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 [bold mine-DL]. ~Barack Obama

Not to beat this topic into the ground, but I want to focus on this last part of the quote, because it seems to me that this is the crucial part that makes some sense of what Obama was trying to say.  There are now a couple of pro-Obama arguments circulating around out there that try to make this statement complimentary to small town Americans or simply a statement of electoral realities.  According to the former, Obama is saying that small town Americans fall back on valued certainties and traditions (this conveniently ignores the bits about being racist and anti-immigrant) because they have been ignored and neglected by Washington.  No doubt they have been ignored and neglected by Washington, but note what Obama actually said: these people cling to all these things “as a way to explain their frustrations.”  How does clinging to religion explain their frustrations?  The sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you read it as a claim that people ”cling” to religion because of frustrations with their economic woes.  But that isn’t why people hold fast to their religion.  This implies that these people would not “cling” so tightly to such things if their economic situation were better.  According to the second argument, Obama was engaged in a bit of analysis of why small town Americans vote a certain way on religious and cultural issues.  In this view, perpetually neglected voters whose economic interests are ignored start voting on such issues because they have no expectation that either party will serve those interests.  This is not just a claim that socially conservative working and middle-class voters support the GOP on symbolic and cultural issues rather than voting their economic interests, which is the simple Thomas Frank thesis, but that both cultural issues (including views on immigration), racial attitudes and protectionist attitudes are a function of a lack of representation in Washington and that voters “cling” to these things (including racism) to cope with being ignored by the political class. 

This actually has a rather paternalistic ring to it: the nanny state failed to pay enough attention to the kids voters, and now they are acting out with their racism and anti-immigrant sentiments.  But Obama is there to reassure the San Franciscans: “Don’t worry.  They’re racist and xenophobic, but they don’t really mean it.  It’s just a phase they’re going through because we haven’t been giving them enough attention.”  The more you think about the statement, the greater the condescension seems.  The implication is again that the “clinging” attachment to these things is a product of alienation from Washington, rather than recognising that the voters already valued these things or had these attitudes (though I would certainly not describe them as Obama did) and Washington and/or the cultural left proceeded to intrude upon or insult them on the one hand or promote mass immigration and de-industrialisation on the other.  Besides the positive reasons to value guns and religion, the strong attachments to these things expressed in voting are partly a backlash against efforts to regulate gun ownership, drive religion out of the public square, flood the country with cheap labour and send manufacturing industry out of the country, and they are partly earlier attachments that are being threatened by the kinds of policies that Obama supports.  On literally none of the things that actually causes the frustration Obama identifies (it is the only thing he correctly identifies in this sentence) does Obama offer a serious alternative to his competitors.  He may not be an elitist, but he is content not to challenge his party establishment on any of the things that are alienating these voters from Washington and from both major parties.    

Update: Michael Lind has a good article on this topic, and especially here when he paraphrases Obama’s claim:

They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.

And he quotes Todd Gitlin, who says Obama “did indeed fall into the Tom Frank vulgar Marxist trap of seeming to say that love of guns or religion (or antipathy, even) is merely derivative, not fundamental.” 

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