GOD, GUNS AND OBAMA

After a long, arduous march on the campaign circuit, including visits to small cities such as Bangor, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama stopped in San Francisco earlier this month to raise more money. At the private gathering, Sen. Obama said that in Pennsylvania, where he is in a pitched battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, he has learned that small-town residents “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.”

The candid remark is being waved by Sen. Clinton and GOP candidate John McCain as evidence of Sen. Obama’s elitist, patronizing attitude toward voters. Is the candidate’s veneer cracking? Are his promises to govern without divisive political rhetoric hollow? Is the man behind the compelling message finally emerging, warts and all?

Sen. Obama, despite his fresh approach to campaigning, is not a political neophyte. He knows he must pander, to a degree, to those whose worldviews are different from his if he is to win their support. Candidates end up looking phony and worse when they cross a certain line; remember Michael Dukakis in the tank, and John Kerry hunting duck? It remains to be seen if this is Sen. Obama’s tank moment.

Democratic Party leader Howard Dean was criticized a few years ago for saying the party needed to win the votes of young men from southern states who drive pickup trucks with gun racks and Confederate flags. Liberal Democrats were horrified, dismissive of “those people.” But as far as strategy goes, Gov. Dean was right on target. He argued that George W. Bush’s economic policies hurt those men, even as they were charmed by the president’s macho tough talk and swagger.

Sen. Obama’s observation that small-town Americans are bitter about their economic fate and cling to God, guns and their prejudices about immigrants and foreign trade as a coping response may have some degree of truth. But it also betrays the candidate’s own prejudice about rural America.

Parts of rural Maine have seen generations-long economic decline, which can lead to desperation and bitterness (see Maine writer Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls). But small-town life is no less sophisticated, and its residents are no less willing to embrace change and opportunity, than those who live in crime-plagued urban centers or civic and culturally vacuous suburban regions.

Sen. Obama may have been suggesting that bitter small-town Pennsylvania voters have been manipulated by politicians’ appeals to God, guns and anti-immigrant fervor. If this is what he meant, he needs to get back on message and persuade these voters to embrace his vision of an America where issues are discussed without pandering and posturing.