Obama Says That Poor People Are Pissed; Everyone Goes Nutzoid:
The thing that's annoying about Barack Obama's statement at a San Francisco fundraiser about bitter small community people turning to guns and God and then hating them some immigrants is not that it was condescending or any such bullshit. It's that it was understating the truth. People aren't bitter. They're fucking savagely angry or suicidally depressed. Bitter? That's what Hillary Clinton and John McCain have their panties in a wad about? Motherfuckers, the working class passed bitter sometime in about 1986. By 2008, we're lucky that illegals aren't hanging from lampposts in rural America as targets for gun practice while a prayer circle blesses the bullets.

(A Brief Diversion Wherein the Rude Pundit Establishes His Street Cred on Talking About This Shit: At the point when the Rude Pundit was a kid and his family was living in a mobile home in a medium-sized Deep South town, the Rude clan was on food stamps while the Rude Dad drove a big rig. The Rude Dad blamed non-whites and rich people for his woes. Rich people more than non-whites, for, indeed, the Rude Dad fucking hated the wealthy - he resented the shit out of them, for their luck, for their upbringing, and for his perceived feelings of them looking down on him. In the course of trying to negotiate this devolved class landscape, the Rude Dad tried on different things. He took the family to a Seventh Day Adventist revival meeting, but that just seemed too idiotic. He tried the cult of Amway, but just used up all the samples. And he took the Rude Pundit out with friends to fire guns at shit. The Rude Dad could have given in to any of these as an outlet, but instead, he just simmered in anger and resentment, blaming the powerless for the policies of the powerful, sampling God and guns, but preferring the narcotic effect of TV and cigarettes and, yes, self-loathing bitterness.)

Clinton's and McCain's statements attacking Obama are not just disingenuous, but they are, in fact, the elitist wishful thinking of the privileged class. They want to homogenize the anger, they want to whitewash away the very real differences of class, and they cry the plaintive cry of every wealthy liberal who ever gave money to support a union: "We're all in this together." That's a bullshit belief. (And Clinton, who has worked really hard for the working class people of New York, fuckin' knows better than to say the crap she's spouting.)

Obama wasn't looking down on anyone or disrespecting the workers of America. He was acknowledging something real about small towns where the factories have closed, where the economic centers have been shuttered, and where the people have been told that a tax cut for millionaires is what's going to get them their jobs and economic security back. Obama's giving those people voice and agency: when you are disempowered, you seek other means to have power, whether it's through the gun or through the disempowering of others, or through the comfort of faith, which promises you oodles in heaven for your sufferings on earth.