Very often, innocent remarks by a candidate are constructed as "major gaffes," or even statements that are "deeply offensive" to a particular group, or to all American voters. This was the case with Obama's words last week in Los Angeles: "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 has 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."
Quite unremarkable, to say the least: there are thousands of studies about the "bitterness" of white working class, and the libraries of Political Studies Departments overflow with books about religion, and its role in American Politics. Not so, if you are involved in a dogfight with an opponent who will spin your speech into an "attack" against religion, or at least, against "people of faith." This is precisely what Hillary Clinton did in this video, borrowing another page from Karl Rove's campaign textbook in order to accuse Obama of being an "elitist."
The fact that Barack Obama was a community organizer in South Side Chicago during the very years spent by Hillary Clinton on the board of Wal-Mart should say something about her cynicism, but apparently her determination to win, even at the cost of destroying her party, has no bounds. However, as the Cook Political Report observed, "For Clinton, the odds are the incident is too late to save her candidacy. But more [Obama's faux pas] would increase her chances of drawing enough support in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary to justify, or even guarantee, her continued run. There are likely to be more gaffes for each of the candidates as this campaign progresses, but in a race like this, each one is exceedingly costly and, cumulatively, can become fatal." The issue of Religion and American working class was the topic of an interesting piece by Timothy Noah in Slate magazine. We shall return to this soon, but first have a look at what we wrote on February 28 here.
