Obama Camapaign in the Pennsylvania Primary – Political Analysis

As an historic quintessential American text warranting a place next to Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March-On-Washington address, Senator Barack Obama’s Independence Hall address conveyed fulsome intellectual and moral authenticity. It thereby resonated with broad multiracial/multicultural constituencies, as indicated by polls taken during the two weeks after the address, showing some 70% of voters saying that Obama’s electability was not diminished because of his attendance at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s liberation-theology activist United Church in Christ.

However, these Obama-supporting poll results did not end what the New Republic magazine candidly and correctly dubbed the “kneecap-Obama” Clinton campaign strategy against Barack Obama. Rather the Obama-supporting poll results only slowed down the quite nasty “kneecap-Obama” Clinton strategy. After all, Clinton and her advisers understood that there would be other opportunities ahead that their cynical “kneecap-Obama” strategy could easily exploit, thereby reinforcing the disinclination of working-class White voters in Pennsylvania (and later in Indiana, West Virginia, North Carolina,Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota ) to vote for an African-American candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Obama’s “Bittergate” Comment Cost Him Some Momentum

Senator Obama committed a tactical error during a private fund raiser event in California on April 6th when he remarked that many working-class White voters he encountered campaigning in the towns of Pennsylvania felt “bitter” about their economic plight and that this unhappiness got reflected in their social and political outlook . “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…”, as Obama put it. Obama never imagined, however, that his words would immediately become cannon fodder for Hilliary Clinton’s against him.

Indeed, Obama’s “Bittergate” formulation unwittingly provided broad assistance to the Clinton campaign’s cynical “kneecap-Obama” message, which was propagated nationwide by cable television stations (CNN & Fox News especially) and by a legion of rightwing Talk Radio hosts, all of whom pounced fervently on Obama’s remarks, cleverly labeling them and Obama as “elitist”. As Hillary Clinton formulated this new assault on Senator Obama, she said his “Bittergate” remarks were “not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans…. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”

Of course, Obama had to back down from his somewhat leftist characterization of the interplay between working-class White citizens’ social discontent and their religious and political choices, because it amounts to a one-dimensional observation of such socio-political patterns in our society. Thus Obama admitted the error of his observation, saying he had used “ill-chosen words”. This contextual event was Obama’s first major gaffe leading up to the Pennsylvania primary election, by which I mean a political comment that gives his opponent Clinton an easy political missile to toss at him. This was an error, particularly in a primary contest like Pennsylvania where perhaps 55% of the White voters (mainly working-class and lower middle-class Whites) are, shall we say, disinclined toward Senator Obama’s candidacy.

Accordingly, Obama’s gaffe can be viewed as a tactical error in that he failed to understand that when he’s offering political discourse at either private fund raisers or public events, the situations are not academic-debate milieu but real power-game milieu. Which is to say, they are milieu in which a politician’s words might arry heavy political consequences. This understanding was clearly not at the forefront of Barack Obama’s consciousness at the California fund raiser on Sunday, April 6th. It should have been.

I say this because, owing to his “Bittergate” gaffe, the Obama campaign was incapable of mobilizing for its own political advantage a series of political faux pas on the part of the Clinton campaign. One such political faux pas occurred in mid-March when Clinton, seeking to bolster her foreign-policy credentials, patently lied during several public speeches about landing in Bosnia 1996 during an official tour when gun-fire between opposing groups riddled the airfield she landed on. “I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia”, Clinton remarked while campaigning in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, in late March 2008.

Another Clinton campaign political faux pas took place a week after Obama’s April 6th fund-raiser gaffe. The leading front-page article in the Boston Globe (April 7, 2008) on the campaigns in Pennsylvania was titled “Top Strategist For Clinton Quits Post Amid Uproar”. The article reported the removal of Mark Penn from his powerful post as chief strategist for Clinton, owing to his participation as lobbyist for the government of Columbia’s bid to have a trade pact with the United States enacted—a pact that major trade unions strongly oppose. Yet Clinton campaigns in economic-depressed areas of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, Scranton, Hazelton, etc.) pronouncing opposition to the Columbia trade pact with the United States. Of course,this rather bald duplicitous politics surrounding Clinton’s official posture toward the Columbia trade pact (publicly opposing the trade pact while here chief campaign strategist was paid millions of dollars for lobbying for it) was a sitting-target for critical fire from the Obama campaign, but Obama’s “Bittergate” misstep canceled-out this opportunity.

A Note On The Toxic Issue Of Race In Life & Politics

I suspect, however, that even had the “Bittergate” misstep never occurred, the Obama campaign would have nonetheless experienced much difficulty in persuading anything like a sizable segment of working-class White voters in economic-depressed urban and rural areas of Pennsylvania warming-up to his candidacy. After all, the racial mindsets among working-class Whites in Pennsylvania are, shall we say, not yet inclined toward the kind of multiculturalization involved in voting for a Black presidential candidate. The columnist Bob Herbert candidly addressed this issue in the New York Times (April 15, 2008):

Moreover, Bob Herbert’s forthright characterization goes further and provides us a keen understanding of the dynamics that enable the Clinton campaign to maneuver Senator Obama’s gaffe– his “Bittergate” ill-chosen words—into an easy political missile for Hilliary Clinton to toss in Obama’s campaign path. As Herbert put it: