Spin Until Your Wheels Are Smokin' (Updated 4/13)

Ran across this post by Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog this morning. I'd seen mention of this story yesterday, and frankly, Obama's remarks seem quite reasonable -- and completely inoffensive -- to me. Sudbay notes Al Giordano going after the Clinton camp for their attack, and GottaLaff at Cliff Schechter going after McCain.

Even the MSM isn't buying it.

One of Giordano's commenters provided a complete quote:

OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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.

I was, quite frankly, amazed at this post by Autumn Sandeen on the topic at Pam's House Blend. It's credulous to the point of slack-jawed stupidity:

The bottom line is that at best the way Sen. Obama initially described small town Pennsylvanians sounds unflattering, and there does seem to be some credence in describing the comments as elitist.

The bottom line is that Sandeen is not paying attention. I simply don't understand how anyone could come to that conclusion after reading the remarks or actually listening to the recording. I don't have a lot of respect for her as a commentator anyway, but this tends to prove that my instincts were right once again. Obama's comments have quite obviously been spun into unrecognizability by people with their own agendas, thank you very much, and she's simply bought it. Who does she think she is -- Camille Paglia? (I have no idea who Sandeen favors in this year's elections, but she seems to be gullible enough that I would not be surprised if it were either Clinton or McCain.) That's what I call criminal laziness.

Andrew Sullivan is not much better. "Not the most felicitously phrased"? Excuse me? And Sullivan is worried about Obama being called an elitist?

Jeff Fecke, over at Shakesville, has a reasonable take on the whole thing.

Update:

Barbara O'Brien is another who gets it.

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

Read the whole post. It's right on target. And get this:

What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left.

That's what they -- the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys -- are trying to do with this flap: the usual tactic of taking something out of context, just as they did with Jeremiah Wright, spinning it like crazy, and turning it against the left.