I've already mentioned the difficulties Barack Obama will face as this election goes forward.
Irritatingly, Obama waited until just after I wrote last week's column to provide me with another example: Bittergate.
Bittergate, for those of you not paying attention to the current slugfest in Pennsylvania, is the flare-up that ensued after Obama made the following comment:
"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 going to regenerate, and they have not. So 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."
Now the first half of the comment isn't so bad. It plays into the themes of Obama's campaign - that he's a different kind of politician, that our current politics are broken and that leaders from both parties are stringing along the average Joe by telling them what they want to hear, but they never actually follow through. But the second half is a disaster.
The "cling to guns or religion" bit, especially, will be problematic for Obama all the way through November. It plays into the image that the Republicans are carefully constructing - that of a liberal elitist who looks down his nose at those rubes in the sticks who hunt and pray instead of attending wine-tasting parties after a night at the opera.
That section's the part that's getting repeated the most in news accounts of the incident, and it's plenty damaging. But in a way, Obama should be thankful that in the dust-up over "guns and religion," nobody's paying much attention to the "antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant or anti-trade sentiment."
Therein lies an even bigger danger for Obama. In the first place, implying small-town voters are gun nuts or Jesus freaks is one thing, but suggesting they're hostile to "people not like them" is getting perilously close to a line of argument Obama has admirably refused to entertain: that flyover country is still a place full of racists and xenophobes. And that by extension, lack of support for the Obama campaign is a product of racism instead of policy disagreement.
I don't think Obama means this, but it looks bad. The Obama campaign has admitted he spoke poorly, and Obama regrets the phrasing he used. He's applying some smart damage control: first admitting error, then turning the tables on his chief tormentor, Hillary.
Hillary, in the wake of Obama's comments, began to wax poetic about her dad taking her out behind the shed to shoot rifles. Rightly sensing political pandering of the most obvious sort, Obama said the following at a rally in Pennsylvania about the new gun-friendly Hillary (who has basically the same positions on gun control as he does): "She is running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment. She's talking like she's Annie Oakley. Hillary Clinton is out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday. She's packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better. That's some politics being played by Hillary Clinton."
I'll say this for Obama. He might be adept at getting himself into trouble, but he's pretty damned good at getting himself out, too. That "Annie Oakley" bit has probably been more widely seen and heard than his original screw-up.
Michael Sherry is a junior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Michael.Sherry@tufts.edu.
