, Obama is half-apologetic, disavowing the content of his remarks but not the context. I am an Obama supporter and a liberal, but I was also a resident of southwestern Pennsylvania for 22 years. While Obama’s remarks had the right sentiment, they were completely off-base and problematic for his campaign there.  

Obama’s gaffe was as follows: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and . . . the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them . . . So it's not surprising then that 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.”

Conservative pundits and Obama’s opponents, Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, were quick to recognize how advantageous these remarks could be for them – the perfect opportunity to show how “in-touch” they are with the lower-middle-class and how tragically out-of-touch Obama is with them. Clinton immediately began touting her quaint experiences with her father and firearms at a cabin outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania and downing a shot of Crown Royal at a bar in Indiana (while Obama, an indignant Chris Matthews was quick to point out, refused coffee at an Indiana diner in favor of orange juice – the nerve!). Then McCain’s campaign called Obama “elitist” and condescending “toward hard-working Americans.”

But we haven’t heard much from Pennsylvanians themselves. As someone who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where the first day of buck season meant a day off from school, and someone who lived my college years in a failed industrial town on the Monongahela River that clings to just a glimmer of what it once was, I can attest that Obama is right to point out the loss of hope in things ever getting better and the need for someone in Washington to advocate for the repair of these places. However, I don’t agree that this bitterness over circumstance is what fuels the Pennsylvania identity of which Obama speaks – the guns, the church, the remnants of racism. 

Sure, many people in these small Pennsylvania towns are disillusioned with their government. But many are simply complacent, having missed the heyday of industrial prosperity by nearly a full generation. What they see now – the crumbling factories, sagging roofs and empty buildings that once housed thriving businesses along main street – is what they’ve always known.

Similarly, their passion for guns and religion and, sadly, racist sentiment is inherited, not cultivated out of a distrust for the government. Obama’s claims may make perfect sense to born-and-bred Californians, and rhetorically it was an admirable strategy – to blame the things liberals seem to hate about rural America on people the liberals hate even more. But not only has he inflamed the passions of working-class Pennsylvanians who shudder to see religion and guns lumped together with racism as the mark of the embittered, he has pegged their reasoning all wrong.

Do I think that what Obama said shows his secret distain for working-class America? No. Do I think that what he said shows a lack of understanding for working-class America and their cultural and economic inheritance? Absolutely. 

What I find disturbing, though, about this whole “celebration of the common man” turn in the election is how contrived it all seems coming from people so completely divorced from the common man. Conservative pundits, whom, I would add, mostly enjoy cushy positions at the top of their networks, seem to insist that Republicans are “regular people” – people who know how to bowl and shoot guns and drink coffee. But, if we’re being honest, most politicians are not normal people by virtue of their positions. 

Sure, they can put up a believable front – hence George W. Bush’s Texas colloquialisms and “beer buddy” rhetoric despite his bourgeois upbringing and his spoon-fed political opportunities, but in the end, he is not and never was a working-class American. McCain is not a working-class American. Obama and Clinton are not working-class Americans. They might have been at one point in their lives, as they are quick to point out, but now they certainly aren’t. They are vying for one of the most important positions in the world, not wondering how they are going to manage to pay their electric bill that month. One party claiming a greater allegiance to the common man is just ludicrous and smells of political opportunism.   

My father, who still lives in the southwestern Pennsylvania home I grew up in, staked an Obama sign into our yard this week, and my mother is worried that someone is going to throw rocks through our front window. Some hyperbolize that this will mark the end of Obama’s campaign. It’s disheartening because rather than resorting to empty cowboy, whiskey-drinking rhetoric, Obama seems to truly care about working-class America. But after one slip-up, he might be pegged as an elitist liberal, while those who give tax breaks to the wealthy are touted as the saviors of the working class.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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