Bitter your tongue

Slate blogger Melinda Henneberger sums up my thoughts on the controversy Barack Obama caused in his remarks during a San Francisco fundraiser.

It smacks of blame the little guy.

To be sure, he cushioned his statements with "it's not surprising" that people are bitter and looking for somewhere to turn after losing their jobs in an economy that overlooked them.

But his comments rip the carpet out from under the lives these small town people have built, and the ideas and philosophies that have sustained them.

I would have had no qualms with anyone hypothetically saying, "It's no wonder people in America are uninformed and forget about the war and the catastrophic debt and the plight of low-income and no-income people - Most people get their news from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp."

But Obama sounds patronizing to the people who obviously weren't there at a fundraiser in San Francisco.

I don't think the Jeremiah Wright flap should have been a big deal. I like the idea of a politician listening to sermons he might not agree with. I didn't think the "typical white woman" thing was anything more than poorly chosen wording. Hell, the thesaurus says the word normal is a synonym of typical. And who hasn't wanted used the word normal to describe someone?

No one should claim to understand the forces that effect peoples thinking unless they're damn sure of it. That may sound hypocritical coming from a journalist (and blogger) who does that sort of thing for a living, but it's true.

The thing that really gets me is he didn't have to say that. A lot of people already believe those stereotypes.

And lastly, unfortunately I don't have the time to go into the problems I have with Bill Clinton's error-ridden defense of Hillary's wacko Bosnia sniper-fire story. However I would like to see a YouTube mash-up of the 3 a.m. phone call commercial and the (paraphrasing) "It was late at night, she was exhausted, she misspoke" defense.