Have The Boys On The Bus Run Out of Gas
We knew this day would eventually arrive.
With the presidential campaign now in its 14th month, the Boys on the Bus have finally run out of gas.
There’s no other reason than to explain why Barack Obama’s comments in San Francisco spread like wildfire.
The press corps, it seems, have run out of issues to report, and needed to cling to a debatable mischaracterization in order to vent their frustration in having nothing better to report during a slow news weekend.
So Obama’s ``clumsy’’ phrasing of words, while delivering a speech on April 6th, in which he portrayed middle-class, rural Pennsylvania voters, as being frustrated with their plight, and still hold fast to middle America values: guns, butter, religion, tinged with a shade of xenophobia was the talk of the town.
Originally posted on the Huffington Post, the Illinois senator’s comments delivered at a San Francisco fundraiser, said small-town Pennsylvania voters still ``cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations.
Such talk was described as ``elitist’’, coming as it did from a ``Latte Democrat'' telling Hillary’s ``Dunkin Donut'' Dems’ why they’re bitter and haven’t yet warmed up to Obama’s message.
Senator Clinton, herself, clinging on the edge of the cliff, naturally went into overdrive on Sunday in trying to capitalize on Obama’s poor choice of words, saying her chief rivals comments were divisive and out- of-touch with middle class voters
But how out- of-step were the Illinois senator’s comments?
A Gallup poll reports only 9 percent of Americans think the economy is getting better, while a whopping 85 percent fear its tanking.
While depicting rural town Americans displaying antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, was viewed as an insult to the middle class, The Pew Research Center reports 75 percent of those who report losing a job to an immigrant, believe they are costing Americans jobs, housing, and affordable health care.
Obama, it seems, wasn’t merely echoing perceptions of middle class Americans, he was stating what has been reported many times before; that a slice of Americans find themselves in the crosshairs of an economic downturn and are looking for someone to blame.
Whether Obama’s comments were ill- chosen or right on- the- money, the point is that it shouldn’t have attracted the attention it did.
If we were looking for some worthwhile news to report over the weekend, couldn’t we have focused on the approaching one- year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, and examined if students are safer on American campuses; or how about the soaring food prices taking place in developing countries, which have recently sparked food riots as the price of wheat has climbed 120 percent over the past year? Aren’t guns and soaring food prices legitimate campaign issues?
With Obama, Clinton, and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain’s positions on health care, the war in Iraq, and the housing crisis, having been reported and analyzed to death, all sounding like stale manufactured sound bites, the news media lunged at Obama’s comments like caged animals, hoping it would fill their notebooks until Monday.
It’s too bad it was such a non-issue as to make it almost laughable.
Alexander Keyssar, Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, has a more cynical view on why Obama’s comments attracted the attention it did: ``My own take on this, the author of ``The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States’’ wrote through an e-mail, is that the dust-up is being driven by the Clinton campaign's effort to find any issue that might gain traction or penetrate a little; and the press has always tended to respond, and over-respond, to candidates attacking one another’’
-Bill Lucey
billlucey@bellsouth.net
With the presidential campaign now in its 14th month, the Boys on the Bus have finally run out of gas.
There’s no other reason than to explain why Barack Obama’s comments in San Francisco spread like wildfire.
The press corps, it seems, have run out of issues to report, and needed to cling to a debatable mischaracterization in order to vent their frustration in having nothing better to report during a slow news weekend.
So Obama’s ``clumsy’’ phrasing of words, while delivering a speech on April 6th, in which he portrayed middle-class, rural Pennsylvania voters, as being frustrated with their plight, and still hold fast to middle America values: guns, butter, religion, tinged with a shade of xenophobia was the talk of the town.
Originally posted on the Huffington Post, the Illinois senator’s comments delivered at a San Francisco fundraiser, said small-town Pennsylvania voters still ``cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations.
Such talk was described as ``elitist’’, coming as it did from a ``Latte Democrat'' telling Hillary’s ``Dunkin Donut'' Dems’ why they’re bitter and haven’t yet warmed up to Obama’s message.
Senator Clinton, herself, clinging on the edge of the cliff, naturally went into overdrive on Sunday in trying to capitalize on Obama’s poor choice of words, saying her chief rivals comments were divisive and out- of-touch with middle class voters
But how out- of-step were the Illinois senator’s comments?
A Gallup poll reports only 9 percent of Americans think the economy is getting better, while a whopping 85 percent fear its tanking.
While depicting rural town Americans displaying antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, was viewed as an insult to the middle class, The Pew Research Center reports 75 percent of those who report losing a job to an immigrant, believe they are costing Americans jobs, housing, and affordable health care.
Obama, it seems, wasn’t merely echoing perceptions of middle class Americans, he was stating what has been reported many times before; that a slice of Americans find themselves in the crosshairs of an economic downturn and are looking for someone to blame.
Whether Obama’s comments were ill- chosen or right on- the- money, the point is that it shouldn’t have attracted the attention it did.
If we were looking for some worthwhile news to report over the weekend, couldn’t we have focused on the approaching one- year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, and examined if students are safer on American campuses; or how about the soaring food prices taking place in developing countries, which have recently sparked food riots as the price of wheat has climbed 120 percent over the past year? Aren’t guns and soaring food prices legitimate campaign issues?
With Obama, Clinton, and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain’s positions on health care, the war in Iraq, and the housing crisis, having been reported and analyzed to death, all sounding like stale manufactured sound bites, the news media lunged at Obama’s comments like caged animals, hoping it would fill their notebooks until Monday.
It’s too bad it was such a non-issue as to make it almost laughable.
Alexander Keyssar, Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, has a more cynical view on why Obama’s comments attracted the attention it did: ``My own take on this, the author of ``The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States’’ wrote through an e-mail, is that the dust-up is being driven by the Clinton campaign's effort to find any issue that might gain traction or penetrate a little; and the press has always tended to respond, and over-respond, to candidates attacking one another’’
-Bill Lucey
billlucey@bellsouth.net
Comments