Defending Obama

On April 6, during a fundraising speech in San Francisco, Barack Obama offered an explanation for America's cultural divide:

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. 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 anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

These remarks set off a brouhaha once they appeared in the Huffington Post on April 11.

I think that Reihan Salam, blogging for The Atlantic yesterday, does a good job of explaining what Obama was saying -- and trying to accomplish -- in his comment. I excerpt from Salam's post at length:

Was Barack Obama wrong to suggest that a sense of bitterness and disappointment has driven working-class voters to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"? Note that Obama was making a number of discrete, subtle points. First, he was offering an implicit critique of the Clinton Administration, which made promises that were left unfulfilled. Second, he was trying to offer a rationale for holding views that his audience of affluent liberals might find distasteful. And third, he was making the eminently defensible and almost banal observation that people who are disappointed by high politics will often turn to primary loyalties -- the traditional, familiar truths of faith and family that endure when all else changes.

This is not to defend the words themselves -- the term "cling," with its pejorative connotations; the implicit equation of gun owners and religious believers with xenophobes; and the dismissal of the legitimate concerns of social conservatives. But it resembled the sort of rhetoric that Obama does best: His armchair sociology, to put it harshly, was about building a bridge between so-called "coastal elites" and the toiling masses of the heartland, by making the former see the world from the latter's point of view. It is just as easy to imagine him trying to explain the views of gay rights activists or, say, Jeremiah Wright to an audience of ardently traditional working class whites.

What Obama is trying to do is knit together a national conversation by having several discrete national conversations -- with black Americans, with working class whites, with coastal liberals, and even with conservatives. He uses slightly different language in every case, the better to project his empathy and understanding. This is why all of those young Reaganites who worked with Obama on the Harvard Law Review admire him so -- he listened then, and he listens now. The trouble is, knitting together these conversations is a tough trick to pull off.

Remember when the Globe's Peter Canellos suggested -- over a year ago, now -- that Obama shares with fellow members of his generation "a certain set of touchstones, and a certain view of society," but that it's tough to say "just what these touchstones comprise in political values and impulses?" Well, I think we're beginning to get a clearer picture.