Bitter Politics

The flap over Senator Obama's diagnosis of working class ills provides a lovely example of an ongoing clash of political cultures. For those who haven't heard, Senator Obama referred to working class Americans as "bitter" at a fundraiser in San Francisco. In a broad sense, Obama was trying to explain why working class Americans don't trust their government anymore and, in particular, don't trust the presidential candidates who make promises every four years. Those candidates come around, make promises, and the jobs continue to go away. So, they get angry, frustrated, and yes, bitter, about politics. As a result, they take refuge in religion, guns, social issues, anything they feel they can affect. And they turn Republican.

Now, realize this diagnosis is not new, particularly to the Clintons. Theda Skocpol writes in to Josh Marshall to discuss meetings in which the Clintons and their supporters made that point. It's a theme of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? It's arguable. Some social scientists, particularly Larry Bartels of Princeton, argue that Democrats have lost only the Southern white working class vote and that's due almost solely to race. But it's clear the Clintons get the theory; go back and read President Clinton's ruminations after his losses in the 1994 midterms. His thinking aligns nicely with Obama's.

Yet the Clintons also understand the existing political playbook better than anyone and they're playing this for all its worth. Take the one offending word, "bitter." Lift it out of the context of the larger argument (with which they agree). Connect it to a faintly existing bad narrative about their opponent (Obama's a bit elitist, a bit too "cool," a bit too much like Adlai Stevenson). Tie it to the issues he brought up, guns and religion (again, issues on which they're in agreement with Obama). Use the megaphone of a campaign to hammer home the narrative and control the news cycle. Put Obama on the defensive.

It's the exact strategy they used against Bob Dole in 1996. He spoke of his candidacy as a bridge to the past, a way of bringing back the values of the Greatest Generation. President Clinton fully agreed with those values, but lifted the quotation out of context and turned it; Clinton was a bridge to the future. Dole was a relic.

Now, this is the sort of strategy politicians traditionally use against those with whom they generally disagree: the other party. Clinton may have liked Dole's values, but he deeply disliked the policies that did or, in most cases, did not grow out of those values--massive tax cuts, etc. What marks the Hillary Clinton campaign at this point is her willingness to use these Rovian strategies against a member of her own party and, moreover, someone with whom she has very few ideological differences. This isn't Robert Kennedy vs. Hubert Humphrey. Equally important, she's throwing in an old Nixon strategy as well; she constantly refers to Obama's words in "San Francisco." Well, we know what that means, now don't we? Respond to the dog whistle, she's saying to Pennsylvanians.

By the rules of the playbook, she should win this one big. But Obama won't play by the rules. They require him to prostrate himself, admit his sin, and play to her narrative. He hasn't, although the MSM keeps trying to make him. He says simply that his wording was not perfect, nor is he. But, as this clip from Andrew Sullivan's blog suggests, he's sticking by his guns and turning the argument on her. Yep, people are mad and bitter because politicians like the Clintons keep playing by these nasty old rules. He wants to try something new.

Equally important, he's using the occasion to make fun of Senator Clinton, calling her "Annie Oakley," out there in her "duck blind" every day. Her greatest weakness is lack of a central identity. Like the new Nixon, there's a new Hillary every couple of months, a smart Hillary, a compassionate Hillary, a fighting Hillary, a crying Hillary, a this and that Hillary. Much as the Kennedys used humor to reveal and diminish the constantly sweating, striving, and new, and new, new Nixon, so, too, is a calm, centered, confident Obama revealing the essential falseness of Hillary the hunter. He's betting that people will respond to his core self, his comfort in his own skin, and reject the constantly mutating Hillary, even if this particular mutation might seem closer to their identities.

That's the clash of cultures. What's going to work? The old politics or the new?

Comments

[JM]

I find this whole flap slightly, to use a jargon-y political science theoretical term, cuckoo bananas. Of course your analysis is spot on, but it's nevertheless discouraging to see how easily the media bite at whatever bait can be made attractive to their one-dimensional, fishy-little world views about elitism or white working-class resentment. Although a bit of an outlier, take Bill Kristol at the New York Times, who concluded thus: "What does this mean for Obama’s presidential prospects? He’s disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize." I guess I object (most) to the idea that to tell the working class they ought to vote their economic interests amounts to "patronizing" them. It's a cynical kind of populism that I find at once ridiculous and sad. :end rant: