Half a Column About Barack Obama I Haven't Been Able to Finish.

When Mel Gibson got drunk, slandered Jews, and sexually harassed cops, we were seeing his true self through alcohol. When Michael Richards responded to some crowd noise in a comedy club by dropping the n-bomb a dozen times, we were seeing his true self through anger. But when Barack Obama said that people who live in small town Pennsylvania cling to xenophobia, God, and guns when in distress, we were seeing … what, exactly? A slip of the tongue? Fatigue? Well, whatever it was, it sure wasn’t elitism, if that’s what you’re thinking.

The remark in question was, in fact, uttered off-script to a roomful of limousine liberals during a private fundraiser held in San Francisco (the People’s Republic by the Bay): “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 twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama opined. “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. And it’s not surprising then they [the little people] 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.”

This isn’t exactly a picture of Deliverance he’s painting, but one hears a matter-of-factness in Obama’s voice that suggests he sees middle-Staters sitting on front porches, hocking greenies into spittoons, and belting out that day’s twentieth drunken rendition of “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” Interesting that Obama didn’t think to mention the extraordinary amount of black-on-black violence in Philadelphia, but he wouldn’t have. No one is supposed to draw a comparison between clinging to a gun for emotional support, or whatever he meant, and using one to murder another human being. We are left to suppose there is no bitterness lying underneath manslaughter.

Question: At what point does someone lose connection to the common man? For years the knock against wealthy conservatives (think Rush Limbaugh) has been that as they put distance between themselves and the poor, their perspective regarding struggle must change, because they themselves no longer struggle.

[This is the point where I wrote myself into a corner, from which I haven't been able to retreat for two days. And now that the issue has abated, I - along with the country - have lost interest.]