The NY Times Week In Review - Clinging To Obama

I have finished paging through the Times Week in Review, and guess what was not Review-worthy this week?

Gen. Petraeus got an op-ed and a Frank Rich piece.  Certainly a deserving topic.

Nick Kristof wrote about the under-covered link between global warming and witch-burning; even News.Google was skeptical, asking

"Did you mean to search for: ny times kristof climate change which" 

No, I'm serious - Kristof had found a new hook on a story - global warming is bad - that could be written on any day of any week, and is.  The Times flooded the zone by offering a second op-ed titled "Of Witches and the Wait For Justice" about the effort by a fourteen year old student in Conecticut to clear her ancestor's name.  You are now up to speed on burned witches.

Maureen Dowd wrote about Bill Clinton's revival of Hillary's Excellent Bosnian Adventure, and included this:

Hillary started telling her tall tale about Bosnia as early as January and continued until her Iraq speech on March 17 at George Washington University.

"As early as January"?  C'mon, the consensus is she first told the tale in late December, as reported by the Times Caucus blog and many others.

I will even hazard a guess as to how MoDo, who is normally diligent about her Clinton trivia and arcana, got this wrong - I think she relied on this Frank Rich passage from two weeks ago:

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” 

Now, if MoDo would deign to click on those link thingies provided on the on-line Rich version, she would see that he links to a December report from the WaPo blog (hmm, does Macy's read Gimbels?  Guess so.) and to a story written in January by Ms. Sullivan, which opens with this:

Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to exude war cred when she breathlessly told Iowans in Dubuque last month about her and Chelsea's "corkscrew" landing at a Bosnian airfield in 1996 and their dash from the plane to avoid "sniper fire."

Looks like Rich's ambiguous reference with "In January" confused Ms. Dowd.  Whatever - Times columnists are under no apparent pressure to get their facts right as long as their broad themes are opinionated.

Well - there are also articles on Israel, the Pope, Tibet, the Olympics - all newsworthy, and I am sure they have a hard time deciding what to include.  But since Obama's small town gaffe made the front page of the Sunday Times, I was hoping to see someone on the Times editorial side putting a happy face on it.  I don't think ignoring it will make it go away.

And on the front page, here is the Times opener:

 

On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen  

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JEFF ZELENY  

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.

Let me say a few things.  First, my Dead Tree headline is a much more ghastly "Obama, Now On Defensive, Says Remarks Weren't Artful". "Artful"?  As in, "Normally I can gift-wrap this BS and blow it right past the rubes, but it looks like this time they caught me" artful? C'mon, a guy with a rep for being a smooth talker does not want attention called to that rep; he wants to be perceived as a straight shooter.  The Times bailed out Obama on-line, at least.  And to be fair, if Obama did not use that word (Right now News.Google does not show a news report that he did), the Times should not be headlining it.

Second, although the Times officially endorsed Clinton despite no apparent enthusiasm for her on the editorial pages I think they are trying hard to express Obama's position sympathetically and succinctly in their third paragraph.  But even their sympathetic version  makes it sound as if rural voters just aren't that serious about God or guns, and only dwell on them because of their lost jobs. Well, maybe Obama believes that if jobs were plentiful in the heartland the rubes would favor gun control, unrestricted abortion and gay marriage; I have no idea what his pollsters tell him.  That said, if they are telling him that, the "out-of-touch" label fits tightly.

Hillary has found her attack line, as reported in the next paragraphs:

 

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.”

Ms. Clinton ducks immigration here, partly because Obama is surely right that *part* of the anxiety about immigrants, both legal and illegal, is tied up with jobs.  However, there is also a tension surrounding immigration and cultural assimilation which Barack ignores.   

For example, my impression is that English-speaking immigrants from Ireland seem to create less political friction than Spanish speakers from South and Central America.  Speaking for myself, when I am trying to order at the local McDonalds and no one can actually communicate with me, I pass on the opportunity to marvel at our nation's glorious mosaic, skip past the notion that as an oppressive rich white guy I ought to be frequenting more upscale restaurants, and set the emotional dial right to "Why can't anyone here speak English?".  And, contra Barack, that has nothing to do with lost jobs.  More to do with a lost mind, actually. 

John McCain commented on the clash of cultures, and Don Surber evaluated it with pith and flair.

Comments

[MikeS]

Other politicians have also mentioned that there are people who are racist, and people who are xenophobic, and people who are religious zealots, etc. Those things are insults made against some unknowns.

This time Obama made the mistake of telling us who these people are. He says bitter, small town, working-class Americans think that way.

[Danube of Thought]

If it doesn't track the agenda, by definition it's not fit to print.

[bgates]

Those things are insults made against some unknowns. This time Obama made the mistake of telling us who these people are.
McCain does that too. He insults anyone who dares question him on immigration.

[Daddy]

I thought the Politics of Personal Destruction was all about destroying the other candidate, not yourself. Did Barack miss that memo?

[richard mcenroe]

"Those things are insults made against some unknowns. "

But are those known unknowns, or unknowns we don't know are unknown? Didn't somebody get in trouble for not clearing that up?

[MikeS]

But are those known unknowns, or unknowns we don't know are unknown?

I doan know. That's what makes it all so confusing!

[Cecil Turner]

Gen. Petraeus got an op-ed and a Frank Rich piece. Certainly a deserving topic.

A deserving topic, but the treatment was somewhere between "thin" and "counterfactual." Neither covered the experts' testimony, except to deride it, and both came up with silly pronouncements (like "talking" with Iran . . . as if they were part of the solution instead of the problem) that have little chance of being implemented, and even less of succeeding if they were. But my favorite by far was this bit from Rich, who attempted to explicate why (anti-war) Iraq movies were doing so poorly, and why there was so little coverage on Petraeus:

The simple explanation for why we shun the war is that it has gone so badly.

Sorry, Frank, but that doesn't explain two conflated phenomena. How 'bout this: the public shuns the anti-war films because they don't see any need to pay for enemy propaganda (they get plenty of it for free); the media shuns Petraeus's testimony because it doesn't fit the narrative. And while most of us would like an honest update on the war, we don't think we're going to get it from either the NY Times, or a bunch of Congressmen who use up their allotted time asking stupid rhetoricals, not giving the guy with a clue an opportunity to answer.

[narciso]

The Dick Cavett piece had extra snark in it about General Petraeus re; Sahl re Westmoreland. One is reminded of the fact that Time in the post Luce era had a fairly good piece on those Middle Americans, we'd call them "Reagan Democrats" which would explain the landslide against McGovern, despite an unpopular war:href althouse.blogspot.com/2008/04/everywhere-they-flew-colors-of.html> The truth this is in so many words how the media, thinks of
"Flyover Country" they don't really find anything wrong with it except the tactlessness with which he said it. The Huffington Post clearly didn't disagree,
had they been a little more discerning they would have buried it.

[Ann]

"Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriot."

[Phil Wilson]

Kristoff must have seen Astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas' excellent YouTube video where she talked about the witchcraft era and how 'world opinion' was that witches affected the 'Little Ice Age' weather and needed to be killed. Notable skeptics of witchcradt were derided and worse. Today's Religion of AGW behaves siilarly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C1CKKhN7ng&feature=related

[battery]

Bottom line: I need to see something more before getting too excited on this one.

[sophy]

I will thank for my friends bringing me in this world. I am not regret to buy flyff penya .