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Barack Obama’s flip side revealed April 14, 2008

POLITICO; by Carrie Budoff Brown; 4/13/08

Barack Obama’s remarks on small town America were an off-key note from a politician who has rocketed to the top by being brilliantly on-key.

At the same time, the comments were not a total departure: On the campaign trail, Obama can reveal moments of aloofness or tone deaf reactions that belie his image as the epitome of polished.

At 46, Obama carries a political persona that draws on many origins. He is the son of a single mother who grew up middle class in Hawaii and worked as a community organizer in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago. But he is also the Harvard Law Review president who knows well — occasionally too well — that he is smart and successful.

Part of the appeal to many Democrats is an intellect that allows him to discuss difficult issues with sophistication and candor, as he did in Philadelphia with his speech on race. But his remarks at a private San Francisco fundraiser amplified the flip side of his personal manner, a sort of freestyle rhetorical approach sometimes better suited for a dorm room bull session.

Obama fielded almost identical questions from the donors in San Francisco as he does from voters across the country. Yet his answers in the more intimate — and in his view, off the record — gathering were a bit more revealing.

Asked what he would seek in a running mate, Obama said despite the conventional wisdom, he wouldn’t need somebody with military expertise because “foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Sen. Clinton or Sen. McCain.”

And then there was the question from donors who asked what they could expect in Pennsylvania when they traveled there to campaign for him. They had to work to do, Obama responded, because voters in a lot of the communities feel beaten down by job losses and betrayed by their government.

“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,” Obama said.

The remarks, recorded at the Sunday fundraiser by a Huffington Post blogger and published Friday, opened a fresh round of scrutiny about Obama’s ability to connect with blue-collar workers.

“What I found to be most revealing was that these remarks were made several thousand miles from us, at a very expensive fundraising campaign event in a very upscale location where he did not think any of us were going to hear what he would say,” said Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed, a Clinton supporter. “It invites the question of what else does this candidate think about all the different people who make up our redder, diverse nation.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, pointed to the senator’s expressions of regret for the way he phrased his remarks.

“Did he choose his words poorly? Yes,” Axelrod said. “Does it reflect something larger? Absolutely not. Those who are trying to portray it that way are disingenuous.”

Indeed, he has won liberal states and conservative states, wealthy states and poor states. And he has been masterful at attracting millions of new voters and donors to the Democratic Party, and building fierce loyalty within his campaign operation and among his legions of supporters with a message of bridging racial, religious and cultural divides.

But for all of the pitch-perfect performances over the past 15 months, Obama can come across as detached at moments when he should identify, as scolding when he should allow incidents to roll off his back, as misunderstood when he says one thing but means another.

At a New Hampshire roundtable in December, Obama betrayed little emotion as one participant sobbed while describing her situation: She lost her job on her 65th birthday, struggles to afford her $2,900 monthly prescription drug costs, and lives in 30-year-old trailer where the thermostat is set at 64 degrees.

At the same event, he later mentioned how the success of his book had allowed him to buy a big house. He was making a point about inequities in the tax system, but the story felt misplaced in the midst of such dire tales.

Just before the Iowa caucus, Obama began telling voters about a phone conversation with his wife, who said this year was the right time to run for president because they are “still almost normal.” She meant that before her husband became a U.S. senator and received a $1.9 million book advance, they juggled school loans, grocery shopping and mortgage payments like other middle-class families.

“Michelle’s point was, in eight years from now, 10 years from now, we may still be nice people, but we may be in this orbit where we just don’t remember, we don’t hear people’s voices anymore,” Obama explained at the time.

Two women in the Sioux City audience were not impressed.

“That was a mistake,” said Lindsay Pelchat, 30. “That was a big mistake.”

“Don’t ever forget where you come from,” her friend, Paula Yasat, 53, piped in.

“Does that mean in the next election he’s already going to start losing sight of the middle class?” Pelchat asked.

The women approached Obama afterward to tell him they remained undecided.

“What do I need to do?” Obama asked, almost disbelieving. “You’re really making us work.”

At a February town hall meeting in Racine, Wis., Obama showed little patience for a rowdy crowd. When one young man asked for his views on Native American rights and “people getting screwed” by NAFTA, Obama took a sharp tone.

“I’m sorry, young man, you have a series of different questions and why don’t you ask your questions in a more polite fashion,” Obama said.

An aide later said that Obama, who was on his last stop before a trip home to Chicago, appeared irritated because was anxious to see his family.

Reacting in mid-February to Clinton’s charges that he was all talk, Obama offered a confident self-assessment, one that might sound arrogant to some. “It’s true I give a good speech. What can I do? Nothing wrong with that.”

Obama infuriated supporters of former Sen. John Edwards by continuing to use him as a punch line on the stump even after he left the race. And New York magazine reported last month that Obama blew the endorsement, in part, because he came across as “glib and aloof” during a phone conversation on the day that Edwards dropped out.

Cass R. Sunstein, a former colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago law school, said the characterizations by Obama opponents of him as elitist is “laughable,” and the charge of him as condescending “aren’t features of his personality.”

But he allowed that Obama, like anybody under a nearly 24-hour-a-day microscope, can slip up.

“He is a real person,” Sunstein said. “He is not programmed in the way that some political candidates have been in the past. The moment-by-moment scrutiny is surely less familiar for him than it has been for people who have been facing this kind of scrutiny for a longer time.”

12 reasons ‘bitter’ is bad for Obama April 13, 2008

POLITICO; by Mike Allen; 04/12/08

A Clinton comeback was looking far-fetched. But operatives in both parties were buzzing about that possibility Saturday following the revelation that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told wealthy San Franciscans that small-town Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners “cling to guns or religion” because they are “bitter” about their economic status.

Obama at first dug in on that contention Friday after audio of the private fundraiser was posted by The Huffington Post. Altering course, on Saturday in Muncie, Ind., he conceded that he “didn’t say it as well as I should have.” And he told the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal that “obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that. … The underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

Here is what he said April 6, referring to people living in areas hit by job losses: “[I]t’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.”

The Obama campaign contends that coverage of the San Francisco remarks is overheated and distorted. One aide said that “any logical analysis” would make it obvious that the brouhaha will not “change the pledged delegate count” — the key to the Democratic presidential nomination.

In fact, this is a potential turning point for Obama’s campaign — an episode that could be even more damaging than the attention to remarks by his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, since this time the controversial words came out of his own mouth.

Here are a dozen reasons why:

1. It lets Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) off the mat at a time when even some of her top supporters had begun to despair about her prospects. Clinton hit back hard on the campaign trail Saturday. And her campaign held a conference call where former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Pittsburgh native, described Obama’s remarks as “condescending and disappointing” and “undercutting his message of hope.”

2. If you are going to say something that makes you sound like a clueless liberal, don’t say it in San Francisco. Obama’s views might have been received very differently if he had expressed them in public to Pennsylvania voters, saying he understood and could alleviate their frustrations.

3. Some people actually use guns to hunt — not to compensate for a salary that’s less than a U.S. senator’s.

4. Some people cling to religion not because they are bitter but because they believe it, and because faith in God gives them purpose and comfort.

5. Some hard-working Americans find it insulting when rich elites explain away things dear to their hearts as desperation. It would be like a white politician telling blacks they cling to charismatic churches to compensate for their plight. And it vindicates centrist Democrats who have been arguing for a decade that their party has allowed itself to look culturally out of touch with the American mainstream.

6. It provides a handy excuse for people who were looking for a reason not to vote for Obama but don’t want to think of themselves as bigoted. It hurts Obama especially with the former Reagan Democrats, the culturally conservative, blue-collar workers who could be a promising voter group for him. It also antagonizes people who were concerned about his minister but might have given him the benefit of the doubt after his eloquent speech on race.

7. It gives the Clinton campaign new arguments for trying to recruit superdelegates, the Democratic elected officials and other insiders who get a vote on the nomination. A moderate politician from a swing district, for example, might not want to have to explain support for a candidate who is being hammered as a liberal. And Clinton’s agents can claim that for all the talk of her being divisive, Obama has provided plenty of fodder to energize Republicans.

8. It helps Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) frame a potential race against Obama, even though both of them have found support among independents. Now Republicans have a simple, easily repeated line of attack to use against Obama as an out-of-touch snob, as they had with Sen. John F. Kerry after he blundered by commenting about military funding, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

9. The comments play directly into an already-established narrative about his candidacy. Clinton supporters have been arguing that Obama has limited appeal beyond upscale Democrats — the so-called latte liberals. You can’t win red states if people there don’t like you. “Elites need to understand that middle-class Americans view values and culture as more important than mere trickery,” said Paul Begala, a Clinton backer. “Democrats have to respect their values and reflect their values, not condescend to them as if they were children who’ve been bamboozled.”

10. The timing is terrible. With the Pennsylvania primary nine days off, late-deciding voters are starting to tune in. Obama and Clinton are scheduled to appear separately on CNN on Sunday for a forum on, of all topics, faith and values. And ABC News is staging a Clinton-Obama debate in Philadelphia on Wednesday. So Clinton has the maximum opportunity to keep a spotlight on the issue. Besides sex, little drives the news and opinion industry more than race, religion, culture and class. So as far as chances the chattering-class will perpetuate the issue, Obama has hit the jackpot.

11. The story did not have its roots in right-wing or conservative circles. It was published — and aggressively promoted — by The Huffington Post, a liberally oriented organization that was Obama’s outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright.

12. It undermines Democratic congressional candidates who had thought that Obama would make a stronger top for the ticket than Clinton. Already, Republican House candidates are challenging their Democratic opponents to renounce or embrace Obama’s remarks. Ken Spain, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said: “There is a myth being perpetuated by Democrats and even some in the media that an Obama candidacy would somehow be better for their chances down ballot. But we don’t believe that is the case.”

Obama, Now on the Defensive, Calls ‘Bitter’ Words Ill-Chosen April 13, 2008

The New York Times; by Katharine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny; April 13, 2008

Senator Barack Obama fought back Saturday against accusations from his rivals that he had displayed a profound misunderstanding of small-town values, in a flare-up that left him on the defensive before a series of primaries that could test his ability to win over white voters in economically distressed communities.

For a second day, Mr. Obama sought to explain his remarks at a recent San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations.

Acknowledging Saturday that “I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he explained his remarks by focusing on his characterization of those voters’ economic woes. He meant, he said, that voters in places that had been losing jobs for years expressed their anxiety at the polls by focusing on cultural and social issues like gun laws and immigration.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton activated her entire campaign apparatus to portray Mr. Obama’s remarks as reflective of an elitist view of faith and community. His comments, she said, were “not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”

Mrs. Clinton suggested that Mr. Obama saw religious commitment, hunting and concern about immigration as emotional responses to economic strain rather than as deeply embedded values.

“I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith,” she said at a rally in Indianapolis. “The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling to’ religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”

Later in the day, in Valparaiso, Ind., she reminisced about her father teaching her how to shoot when she was a young girl.

Although she has been a strong supporter of gun control in the past, urging Congress to “buck the gun lobby” as first lady, Mrs. Clinton said, “Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a constitutional right; Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.”

Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had already been under pressure to show that he was capable of connecting with voters in industrial states who have been hit hard by years of economic upheaval and now feel especially vulnerable in the new downturn.

As a result, his remarks in San Francisco provided an opportunity not just for Mrs. Clinton, but for Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee. Republicans are seeking to win over Reagan Democrats, whose economic condition would seem to make them likely Democratic voters but whose social values align with a more conservative agenda.

It was not clear whether Mr. Obama’s remarks were resonating with voters. But they came at a critical time, as he heads toward a debate on Wednesday with Mrs. Clinton and the primary on April 22 in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton, of New York, is hoping a strong victory there will keep aloft her prospects of winning the Democratic nomination. The two candidates are also both appearing Sunday night in Harrisburg, Pa., at a forum on values and faith.

While Mr. Obama cast his remarks as an expression of populist sympathy for a displaced working class, Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates suggested that they went to the heart of his political vulnerability: while his message of hope has energized young and affluent voters, he has yet to dispel concern about whether a young, African-American candidate can persuade white, working class Democrats that he represents their interests.

The comments presented the Clinton campaign with the kind of opportunity it had been hoping for, in which Mr. Obama would show a vulnerability that could be exploited.

Seizing on his remarks with zeal, Mrs. Clinton mentioned them throughout the day on Saturday. And the campaign deployed several public officials in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina to keep up the drumbeat.

The campaigns organized dueling conference calls for reporters on Saturday, both featuring Pennsylvania mayors who supported their side.

Mr. Obama made the remarks at a closed-door fund-raiser in San Francisco last Sunday — before a very different crowd from those he has been courting in Pennsylvania and Indiana — after he was asked why he was not doing better in Pennsylvania. Polls there show him narrowing the gap with Mrs. Clinton but still lagging behind.

“You go into 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,” Mr. Obama responded, according to a transcript of the fund-raiser published on Friday on The Huffington Post Web site.

“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,” Mr. Obama went on. “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 antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

By Saturday morning, Mr. Obama was trying to contain the political damage after a series of late-night and early-morning strategy calls in which advisers decided he had to acknowledge that he made a mistake.

His aides made a flurry of calls to superdelegates to explain his remarks and to reassure them about his electability. And Mr. Obama told audiences Saturday that what he had said about people’s economic circumstances was true, if inartfully expressed, but that he was not trying to play down the importance of religion or gun rights.

“Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true,” Mr. Obama said, “which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter.”

“So I said, well, you know when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on,” he added. “So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community.”

Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, campaigning with Mrs. Clinton, told reporters that Mr. Obama’s remarks should serve as a warning to superdelegates that he would be a weak general election candidate.

Mr. Bayh and other Clinton supporters suggested that Republicans would use these remarks to help define Mr. Obama as a cultural elitist who was hostile to rural voters, much the way Republicans portrayed Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee in 2004.

“They’re going to say that we’re weak on national security,” Mr. Bayh said, “that we’re a bunch of high taxers and spenders, and out here in the middle of the country we don’t understand people’s values. The question is, have we given them some hook they can hang their hat on to make that argument?”

In fact, Republicans have moved to capitalize on Mr. Obama’s comments. The Republican National Congressional Committee, for example, has been calling on Democratic members of Congress to denounce the remarks.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, who is Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent supporter in that state, said Mr. Obama should not have implied that rural voters were clinging to their guns as a way of dealing with their frustrations.

“People in rural Pennsylvania don’t turn to guns and religion as an escape,” Mr. Rendell said. “Hunting and sportsmanship are long-established traditions here, and people of faith founded the commonwealth and continue to live here. What the senator has done is essentially misread what is actually happening in Pennsylvania.”

But J. Richard Gray, the mayor of Lancaster and an Obama supporter, said this was not what Mr. Obama meant. Mr. Obama was trying to say, Mr. Gray argued, that Republicans take emotional issues like guns and religion and try to use them to divide people.

“I don’t think he’s demeaning religion or guns,” Mr. Gray said. “He’s saying the use of those issues as wedge issues plays on the bitterness that people have and diverts attention from the real economic issues, like the disparity between the wage earner and the rich.”

Mr. Gray also said Mr. Obama was right that voters were bitter, although he said he would have used the word angry. He pointed to a recent poll that found 81 percent of voters believed the country was on the wrong track. He said Mrs. Clinton sounded like “a Pollyanna” in saying that workers were optimistic.

“I don’t know who she’s been talking to,” Mr. Gray said.

Ed Mitchell, a Democratic consultant in Wilkes-Barre who supports Mr. Obama, said that while he did not agree with the comments, he still favored him. “I think he’s right that voters are frustrated, but I don’t think they seek refuge in anything so much as they want leadership and change,” Mr. Mitchell said. “That’s why I support him. I think he offers that best.”

David Saunders, a Democratic strategist and rural advocate, advised John Edwards’s presidential campaign but is now neutral. He said he believed that Mr. Obama’s comments would offend rural voters.

“It could mean he’s rendered himself unelectable,” Mr. Saunders said. “This is a perfect example of why Democrats lose elections.”

To working class, Clinton talks the talk: Blue-collar voters buoy candidate March 31, 2008

Chicago Tribune; by Jim Tankersley; March 30, 2008 

RALEIGH, N.C. — Hillary Clinton kicked off her North Carolina primary campaign last week at a technical school that bills itself “College for the Real World.” After some pleasantries and a stab at a basketball reference, she began to outline what she called “the problems that we face” as a nation.

“Our American workers work harder and are more productive than anyone,” she said. “And yet for too many, here in North Carolina and elsewhere, that hard work doesn’t seem to be paying off.”

That same morning, Barack Obama hit New York City for a speech on America’s housing crisis. He opened with a 300-word history of the Founding Fathers’ views on free markets.

“In the more than two centuries since then,” he said, “we have struggled to balance the same forces that confronted Hamilton and Jefferson—self-interest and community; markets and democracy; the concentration of wealth and power, and the necessity of transparency and opportunity for each and every citizen.”

The difference in those speeches helps explain Clinton’s success in fashioning herself as the “Working Class Hero” of the 2008 Democratic presidential race.

On several scales of “readability,” which measure the level of education needed to understand a piece of writing, a sample of Clinton’s speeches scored on average two grade levels below Obama’s.

Typically, he speaks the language of high school seniors or college freshmen. She speaks the language of high-school sophomores or juniors — the language of the least-educated, lowest-earning voters.

Clinton makes for an unlikely modern Rosie the Riveter: a suburban-born corporate lawyer, a former first lady who never worked an assembly line, never picketed her employer. But across the country, particularly in manufacturing hubs feeling the pains of globalization, blue-collar voters have kept her candidacy alive.

Voters, analysts and political strategists trace that support to lingering affection for Clinton’s husband and the economic boom of his presidency — but only in part.

They also say a range of strategies has won Clinton working-class backing: her focus on economic problems and solutions, the clarity of her speeches, and a personal story of trial and survival that, in its own way, hits home with many voters suffering financially this year.

“For blue-collar Democratic voters choosing a candidate, the first question is usually, ‘Does he or she understand my life?’ ” said Mark Kornblau, who advised former Sen. John Edwards in his unsuccessful presidential bid this year. He said Clinton has improved in that area over the course of the campaign. “I don’t think it’s natural, and I don’t think it comes from any real life experience … but she uses language that really describes what’s going on in people’s lives.”

Melissa Dunston and her husband bought a new house two years ago. She lost her job before they made the first payment. They started a trucking company. When fuel prices shot up last year, they lost that too.

Dunston identifies with Clinton’s public struggles. “To have been through everything she has, she really is ‘I have overcome,’ ” said Dunston, a public school teacher’s assistant.

Clinton’s campaign doesn’t have all the money it needs to keep pace with Obama, she added, “but they still make it. You think, ‘I can relate to that.’ “

It’s not unusual for wealthier Democrats to connect with the working class, as evidenced by Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Obama has successfully courted working Democrats in this campaign, winning majorities of them in states with large African-American populations, along with largely white Wisconsin and fairly white Virginia, according to exit polls.

But the blue-collar vote delivered campaign-sustaining victories to Clinton in Ohio and Texas earlier this month. In both states, exit polls showed her beating Obama by 15 percentage points among voters who lacked a a college degree. She also won solid majorities among those who earn $50,000 a year or less.

Those voters figure to drive primary results in West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and North Carolina, which vote May 6; and Pennsylvania, next on the calendar, where polls indicate Clinton leads handily. They’re also a key piece of the Clinton campaign’s electability-themed argument to “superdelegates,” the Democratic elites who are all but assured of deciding the party’s nominee.

The working class “is a critical vote when superdelegates look at who’s going to be a stronger candidate” against presumed Republican nominee John McCain, said Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist. “These are voters who in the past have gone either way in the general election.”

Others say Clinton’s blue-collar strength doesn’t necessarily suggest trouble for Obama in November.

“It’s not like working-class voters are turning away from him in droves,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who hasn’t endorsed either candidate. “They have two good choices.”

The Obama campaign says many working-class voters are getting to know him and his “record of fighting for economic fairness,” including his experience as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side. As working families learn more about Obama, spokesman Ben Labolt said, “they come to support him.”

Three in five Americans worry “a great deal” about the economy, a Gallup poll reported last week. A similar number of self-described working-class voters told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in February that their incomes are falling behind the cost of living.

Clinton and Obama have tried to tap those anxieties with plans to create jobs, help homeowners ward off foreclosure, rewrite free-trade pacts, expand health-care coverage, retrain workers and reduce families’ college tuition costs.

Analysts say the candidates’ delivery of those plans, more than the details, make the difference for the working class. Obama talks in broader themes of hope and change, they say. Clinton talks more specifically of problems and solutions.

For working-class voters in Ohio and Texas, “Hillary Clinton was acting like the fighter they wanted in the face of desperation,” said Drew Westen, an Emory University psychology professor, political strategist and author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

At Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, Clinton offered a long list of proposals to soothe financially ailing Americans.

“I was impressed,” said Lisa Rosen, who is undecided. “She seemed more real than I expected.”