Obama-rama

Sorry for the long run between posts. I've started three--on the housing collapse in the U.S., increased food prices, and Obama's "bitter" comment--and abandoned each of them halfway through when research showed others had covered all three topics quite well.

Okay, well, I can use the third one as a springboard, then.

I really must add to Lisa Van Dusen's already cogent synopsis of why "Bittergate" just might kill Obama's chances. I'm not so sure "bitter" is the problem. Here's the offending quote in all its glory:

"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 they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."
"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."

Those remarks were addressed to a bunch of San Franciscans--"elitists" if John McCain ever saw one--and, to me at least, they are refreshingly honest. They also seek to explain a population that many people on the Left Coast find almost alien...and what could be controversial about that?
No, the real problem isn't "bitter". Most voters are "bitter", precisely in the defeatist way Van Dusen asserts is un-American. How many times have you heard a neighbor (or a neighbour, if you're in Canada) say something like "what's the point of voting? They're all crooks, liars, and weasels." Tell me that's not bitter.
The key word in that quote that's giving Obama nightmares is "cling". He could get away with that remark in Canada: the notion of "clinging" is embedded in our social and literary consciousness in this dark and inhospitable land. (Wait: southern Canada, where most of us live, is no more dark and inhospitable than, say, Minnesota...but the vast Northern arctic tundra wasteland presses on us almost subliminally. You'd cling, too.)
But America is the land of the individual above all else. Americans don't like to be told they're "clinging" to anything...much less God and guns. Embracing, sure. Clinging, no way.

God and guns: two things most Canadians just don't get about the nation to our south.
Oh, we have God up here, don't get me wrong. I'm related to God-fearing folk (aside: why fear Someone Who's supposed to love you unconditionally?); we even have multiple Bible Belts to rival anything in the U.S. Midwest. (We have a concentration of Mennonites all around us, and just north of that you get into a much more strident area, complete with roadside billboards: CHOOSE LIFE, YOUR MOTHER DID and SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU.)
But for the most part, faith in Canada is a private thing: many become uncomfortable when matters of faith are thrust into the public sphere. Exactly the opposite attitude prevails in the United States. According to author Dan Simmons,

"...the polls [show] that a gay-lesbian black Jewish pedophile ex-convict terrorist with Wal-Mart stock who's been caught in front of CNN and Fox News cameras buggering a martyred civil right leader's pre-teen son or daughter at high noon while carrying a Fuck America! banner has a BETTER chance of being elected to high office than any atheist"

Think he's exaggerating? Ask an American atheist.

The Canadian attitude towards guns is more subtly different. We've got guns up here, too. In rural areas, they're used to hunt, just like down there. In the cities, they're used to kill people...same as down there. The difference being that only a very small minority of Canadians--we call them "gang-bangers"--feel constitutionally entitled to kill people with a gun. As of right now, our Constitution doesn't agree with them. (Oh, come on...do you really think the American Founding Fathers believed in the right to bear arms, but not to use them?...well, actually, there's quite a bit of confusion as to what the Founding Fathers actually meant...

Bringing this back to Obama. What he said could probably have been worded better. It certainly would have been if he had said it in Pennsylvania instead of California. But isn't it true that people in small towns, from which all the high-paying jobs have vanished and for which governments are forever making and breaking promises...isn't it true these people grow bitter, and indeed cling to whatever can sustain them? Check out this website: it seems some Americans agree.
The Hillary-pillory was as disgusting as it was predictable. Truly, that woman repulses me, and I say that as a man who would love to see a female President. Every time I figure she's stopped as low as she can, she stoops lower. I do hope people see through her various disguises to the vote-grubber beneath.
What puzzled me was McCain's "elitist" barb. Not that it happened: Republicans have been tarring Democrats with "elitism" forever--but that McCain chose those particular words of Obama's to tar.
Barack Obama doesn't strike me as elitist at all. Hillary Clinton certainly does, but not Obama. Nevertheless I can just see McCain dismissing Obama's entire campaign as "so many words, most of 'em long words". Whereas McCain himself is a man of action, see.

And that just might stick. I'm starting to think that what I viewed as impossible a year ago is in fact inevitable: the Republicans will almost certainly keep the White House. I so hope I'm wrong.