by Frank James
Mayhill Fowler has a highly thoughtful piece on Huffington Post with her observations about how Sen. Barack Obama explained, to affluent Californians at a swank fundraiser, Pennsylvanians he’s met on the campaign trail.
Fowler wrote:
These qualities of hospitality, patriotism and endurance are exactly what Californians need to hear about Pennsylvanians. And when he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot (Pennsylvania) from a Marin County. “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,” Obama said. “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.”
The problem here is obvious. It sounds as though Obama is saying small-town, blue-collar Pennsylvanians who believe in gun rights or have a strong religious belief, do so because they were driven to it from economic frustration.
While that may be true of some Pennsylvanians or Iowans or even some people on the South Side of Chicago where Obama’s from, it’s clearly a vast stereotype of the sort that someone as subtle as Obama must know is flawed.
There are several reasons why many Pennsylvanians “cling” to guns. Pennsylvania is a big gun-rights and hunting state. A lot of Pennsylvania live in rural communities, places where gun ownership tends to be higher nationwide.
This helps explain the 300,000 National Rifle Association members in the state, the highest per capita number in the nation. It’s a safe bet most of these people don’t have guns because they’re embittered by their economic circumstances.
It’s also a safe guess that most of those people don’t have their guns because they are embittered due to economic circumstances.
In terms of religion, Pennsylvania has a wide, culturally conservative swath between the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on it’s east and west flanks. Actually, the western part of the state surrounding Pittsburgh is fairly conservative too, a territory filled with many committed Catholics and fundamentalist Christians.
These are people of strong faith during good times and bad. Their faith has little to do with economic circumstances.
In any event, Fowler continues:
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Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of creamy Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia.
I’m not sure this is what at least this lot of Californians needed to hear about Pennsylvanians. Such phrases can reinforce negative stereotypes among Californians, who are a people in a state already surfeited with a smug sense of superiority and, as an ironic consequence, a parochialism and insularity at odds with the innovation, prosperity and openness for which California is rightly known. (Of course, this is a generalization, and as such does not fit everyone; but as a state characteristic I stand by it.) Californians might be better served by hearing that Pennsylvanians have a strong sense of their place in American history, for here California is wanting. California needs to hear that other Americans have gone through hard times and survived, humor intact. Since Barack Obama sees himself as the candidate best able to unify the country, these are the messages he needs to carry and his frank words about Pennsylvania may not have translated very clearly.
A failure in translation will certainly be the way the Obama campaign will likely explain what seems to be a fairly dark explanation of how these Pennsylvanians came to love their God and their guns.
It should be fascinating to see how Obama deals with these comments when he hears them echoing back at him in Pennsylvania, maybe as soon as Sunday during his “compassion” discussion with Sen. Hillary Clinton to be carried by CNN.