Obama's 'Small Towns' Gaffe Reveals Un-American Democrats

Publius' Forum ^ | 4/12/08 | Warner Todd Huston

[Mobile Vulgus]

-By Warner Todd Huston

At a fundraiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama said that small town Americans living in the Midwest are religious zealots, gun nuts, and racists. So much for Obama being the candidate of "working together" and the wondrous architect of a "new politics."

Obama's dismissing of the civility and religiosity of the largest part of America's citizenry is reported to have upset a North Carolina Hillary supporter who was tasked with introducing his candidate at a rally there. Former state party chair Tom Hendrickson got in his high dudgeon at Barack's anti-small-town America rhetoric.

Here is what Obama said in California late last week that got Henrickson’s goat.

"You go into some of 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."

Barack’s rhetoric is pretty bad, just as Tom Hendrickson said in North Carolina. So, before he introduced Clinton, Hendrickson lambasted Obama over those remarks. ABC’s Jake Tapper reports Hendrickson's irate words on his Political Punch blog.

"I listened to that quote and I got mad," Hendrickson said, "and I wanted to reach out to Senator Obama and say senator, we are from the rural part of eastern North Carolina. We are very proud of our heritage, we are proud of who we are. We are not frustrated. We are not bitter. We turn to our faith because we believe, and we hunt and fish because it is part of our culture and we enjoy it.

Ok, that's all well and good. We have a candidate in Obama pandering to his far left, elitist California base by telling them he thinks Middle America is filled with racist, hicks. And we have a Southern Democrat playing the good ol' boy card claiming to be "proud" of his fellow hicks in flyover country.

Hendrickson is 100% right, of course. Obama has nothing but disdain for Middle America and he should be called on it.

There is only one problem with Hendrickson's little tale and that problem comes in at the tale end of Tapper's report.

Amos points out that, interestingly, the crowd had little reaction at all. They, in fact, seemed a tad bored.

Tapper says "interestingly" as if it is of but little concern. I, on the other hand, find it disturbing. It says to me that the North Carolina Democrats that Mr. Hendrickson was speaking to, people that are supposedly the sort of average North Carolinians from the same sort of "small towns" that Obama seems to hate so, weren't upset in the least at Obama's comments likening them to racist gun-nuts, etc.

Why is this one might wonder?

Let me posit to you that these Hillary supporters weren't upset because the remarks that Obama made were not that big of a deal to them. In other words, these Democrats AGREED with Obama’s characterization that most Americans are overly religious, racist, gun-nuts. So, when Mr. Hendrickson tired to stir the crowd against Obama's comments, they didn't react because it didn't make them mad in the first place.

And this gets to the nub of the issue. Most Democrats hate the average American. Most Democrats assume that most Americans are racists. Most Democrats agree with Obama that Americans are evil people.

THAT is the Democratic Party of today. A party that hates its fellow citizens. Obama’s charge against his fellow countrymen is garbage, of course. But few in his party think so, few disagree with his mischaracterization of Middle America. And THAT is the most disgusting part of this whole story.

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[Grampa Dave]

[george76]

bttt

This contempt for fly over country comes from a man who has gone to a racist church for twenty years and who now thinks he should be allowed to lecture on the motives of why rural Americans go to their church.

[headsonpikes]

I think Obama is trying to spread the “I am a victim” ideology to whites. It has worked so well with blacks, especially for people like Rev. Wright and other black preachers and black politicians, that he sees it working just as well on whites. He is trying to sell the same Kool Aid to whites that he and others have been selling to blacks for generations. He is urging whites to “play the victim card”.

The 20th Century revealed that those nations who fall prey to collectivists of any stripe will soon enough be victims in reality - 100,000,000 dead is proof enough of that.