William A. Jacobson
Legal Insurrection
8/30/2010
Obama was interviewed by Brian Williams yesterday. Once again, Obama exhibited the sort of disdain towards a substantial portion of the population as he did in his bitter clinger comments back in 2008.
You will remember that at a private cocktail party in April 2008 in San Francisco, Obama made the followingstatement:
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 toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama thus sought to delegitimize opposition to his policies (at that time, his proposed policies) as nothing more than an emotional reaction driven by hatred, fear, and inherent racism or xenophobia.
In the interview yesterday, Obama was asked about the Restoring Honor rally on Saturday, attended by hundreds of thousands of people and which dominated the news over the weekend.
After noting that he had not watched the event (so how could he comment on it?), Obama nonetheless chose to characterize the attendees as the same sort of bitter clingers of whom he had spoken in San Francisco more than two years earlier:
“It’s not surprising that someone like a Mr. Beck is able to stir up a certain portion of [the American people]. … That’s been true throughout our history.”
Thus, in his dismissive tone, Obama once again reduced opposition to his policies to nothing more than mob rule, or worse.
Obama doesn’t seem to realize that his dismissive comments and attitude are undermining his presidency as much as his policies. Obama just can’t see opposition as anything other than the mob.
But Obama’s mob now constitutes a plurality if not an outright majority of the population.
Insulting a majority of the population is not a good political strategy. But it is the only strategy Obama knows. And the results are showing.
