(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the fifth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.)
A week in politics, indeed. Last week Friday, news broke that Barack Obama, asked in San Francisco why working-class Pennsylvanian whites seemed reluctant to support him, first said such types had for too long watched their jobs disappearing, despite promises of help by successive administrations, then explained:
“It’s not surprising then that 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.”
A stunned silence. Then came the ‘Hwop!’ ‘Hwop!’ of champagne corks popping in the Clinton camp.
This columnist caught the news already in progress on CNN. The newscaster wore such a faux-mournful mien that, registering her expression before her words, I thought for an alarmed moment another 9/11 had occurred.
At a rally, Clinton adopted the same graveside manner. It was deeply unfortunate, she lamented, that even while she meant as President to lift Pennsylvanians up, her opponent was “look[ing] down on them.” Small-town Pennsyl-vanians, said Hillary, weren’t bitter, but “hard-working” Americans who were “optimistic and forward-looking and proud.” Reflexive applause.It was probably the single most terrible moment of the campaign: poor American whites — many of whom had lost most everything over the years, jobs, security, hope, and now were losing their homes, as the recession deepened in the Rust Belt — being demagogue’d into shouting down their misery.
That evening, both McCain and Clinton denounced Obama as “elitist.”
There followed five full days of outraged coverage by the US media of what Obama had said. Television talking heads queued up to aver that Obama was elitist, or worse — MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan declared Obama had “just called half of America racist!” — and that this was “a turning point” in the Democratic race. Newspaper columns, with headlines like William Krystol’s in the NYT: ‘The Mask Slips!’ parsed, deconstructed, and furiously impugned Obama’s every phrase.
News came that the Clinton campaign had pulled all its operatives from other assignments to concentrate on spreading word of what Obama had said — along with an obliging explication of what it showed Obama really thought of small-town Pennsylvania’s whites.
At its Chicago headquarters, the Obama campaign closed the section of its operation devoted to campaigning against McCain and threw those personnel into damage control mode on the Clinton front.
Obama himself first dismissed Clinton’s attack (“Me, out of touch!”); then apologized for his “choice of words”; then apologized more fulsomely on the Sunday (even while trying to spin what he’d said away from its ruinous verb, “cling to”). Finally he allowed that he’d “made a mangled mess” of what he meant.
The last was, of course, yet more spin. We in these parts know what Obama meant; and we know, too, he was simply telling the truth. Reagan’s genius had been to sell working-class whites the notion of their essential unity with upscale whites, and so win their enthusiastic support while he radically dismantled Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ economy and unleashed the globalization and privatization that would lead directly to their impoverishment. But in politics, when has truth been a defence?
By Monday, Hillary was out with a new ad. It showed a motley collection of Pennsylvanians staunchly denouncing Obama as “out of touch” with small-town America and declaring they weren’t bitter.
Meantime, Hillary was showing them how just-like-them she was. At rallies, the woman who has long promoted gun control fondly reminisced over how her grandfather had taught her to shoot. (“She sounds like Annie Oakley!” jeered Obama, in one of the few unseemly moments of his campaign.) With the cameras in tow, Hillary downed a “shot,” then manhandled a beer, in a Pennsylvania bar.
The feeding frenzy peaked at their Wednesday night debate.
Moderators Gibson and Stephanopoulos (Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary) peppered Obama with reruns of his ‘bitter-cling’ remark; his relationship with Reverend Wright (which Hillary rhetorically extended to the toxic Louis Farrakhan); and the fact that Obama had once sat on a board with a man called William Ayers, who had once been — “forty years ago, when I was eight years old!” protested Obama — a bomb-throwing member of the Weather Underground. (Ayers has long been rehabilitated, served as an education aide to Chicago Mayor Daley, and is currently a Professor at the University of Illinois.)
Then Gibson/ Stephanopoulos would invite Clinton to comment; Hillary would sorrowfully express her concern over Obama’s association with such “anti-American” types; and the moderators would then hit Obama with another accusation.
For the first time in the campaign, the thought occurred to this columnist: This is a lynching.
Yet, astonishingly, it was already beginning to emerge that none of it seemed to be having any effect on voters’ attitudes to Obama.
On Wednesday, the first post-‘bitter’ polls appeared. They showed no loss — no loss whatever! — accruing to Obama, either nationally or among Pennsylvania voters, as a result of his stumble and the ensuing media frenzy.
Obama’s lead over Clinton nationally was holding at around 7 points. Clinton’s lead over Obama in Pennsylvania was, if anything, shrinking slightly. (On Thursday, a Zogby poll showed her holding Pennsylvania by a single point.) To the contrary, Hillary’s negatives were soaring. And 60 per cent of those polled actually agreed with Obama. They were bitter, they said.
Between Sunday and Thursday there were eight Pennsylvania polls. One had Hillary ahead by 14; another actually predicted a 3-point Obama victory. And the rest all came in with single-digit Hillary wins: no
change from the previous week.
It was as though Obama’s ‘bitter’ stumble — and the sustained, wall-to-wall denunciations it unleashed in the US media — had never happened.
On Thursday, the print and online media were teeming with outrage at the debate performance of Gibson and Stephanoupoulos. The Washington Post’s respected critic Tom Shales called it “shoddy and despicable.” Others (“You disgraced my profession of journalism”) were even less kind. Three hours after the Daily Kos began polling readers on the moderators’ performance, there were 9,600 responders. Most clicked the option ‘Atrocious.’
Meanwhile the steady drip-drip of superdelegates to Obama went on unabated; the Illinois senator netted five more in the five days following ‘bitter-cling.’
Clearly this is no longer the America you and I (and the Clinton campaign) thought we knew. Clearly it’s an America that — via the catacombs of the Net? — has largely escaped the imperial rule of the great American media houses.
Now, for what it’s worth, this columnist isn’t as gung-ho as the polls over Obama’s chances on Tuesday. Most show unusually high numbers of Undecideds; and that, so late in the day, suggests Hillary supporters who don’t want to be asked why they’re not supporting Obama.
So, say the default outcome in Pennsylvania is Hillary by 10 (her margin of victory in Ohio). If she wins by much more than that, then Obama’s stumble, and the Roman feast the media is still making of it, will have proved their potency, after all.
But if, on the other hand, Obama holds Hillary to a single-digit win on Tuesday night, then he really will have shown himself to be, like Ronald Reagan, the Teflon Candidate; and Hillary might as well go home.
