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Obama's comments will hurt him among pro-gun voters
Regardless of whether Obama's recent comments in San Francisco were accurate or not, this flap will, without a doubt, hurt him among the pro-gun bloc in the GE. I don't see this will have an effect big enough in PA so as to hurt him against Clinton, but McCain was just granted a gift.
Let's not remember that McCain is backed by the mainstream media, which is traditionally pro-Republican and detroys the Democratic candidate during the summer and fall.
Obama essentially said that he's not winning in PA because people without jobs cling to guns. The message he's sending voters is that Obama is an anti-gun candidate. This was a bad move, IMO, since as I said, the pro-gun vote is significant and necessary to reach the White House.
Comments (6)
Heh. Like those voters would vote for either him or Hillary after they got hit with ads by the NRA pointing out their anti-gun voting records. Are you really that clueless?
Obama didn't lose any voters who weren't already against him.
April 12, 2008 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nobody buys the arguments that the Republicans will paint Obama as a free-spending anti-gun pro-terrorist anti-religious anti-gun pro-tax anti-business liberal, but not Clinton.
The right-wing machine will do a job against whoever the democratic candidate is, and while they might be accumulating pebbles to throw at Obama, they have quarries worth of stones ready to fling at the Clintons.
Or does nobody remember the Clinton years any more, when no business was getting done in Washington because of all of the scandals?
April 12, 2008 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
How is Obama's statement offensive to gun owners?
"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. So it's not surprising then that 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."
April 12, 2008 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Opus,
It sounds like Obama wants them to give up their guns.
I don't think he means that. I think he means that they choose candidates based solely on gun-rights, because they've given up on getting anyone who will tackle their economic concerns. I think he means that he intends to change that, earn their trust on the economic issues, and get them to vote a larger agenda.
Heck, I even think he accepts that they're going to keep their guns. At most, he hopes to be able to get them to separate their hunting rifles from cop-killer automatic weapons, and let us regulate the latter.
But he did say "they cling to guns," and that really does suggest that the healthy alternative would be "letting go of their guns."
It isn't what he meant, but it is what he said. He's working on fixing it. I think he can fix it. But the first part of fixing it is admitting that there's a problem, and that remark was ap roblem.
April 12, 2008 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Going back to Obama's statement, and keeping in mind that he was speaking to a specific group of supporters in San Francsico, and keeping in mind that he was discussing a variety of "talking points" in the previous paragraph, I think that it is the absence of the word "issue" in this particular portion of his response to one of the attendee's questions that is lost in translation from the actual event to the transcript spun in the media.
So let's break it down:
"'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.
Obama is offering:
- closing tax loopholes
- roll back taxes for the top 1 percent
- tax breaks to the middle class
- health care for every American
But:
"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."
"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter" and "As a way to explain their frustrations...they cling to" issues that focus on:
- guns
- religion
- antipathy to people who aren't like them
- anti-immigrant sentiment
- anti-trade sentiment
It's the usual laundry list of GOP hot-button talking points.
What Obama was doing was contrasting his talking points, with the tradtional GOP talking points that he has to contend with if he is going to break through and reach these tradtional blue-collar voters.
April 12, 2008 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow! That is an excellent way of showing how the San Francisco statement was meant. Add a couple of words, and it fits Obama's earlier commitments and his subsequent statements.
April 12, 2008 8:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
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