Hillary Clinton's Sad and Desperate Pounce

How perfectly demagogic, which is so typically democratic.

Barack Obama utters a less than attractive truth about the American working class which historians, sociopsychologists, anthropologists, theologians, economists and political scientists have been writing for decades and his opponent pounces with feigned outrage and panders with saccharine homilies.

Should Sen. Obama fail to make it to the White House, it will only be by virtue of his being too damned dumb to know he's too damned smart for the Reagan Democrat crowd.

His heresy? By now, I'm sure, you know it well. Obama was being honestly, historically analytical:

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....

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 defy any self-respecting social or economic or political historian to find one dram of intellectual fault with any part of that passage. Obama, they would all tell you, nailed in a few sentences the industrial and postindustrial socio-political history of working-class Americans. They are bitter because they have indeed been "beaten down" for generations and in response they do cling to comforting irrelevancies and scapegoats.

That's what keeps them beaten down. And when they aren't distracting themselves by their own devices they've always had mawkish demagogues to distract them further and tell them that the harm they've been doing to themselves has been just the right medicine.

I give you, in spades, the prodigiously mawkish and Yale-educated demagogue Hillary Clinton, who finds Obama's intellectual truth to be "elitist":

It's being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who've faced hard times are bitter. Well, that's not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They're working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them ...

... and who feeds their self-defeating prejudices and who perpetuates the comforting irrelevancies and who yearns to extol at the anti-intellectual drop of an opportunistic hat the uncommon brilliance of the common man, whose very brilliance has kept him wretchedly disadvantaged for generation upon generation.

But Hillary wasn't through. There was more humbug to come -- parts of which Hillary may actually believe, but it's all too maudlin to distinguish the opportunism from the genuine appraisal:

I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don’t "cling to" religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.

Well, isn't that precious. I am positively weepy eyed.

Hillary, the people I know cling to their religion because a) their parents did; b) they've never examined other faiths or the liberating merits of agnosticism or deistic secularism; and c) above all it gives them some slim hope of eternal justice in the celestial aftermath of disingenuous politicians who have cheated them out of social justice on Earth and, when convenient, propelled unprovoked wars.

And still she wasn't through. As the NY Times reports this morning: "Although she has been a strong supporter of gun control in the past, urging Congress to 'buck the gun lobby' as first lady, Mrs. Clinton said, 'Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a constitutional right.'"

It really is true. If we didn't know it before we now have transcribed proof supporting the unambiguous knowledge that there is absolutely nothing this woman won't say to finagle a vote.

This will all pass, of course, since the demands of electoral ignorance and blind outrage already have Obama backpedaling: "I didn't say it as well as I should have.... The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us" -- which was delivered with all the heartfelt conviction of Paul Newman in the quasi-election knife-fight scene in "Butch Cassidy." 

But not before Hillary does indeed get a bump by bamboozling a few more voters.

How perfectly demagogic, and so sadly democratic.