Thursday, May 15, 2008
CAN OBAMA THINK SOME VOTERS HAVE BECOME BITTER WITHOUT BEING AN "ELITIST" PATRONIZING THEM?
When Obama declared that some economically hard-pressed voters had become bitter about the neglect of their economic troubles and turned accordingly to clinging to God and their gun-rights, he was declared to have been an elitist. Some (including Hillary Clinton) managed to interpret him as saying that all religious people are attached to their religion for the same reason. He did not, however, say this. Nor did he say that all hard-pressed voters had become bitter or that all who had become bitter had turned to religion and their gun-rights. To be sure, he did not spell this out, but when we say things like "People are not taking their full vacations" or "People are driving as much as they ever did in spite of high gas prices" it is understood that we are speaking of tendencies to which there may be many exceptions. His basic point was that the parties in power had offered no economic remedies for hard-pressed voters, just distracting issues.
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4 comments:
It would be odd for a religious person to deny clinging to religion. "I'm religious, but not in a clingy way" suggests a degree of insouciance not easy to reconcile with sincere belief. As for bitterness, what is that but a compound of anger, frustration, and resentment? Had he said, "they are bitter, but not quitters," there would have been no sting.
Although this has been completely lost now, the original context and point was that voters are disillusioned about economic issues--they no longer believe that candidates will really help them economically. So, he went on to say, they focus their attention on religion-related issues and gun rights as the deciding issues for how they vote. The original point was not about where people turn for meaning or comfort or anything else. It was about which issues they focus on when deciding how to vote.
"Some (including Hillary Clinton) managed to interpret him as saying that all religious people are attached to their religion for the same reason."
I wonder if even this would have been false. The "same reason" at issue is the broad one of comfort, into which the narrower generalization about economic insecurity fits snugly. I think the offense taken is because we would like to think we hold religious beliefs on the basis of conscious reasons (like their purported truth, or their moral value, etc), but of course the claim is about unconscious incentives, not conscious justifications. And on that score, it's quite possible that all irrational beliefs, such as religious beliefs, are held on the basis non-rational incentives, even for, broadly, the "same" non-rational incentives.
(A separate issue, which any discussions of the comments have failed to distinguish is: does the truth status of his remarks have any bearing on whether they were "elitist"?)
Addendum to previous 5:07 comment:
There's the further dilemma of what is meant by "elitist" in these charges. I suspect it's a conflation between a morally neutral sense (according to which Obama stated a possible truth about the inferiority of a large populations beliefs and/or reasons for belief) and a morally problematic sense (according to which Obama supposedly suggested the general inferiority of a large population on the basis of their beliefs and/or reasons for belief). My sense is that Obama may be "guilty" of the former, but not the latter.
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