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Bittergate
You've probably already read or heard the remarks but here goes:
"It's not surprising 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."
There you have it: some truth, some correct implicit moralizing, elitist scorn and condescension, some false implicit time series (guns and religion do not closely track economic decline), and some totally unpopular cosmopolitan sympathies. The "they" is the clincher, a hypostatizing and vaguely offensive generalization, yet one which we are all prepared to make in different contexts.
By the way, here is John Lott meets Barack Obama, worth reading for the scene of the encounter.
I think increasingly that Obama is very much a rationalist, in both the good and the bad senses of that term.
If I think about what makes me bitter, it is highway and roadway construction and bad airports and the attendant delays. You can decide for yourself what that makes me cling to.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 13, 2008 at 12:43 PM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
It is possible that economic insecurity would turn more people in small towns to religion. Ditto for feelings about immigration. I have certainly read that the great depression had that effect.
But anybody who knows us hillbillys knows that the richer we get, the more guns we buy. Conversely, I have seen guys sell the guns they did not need when times get tough.
In fact, a lot of guys will deliberately set out to buy guns as a store of value. When times are good, they buy them. When times get tough they sell them. This works out pretty well since guns hold there value well if you buy the right ones.
Of course, a true hillbilly will never sell the guns that he uses on a regular bases. But most guys only have a couple of guns they fire on a regular basis. The rest just stay on the rack and look pretty.
Posted by: Ape Man at Apr 13, 2008 1:10:09 PM
Please.... The man at least ATTEMPTS to express a populist viewpoint and people label him an elitist? If you often feel free to travel in your automobile where the dastardly road construction bothers you (I take it you do own a car), and by air where they horrid queues offend you (you feel you shouldn't have to wait with the rest of the cattle?), then by "they" he isn't talking about you. He's talking to and about people who, if they want to post a comment on the internet, have to go wait in line at the public library.
Now his remarks may seem to you to be ignorantly derrogatory, for that is the attitude that the ignorantly derrogatory label "elitist" brings to mind, but taken in context with the rest of the message aren't so far off the mark. This guy (Obama) is certainly no man-of-the-people, but he is head and shoulders above the other two contenders in this vein. If they ever gave a thought to Joe American, it was to wonder what the poor people were doing while they sipped their champagne.
Posted by: dpirate at Apr 13, 2008 1:14:45 PM
Obama's comment makes perfect sense to me. When times get tough, people look for someone or something to blame besides themselves. Even when it is not their fault (steel-mill closures), they want to avoid the idea that they are part of a failure. (Look at the resurgence of Russian nationalism under Putin.) And no, it's not surprising.
What to do about it? Hope for change? Fine. Take responsibility for oneself, dust yourself off and look for something to succeed in? Better.
Meanwhile, Hillary promises to take care of everyone: "They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families." No -- I don't think so. Hillary is placing herself as the religions solution: "Just vote for me and I'll take care of you." I doubt it.
BTW, I'm an elitist -- grew up in SF, traveled the world, drink "proper" cappuccino, getting a PhD.
Posted by: David Zetland at Apr 13, 2008 1:26:30 PM
Mr. Cowen, have you ever read Friedman's Moral Consequences of Economic Growth? It's a little repetitive but it shows how treatment of others relates to economic prosperity. I think Obama's in the right here, where he says that people have lost faith in government to providew anything economically, therefore they vote on other issues. If I were Clinton, however, I would have tried to remind people that Bill's economy wasn't as bad as Obama said it was, and make him seem like he mustn't have been around in the 90's.
Posted by: Jared at Apr 13, 2008 1:35:18 PM
I think it says that you cling to a heavily subsidized transportation infrastructure with consequences far more dire than a silly little tariff on steal.
Posted by: Stephen at Apr 13, 2008 1:40:34 PM
While this is pissing other people off, it tipped the balance in favor of Obama for me.
Posted by: Paul N at Apr 13, 2008 1:48:19 PM
The reason I have been reading this blog for a while is because u guys express some thoughful and fresh ideas. But this post seems something that can be written by those parrots on TV. Come on u are better than that.
Posted by: Nati at Apr 13, 2008 1:50:59 PM
Hey, he didn't say people turn to guns and god in times of economic decline; he said they vote on gun and god issues when they feel government ignores their concerns about their ecomonic situation.
Posted by: gorobei at Apr 13, 2008 2:32:17 PM
When I read the reactions to his comment I realized that the worst thing Reagan did to the Democratic party was not capturing the Reagan Democrats, but giving them the country club Republicans. It use to be that only a small minority of Democrats were elietist enough not find Obama's statement offensive. It seems only one person in that room of donors realized that he was insulting the people who form the democratic base, and no one on his staff had enough sense to just say he misspoke because they all agreed with the statement.
Posted by: joan at Apr 13, 2008 2:33:27 PM
So be against free trade like Obama is a result of resentment?
He is against free trade and inmigration? that kind of sentiments mean people is looking for scapegoat so he is himself a rensented rusterbelter?
Most commenters here are usually antiinmigration. are they from the industrial cities?
Posted by: k at Apr 13, 2008 2:40:56 PM
This, along with the Wright episode, reveals Obama as a bit of a calculating opportunist who tries to be all things to all people. In other words: the very definition of a politician. He might turn out to be a very effective politician and a good leader, but there will surely be a backlash at some point, perhaps from the very people currently swooning at him as some kind of messianic miracleworker, whose expectations he cannot possibly fulfill, while those who will not have voted for him might grudgingly come around to concede some good points, like they did for Clinton with welfare reform and NAFTA. Perhaps he will be a Lula-like figure who can make the left swallow a little market or trade medicine.
Somewhat offputting however are the sort of people who expect to sweep to positions of power in his wake, not least his wife, who sometimes seems to be running for people's commissar rather than first lady.
Posted by: at Apr 13, 2008 2:41:41 PM
So poor people get bitter and cling to anti-trade sentiment. What's Obama's excuse then?
Also, I'm surprised from reading other comment threads that no liberal has complained about Obama's slur against their party. So, according to Obama, the Democrats haven't done squat for the poor in 25 years?
Posted by: Hei Lun Chan at Apr 13, 2008 2:43:24 PM
I want to reiterate that Obama expressed that people vote against "their economic interests" and on culture issues because they don't trust government to do anything about their economic interests. This is probably true and not offensive. Of course I think they are probably kind of right on this issue.
Lott's findings on concealed weapons sort of amuse me, he found concealed weapons to have a weak crime deterrent effect, others doing different math found a weak crime increase from concealed carry, but I think the take away is that concealed carry doesn't make much difference at all. I think Obama is one of the most anti gun candidates we have seen, and that probably doesn't mean much since I doubt that he will make it a priority.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Apr 13, 2008 2:47:25 PM
This guy (Obama) is certainly no man-of-the-people, but he is head and shoulders above the other two contenders in this vein. If they ever gave a thought to Joe American, it was to wonder what the poor people were doing while they sipped their champagne.
Yes, John McCain, champagne sipper at the Hanoi Hilton
Posted by: Hei Lun Chan at Apr 13, 2008 2:47:55 PM
This flap is just evidence of how small this election has become in terms of the actual differences in the candidates. According to my principle of "Conservation of Outrage," politicians and the media have to maintain a constant level of outrage in every news cycle. If someone bombs a market in Pakistan with dozens of deaths, then outrage is easy. Politicians and news readers can simply talk about it with facial expressions signaling deep concern. If the only thing that happens in a given news cycle is that someone gets their toes stepped on, the soreness of that toe is treated on par with the destruction of the Pakistani market, and all its carnage. The "deep concern" look remains the same.
Obama just stepped on someone's toe.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Apr 13, 2008 3:03:00 PM
Michael Foody, can you name one single refereed journal paper that claims to find that concealed weapons laws increase violent crime? Lott claims that there is not one refereed paper looking at national or state data that makes that finding. Is Lott wrong? I would be interested in seeing a paper if it exists. Thanks.
Posted by: Bob at Apr 13, 2008 3:05:07 PM
"Obama's comment makes perfect sense to me...BTW, I'm an elitist -- grew up in SF, traveled the world, drink "proper" cappuccino, getting a PhD.-- David Zetland"
Ok, let me spell it out for those people who are too educated to see the problems here:
1) The implicit assumption that views about guns, religion, and immigration that differ from yours don't have any intellectual merit, but are simply a response of (non-Phd, uneducated) people towards their economic circumstances.
2) The implicit assumption that views about guns, religion, and immigration are tied to "antipathy towards people not like them."
Plenty of religious gun owners who are anti-immigration are smart, thoughtful, and educated. Refusal to engage them at the level of ideas as opposed to smugly psychoanalyzing them is a hallmark of the latte-left, and has been even before lattes became popular.
Posted by: A Berman at Apr 13, 2008 3:08:46 PM
Bob, Lott's credibility is most definitely an issue. See Mary Rosh, and the recent Freakonomics battle.
He keeps getting cited because right-wingers want to be agreed with more than they want to be credible, I guess.
Posted by: M1EK at Apr 13, 2008 3:21:15 PM
Obama is morally repugnant. I'd prefer a President who doesn't overtly despise a majority of the citizenry. The man has an ugly soul.
Posted by: jim at Apr 13, 2008 3:32:32 PM
McCain is looking better by the day.
Posted by: Mercutio at Apr 13, 2008 3:49:39 PM
Bob, the debate on Lott's handgun analysis is too complicated for me to do it service in a comment. Look up John Lott in wikipedia the bibliography to get a sense of what is going on.
As far as Obama's remarks I would urge people bothered by the comments to read the paragraph that proceeded the troubling comments, I'm not saying that it will fix the problem for you but I feel this is a case where context softens the problem a lot. I'm sure if you are fair you won't come away thinking he despises people, but the remarks are probably still a bit condescending.
When it comes to smugly psychoanalyzing people, this happens all the time, look at welfare causing dependence and the break up of families, etc. I am not saying it is right, but I am saying that this stuff happens all the time. "They hate our freedom"
Posted by: Michael Foody at Apr 13, 2008 3:57:12 PM
> guns and religion do not closely track economic decline
I'm sure you could find some narrow statistics from Pennsylvania to prove this. But for the rest of us...
We can't help but notice that the same people who vote conservatively, the same people who are big on religion and big on guns, are also the people who are living in the economically weaker areas of the country.
Obama stares truth straight in the face and deals with it. I know it's hard to relate...
Posted by: Stephen Downes at Apr 13, 2008 4:45:33 PM
"It's not surprising 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."
Anybody wonder who the "people who aren't like them" are in this sentence? Is this an implication that Obama is having trouble with the Pennsylvania working class because he's black?
Posted by: anon at Apr 13, 2008 4:49:57 PM
It can be misleading to quote that sentence out of context, as the 'gotcha' media and punditry have been doing endlessly. For what its worth, here's the full quote.
OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.
Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).
But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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 gonna 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.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
Posted by: a student of economics at Apr 13, 2008 4:51:37 PM
Thanks student for posting that -- what we are seeing here is an effort at empathy, at figuring out where people are. In a place like Ohio "free trade" means "I lose my job" and neither HRC nor BHO was prepared to try and distinguish one from the other if it meant losing votes.
Thanks Ape Man for the discussion of guns as savings instruments! There's a paper in there somewhere... The larger political point is that in the last election, apparently a lot of people in PA thought Kerry was anti-gun, despite his public protestations and ostentatious duck-killing. "Cling to guns" was not artful, but there is something going on there.
Posted by: Colin Danby at Apr 13, 2008 5:09:19 PM
