To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report called "Gridlock in Washington" by Marcia Clemmitt, April 30, 2010
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The word “gridlock” to describe a paralyzed government — one that moves legislation slower than some would like, or not at all — became common usage around 1980, according to Sarah A. Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. 
The concept is far older, however. “Alexander Hamilton was complaining more than two centuries ago about the deadlock rooted in the design of the Continental Congress,” the body of delegates who governed the colonies during the American Revolution, Binder said. [Footnote 9]
More recently, political scientists have defined gridlock as “the propensity of existing policies to be impervious to change in spite of preferences of a popularly elected majority to enact new policies,” explained Stanford University political science professor Keith Krehbiel. [Footnote 10] And, in many ways, such “gridlock is endemic to our national politics, the natural consequence” of a Constitution that set up two separate legislative bodies, the House and Senate, plus a separately elected presidency, with each entity having the power to stop the other two from enacting new policies, Binder said. [Footnote 11]
In some time periods, accusations of gridlock fly thick and fast, and the past few years has been one of those. However, analysts strongly disagree about whether we are experiencing gridlock and, if we are, whether it is a bad thing.
“The Senate is almost dysfunctional now,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. [Footnote 12]
“Congress just got a lot more done in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s than in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s,” wrote political analyst and former President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. [Footnote 13]
“Bitter partisanship and ideological extremism rule the day,” says Stanford's Fiorina. “A president many voters thought to be a pragmatic centrist chose to defer to the liberal agenda” of some congressional Democratic leaders “while the [Republican] ‘party of no’ digs in its heels and opposes them at every step. Politics increasingly looks like a collective ‘celebrity death match.’ Washington is gridlocked, paralyzed, stalemated. And one could write much the same story about California and some other state capitals.”
As of mid-March, the Senate “was backed up with 88 unconfirmed nominees” whose names President Obama has forwarded for approval to executive branch positions, wrote Ryan Grim, senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post blog. Demonstrating the increase in congressional foot-dragging just over the past decade, that total is “83 more than the Bush administration faced at this point in its tenure,” Grim said. [Footnote 14]
“I think you get the picture that” the held-up nominations constitute a “systematic” effort “to undermine the ability of the executive branch to do its job,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. [Footnote 15]
Further evidence of the roadblocks to changing national policy is the fact that, while a major health-care reform bill has been enacted, it “was done by the narrowest of margins” even though one party holds the White House and both houses of Congress, including one of the largest Senate majorities in decades, says Jeremy Mayer, an associate professor of public policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
“It's hard to gauge gridlock because Congress doesn't always have to do much” in a given year except pass some spending and budget bills and move other routine legislation, says Frances E. Lee, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland in College Park. Nevertheless, Lee and others say that this Congress has changed more policies than many predecessor congresses.
“It's tough to make a case for being in gridlock when Congress has passed the largest social reform in decades” in the form of the new health-care reform law, says Mayer.
In fact, a good case can be made for saying that “this is a truly historical Congress,” based on that accomplishment alone, says C. Lawrence Evans, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
“Since Obama's been president, there's been a major stimulus bill, major higher-education provisions,” and more, besides the health-care reform legislation, says Jones at the University of Texas. “I get so frustrated with people who talk about gridlock.”
Many political scientists point out that Congress' slow march to most legislation is the result not of dysfunction but of institutional procedures put in place by the Constitution mainly to ensure that federal laws reflect the long-term will of the people and are enacted only after significant deliberation.
“Congress does the will of the people at a given time,” but not the will of each fleeting “50-plus-one-percent majority,” says Jones at the City University of New York. If Congress were constructed to immediately change laws “to flip to what the will of the one deciding voter wanted, the result would be constant change” and instability, since the preferences of a bare majority “flip all the time,” Jones says. Instead, Congress acts only in response “to views that a sizable chunk of the public has held for a length of time.”
“It takes a lot of time to build a consensus” on how to solve major problems, says Donald Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project, a nonpartisan study project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Without there being a solid national consensus on solutions” to a given problem, it's right that Congress not rush to legislate, he says.
The public often “has too high expectations for government” to create instant solutions, Wolfensberger says. For example, “the government has been proceeding with work on the economy, but given the fact that about three-quarters of the people” in one recent poll said they believe that “Washington is broken, I don't think people see how much is actually being done,” he says. “The government doesn't specifically replace jobs. It's not like there's some button you can push.”
“Many people don't see that, by Congress talking, they're doing exactly what we want them to do” — which is deliberate over important issues, says Sean F. Evans, an associate professor of political science at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.
Speed in legislating is overrated, says Lara Brown, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., who served as a Department of Education official during the Clinton administration. “If we were passing laws as quickly as we were changing parties, we would have an incredibly unstable system,” says Brown.
Our stable system of laws “has created prosperity,” in part because “high predictability allows business to flourish,” says Brown.
The Issues:
* Is Washington paralyzed?
* Is party polarization threatening our democracy?
* Should Senate filibuster rules be reformed?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report "Gridlock in Washington" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
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Footnotes
[9] Sarah A. Binder, “Going Nowhere: A Gridlocked Congress,” Brookings Institution website, March 18, 2010, www.brookings.edu.
[10] Keith Krehbiel, “Institutional and Partisan Sources of Gridlock: A Theory of Divided and Unified Government,” Journal of Theoretical Politics, January 1996, pp. 7–40.
[11] Binder, op. cit.
[12] Quoted in Peter Crabb, “How Political Gridlock Delays the Economy's Recovery,” Idaho Statesman online, Feb. 11, 2010, www.idahostateman.com.
[13] “Trading Smoke Filled Rooms for Gridlock,” Frum Forum blog, March 1, 2010, www.frumforum.com.
[14] Ryan Grim, “Jim Bunning's Back: Blocking Nominees Over Canadian Smoking Law,” Huffington Post blog, March 16, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com.
[15] Quoted in ibid.
Is Washington paralyzed?
Faith and politics make for explosive mix
By Thomas J. Billitteri
Sarah Palin fired another shot in the culture wars last week, claiming that the United States is a “Christian nation,” and it didn’t take long for the return fire to come her way. The pyrotechnics are reminiscent of the strong views I heard earlier in preparing my January report on government and religion.
Speaking at a three-day Women of Joy Conference on Friday in Louisville, Ky., Palin declared that America must return to its Christian roots and, as reported by the Louisville Courier Journal, rejected the idea that “God should be separated from the state.”
“Hearing any leader declare that America isn’t a Christian nation and poking at allies like Israel in the eye—it is mind-boggling to see some of our nation’s actions recently,” she declared in an apparent allusion to a comment President Barack Obama made in Turkey last year in which he said “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or Muslim nation” but a “nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”
Palin also denounced a federal court ruling in Wisconsin last week declaring government observance of a National Day of Prayer unconstitutional because its sole purpose is to encourage citizens to engage in a religious exercise lacking a secular function.
According to a separate account by ABC News, Palin declared that “God truly has shed his grace on thee—on this country. He’s blessed us, and we better not blow it.” And, she said, “Lest anyone try to convince you that God should be separated from the state, our founding fathers, they were believers. And George Washington, he saw faith in God as basic to life.”
But Palin’s remarks invited a swift rebuttal from advocates of church-state separation. “The United States is not officially ‘Christian,’ wrote Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington advocacy group. “There’s a handy document, Sarah, that explains all of this. It’s called the Constitution.”
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United, told ABC News that “it’s incredibly hypocritical that Sarah Palin, who disapproves of government involvement in just about anything, now suddenly wants the government to help people be religious.”
A spokesman for the Secular Coalition for America told ABC that the Constitution “established a secular government and has no mention of Jesus, Christianity, or a god of any kind, despite the false message spread by figures such as Sarah Palin.”
Don’t look for the battle over history, politics and religion to go away, though. It’s been raging since the nation’s founding, and it continues to brew in 2010.
As Palin said of the court ruling on the National Day of Prayer, “I think we’ll be challenging that one.”
For more on faith and politics, see Thomas J. Billitteri, “Government and Religion,” CQ Researcher, Jan. 15, 2010.
New Report: Political Conventions
By Tom Price, August 8, 2008
Have they outlived their usefulness?
The Democrats and Republicans share a fundamental goal for their upcoming national conventions: to produce scripted television shows that will boost their candidates’ prospects in the general election without showcasing any intra-party squabbling. Under that scenario, convention delegates seem to have nothing to do but cheer Barack Obama and John McCain, whose nominations were virtually assured before the conventions began. If the important decisions are made before the conventions begin, ask some politicians, political scientists and critics in the media, why bother to hold them? Convention supporters argue that the gatherings are needed in case a nomination isn’t settled beforehand. The conventions also make decisions about party rules that can affect which candidates get nominated. And conventions are the one time every four years when the parties become truly national organizations, with delegates and activists from around the country mingling face-to-face.
- Are national political conventions obsolete?
- Should superdelegates be abolished?
- Should an orderly primary election schedule be established?
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Overview of the New Report on Political Conventions
In the days before today’s carefully scripted conventions, anything could – and did – happen, from fist-fights to a verbal attack on a candidate’s wife:
* In 1924, Democrats nominated West Virginia politician John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot, during a 16-day convention that featured a fist-fight and delegates whacking each other’s heads with placards. Famed newspaper curmudgeon H.L. Mencken called the gathering “as fascinating as a revival or a hanging . . . vulgar . . . ugly . . . stupid . . . hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus.”
* At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter, resisted shaking Carter’s hand after the president’s acceptance speech.
* At the 1992 Republican gathering, the last convention not successfully scripted from start to finish, conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan delivered what was described as “one of the most scathing convention speeches of the modern era, extraordinary for its attack on a nominee’s wife.” “There is a religious war going on for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary “are on the other side.”
Many analysts concluded that Buchanan’s speech contributed to incumbent President George H. W. Bush’s loss in the general election. Carter lost after the 1980 convention, as did Davis in 1924.
In fact, divisive conventions usually lead to losing general elections. As Ken Bickers, chair of the University of Colorado Political Science Department, put it, “The party that has trouble unifying itself has trouble winning elections in the fall.” Television’s capacity to carry convention chaos into voters’ living rooms heightened the impact. In response, leaders of both parties will move mountains to avoid convention controversy.
This year, Democratic Party leaders grew terrified as the marathon battle for their presidential nomination slashed and burned its way through the spring primaries and caucuses.
As early as March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was preaching the necessity of unifying behind a single candidate “a long time before the Democratic National Convention” in late August. As the race between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton continued into late May, Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean pressed uncommitted delegates to pick a candidate so a winner would emerge.
If the race were undecided when the primaries ended, Tennessee Gov. Philip Bredesen suggested, party leaders and activists – the ex-officio “superdelegates” – should meet in early June to pick the nominee. Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor, even proposed moving the convention itself to June – a logistical impossibility – to avoid a summer of post-primary campaigning.
Clinton , of New York, finally conceded on June 7, after Obama, of Illinois, collected enough delegates to clinch the nomination in the final primaries on June 3. Many candidates with fewer votes than Clinton had carried campaigns into the convention, but party leaders successfully pressured her to drop out.
“The big obstacle was her wanting to keep her standing with fellow Democrats,” says Mark Rubinfeld, chair of the sociology program at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. “Their message was very clear: We’ll let you go to the end of the primaries, but for the good for the party we don’t want you to take it any further.”
Democratic leaders rejoiced at Clinton’s acquiescence, particularly since Sen. John McCain of Arizona had wrapped up the Republican nomination in February and was busy wooing GOP voters who had supported other candidates. The end of both races, however, left both conventions with few real decisions to make.
As many as 50,000 people – including 15,000 connected with the news media – are expected to descend on Denver for the Democratic Convention Aug. 25-28 and on Minneapolis-St. Paul for the Republican confab Sept. 1-4. Yet the world already knows – barring the completely unexpected – that Obama and McCain will be the presidential nominees. They are expected to name their running mates before the conventions begin. Party leaders are working doggedly to avoid divisive fights over platform planks or party rules.
Telecommunications technology contributed greatly to the conventions’ demise as decision-making bodies.
When Democrats gathered for their first national convention in 1832, the give-and-take of political negotiations could occur efficiently only in face-to-face meetings. That remained true until direct-dial long-distance telephone service became widely available and affordable in the 1960s, according to political analyst Michael Barone.
Previously, politicians “could start communicating with each other only when they got off the train at the convention city,” Barone pointed out. That changed when politicians “could negotiate and convey information confidentially over the phone.” Now, he said, “the communication that once could take place only in the convention city during convention week is going on all the time, all around us.”
Until radio broadcast the first convention in 1924, the general public learned about the proceedings only by reading accounts in newspapers or magazines. Few Americans actually saw the proceedings until television began covering the conventions in 1948. By the 1960s, conflict at conventions was seen by voters across the country.
To avoid unwanted convention activities, Republicans actually wrote a script for each session of their 1972 gathering. They delivered copies to the television networks each night to facilitate planning of the next day’s coverage. Both parties have tried to do the same every year since.
The spread of primaries, particularly beginning in 1972, further reduced the importance of conventions. Candidates discovered they could jump-start their campaigns by doing well in the first contests of each presidential year – the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Other states, resenting those small states’ out-sized influence, pushed their contests ever-earlier in the year.
By the 1990s, candidates were clinching both parties’ nominations before the end of March. In 2008, 34 states voted by Feb. 5, and McCain clinched the GOP nomination when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s withdrew on Feb. 7.
With the nominations sewed up months beforehand, both parties turned their conventions into four-day-long television advertisements for their candidates. The networks rebelled against being used as unpaid advertising conduits and chafed at having little real news to cover.
By 1980, ABC, NBC and CBS had reduced their convention coverage to a few hours each night. In 1984, Jeff Gralnick, ABC’s executive producer for convention coverage, termed the meetings “dinosaurs.” Four years later, ABC News President Roone Arledge called the 1988 Republican Convention “as scripted as any prime-time program,” which left journalists “nothing to cover.”
In 2004, the three networks broadcast from each convention for just about three hours each week. Similar coverage is expected in 2008. Although PBS and cable news channels continue to cover the conventions “gavel to gavel,” fewer voters watch those outlets, so the conventions’ value as free advertising declined.
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New Report: Race and Politics
by Peter Katel, July 18, 2008
Will skin color influence the presidential election?
The once unthinkable could happen this November: A black man may win the U.S. presidency. When freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was born in 1961, African-Americans couldn’t vote in some parts of the United States. Now, as he prepares to accept the Democratic nomination in August, Obama is running slightly ahead of his presumptive Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a 71-year-old Vietnam War hero. First dogged by questions of whether he was “black enough,” Obama now faces doubts about whether racial prejudice will prove a major obstacle to his historic campaign, especially among white working-class voters. Nonetheless, Obama is likely to benefit from changes in the country’s demographic makeup, which is growing less white as immigration diversifies the population. Meanwhile, younger voters are showing notably less racial prejudice than older generations. At the same time, some top Republicans acknowledge the GOP needs to appeal to a broader range of voters if McCain is to win.
- Has Republican Party identification with white Southerners cost it support in other regions?
- Can the Democrats attract white, working-class votes outside the South?
- Is race a major factor in the presidential election?
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Overview of This Week’s Report: “Race and Politics”
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, capping the historic 1963 March on Washington, he was talking about only the most basic rights. “I have a dream,” he thundered, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ “
Perhaps only in King’s inner-most, private dreams did he even entertain the possibility of an African-American running for president, let alone being elected. At the time, standing up for voting rights for black people often meant laying your life on the line.
Yet, 45 years later, to the day, Sen. Barack Obama – a black man – is scheduled to accept the Democratic Party nomination for president. The freshman U.S. senator from Illinois boasts a relatively slim résumé for a major-party presidential candidate: before his Senate stint, eight years in the Illinois legislature and three years of community organizing. Where he most obviously differs from his predecessors, though, is his skin color, the result of having a black Kenyan father and white Kansan mother.
“A lot of black folks, myself included, occasionally pinch ourselves to see if this is really real,” says James Rucker of San Francisco, co-founder of ColorOfChange.org, a Web-based network that aims to boost the political presence of African-Americans.
Perhaps adding to the dreamlike quality of the moment, Obama’s almost-certain Republican opponent, four-term Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a white, 71-year-old war hero – is running slightly behind in some polls. But even if McCain later moves to the lead, Obama, 46, already has upset expectations rooted in America’s complicated and violent racial history.
Obama’s strong showing may be as much generational as racial. “We have more racially conservative people being replaced by younger people coming into adulthood who are much more comfortable with the racial and ethnic diversity that characterizes the country today,” says Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Even so, most recent poll results still show a close race. In June, a Washington Post-ABC News survey showed Obama with 48 percent support, against 42 percent for McCain. Estimates of electoral votes showed McCain ahead, but by only six votes.
Arguably, Obama should be leaving McCain in the dust. A Republican affiliation is a ticket to the political graveyard these days, as any number of GOP politicians are saying. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sees a “catastrophic collapse in trust for Republicans.” Yet Obama and McCain are in “a very competitive race for president,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The Wall Street Journal.
Is Obama’s race – as opposed to his relative inexperience or his policy proposals or his personality – holding his numbers down?
A national poll in early July found that Americans disagree on some – but not all – race-related issues. Twenty-nine percent of blacks thought race relations in the U.S. were generally good compared to 55 percent of whites. Yet 70 percent of whites and 65 percent of blacks thought America is ready to elect a black president. As to the candidates themselves, 83 percent of black voters had favorable opinions of Obama compared with 31 percent of whites. And only 5 percent of blacks had favorable opinions of McCain vs. 35 percent of whites.
Obama supporters and the candidate himself are predicting that Republicans inevitably will resort to race. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’ “ Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Fla., in late June.
Republican officials and activists reject the notion that race will be the deciding issue. “I don’t believe this presidential election is going to be determined by the race of the candidates,” says Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican frequently mentioned as a potential vice-presidential running mate for McCain.
Republicans predict, however, that Obama’s camp will treat legitimate political challenges as racial attacks. “Every word will be twisted to make it about race,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a McCain friend and adviser. But GOP attacks on Obama on issues such as national security and the economy, he said, will have “nothing to do with him being an African-American.”
Still, no one disputes that race inevitably will affect the election. Race has been intertwined with American history even before nationhood, and racial issues have figured in virtually all past presidential elections for the past half-century – before a major party had a black candidate.
In the politically crucial South – a Republican bastion since 1980 – most white and black voters (when blacks could even register) have always joined opposed parties. When the Democratic Party carried the banner of segregation, blacks tended to be Republicans. After the Democrats aligned themselves with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the races switched parties.
“The majority [of Southerners] define themselves as conservative,” says political scientist Merle Black, a specialist in Southern politics at Emory University in Atlanta. “White moderates have tended to be more Republican than Democratic; that isolates the Democrats with white liberals and African-Americans, who are not a majority in any Southern state.”
Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 each failed to win a single Southern state. But some experts give Obama a strong chance in Virginia – and outside possibilities in North Carolina and Florida. As if to underline the point, Obama opened his post-primary campaign in Virginia on June 5.
Obama’s bold move exemplified the approach that has taken him further than any African-American politician in U.S. history.
Indeed, Shelby Steele, a conservative writer of black and white parentage, is disavowing the last part of the subtitle of his recent book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., says: “I underestimated the hunger in America for what Obama represents – racial transcendence, redemption. He’s this wonderful opportunity to prove that we’re not a racist society. I thought that would take him a very long way, but I didn’t think it would take him all the way, but it may.”
However strong that hunger may be, it’s not universal. Hard-core race prejudice remains a factor in American life. If Obama wins, “We’ll end up slaves. We’ll be made slaves just like they was once slaves,” Johnny Telvor of Williamson, W. Va., told The Observer, a British newspaper. And Victoria Spitzer, an Obama campaign volunteer from Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post of even uglier comments. “Hang that darky from a tree,” she said she was told once as she made phone calls to dozens of prospective primary voters.
Obama argues that the country is indeed ready to rise above America’s centuries-old racial divide. “In the history of African-American politics in this country there has always been some tension between speaking in universal terms and speaking in very race-specific terms about the plight of the African-American community,” Obama said during a National Public Radio interview in 2007. “By virtue of my background, you know, I am more likely to speak in universal terms.”
“Universal” now describes a far more diverse population than the white-majority/black-minority paradigm that prevailed only a few decades ago.
The U.S. Census Bureau calculates the nation’s entire minority population – of whom Latinos make up the biggest single component – at 34 percent. “In a single lifetime, we will have gone from a country made up largely of white Europeans to one that looks much more like the rest of the world,” writes Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN (formerly New Democratic Network), a liberal think tank and advocacy organization.
Still, old-school racial issues persist. The “post-racial” aura of Obama’s candidacy suffered some erosion after a video clip surfaced in March of a fiery black nationalist sermon by Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, ending with the unforgettable: “God damn America.”
After cable news channels put the clip in round-the-clock rotation, Obama disassociated himself from Wright’s remarks. When that didn’t calm the waters, the Indonesia- and Hawaii-bred candidate gave a major speech on March 18 in Philadelphia, in which he confronted suggestions that his childhood outside the continental United States, and his Ivy League education had sheltered him from the U.S racial drama: “I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”
The primary contest was winding to a close. Inevitably, the Wright affair and its aftermath permeated news coverage of the final elections.
In a Newsweek poll in May, 21 percent of white registered voters said they didn’t think America was ready to elect an African-American president, and 18 percent of non-whites agreed. But pollsters also tried gauging the extent of prejudice, asking white voters only if “we have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.” Thirty-nine percent said yes.
And in Democratic primary elections in the politically critical states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as in West Virginia and Kentucky, exit polls showed that Obama faced clear resistance among white voters with no more than high-school educations – the standard definition of “working class.”
But a Roanoke, Va.-based political consultant who specializes in rural voters argues that Obama’s race is a deal-breaker only with a small minority of voters in the Appalachian region that includes Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. “There’s one thing that could kill him – his gun record,” says David “Mudcat” Saunders. “He’s got to come to Jesus on guns. You start taking peoples’ handguns, which is how the National Rifle Association right now is defining him – if he gets branded with that, he’s done.”
Obama may have weakened his case with rural gun owners with his widely reported comments at a San Francisco fundraising event shortly before the Pennsylvania primary. “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,” he told prospective donors. “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.”
To Obama’s foes, the comments confirmed their depiction of him as an arrogant and condescending Ivy Leaguer – someone who aroused class-based suspicion more than racial hostility.
Whether Obama, who grew up fatherless and whose family at one point relied on food stamps, fits the standard definition of “elite” is one question. Another, say some scholars, is whether depictions of negative personal reactions to Obama as working-class pride are a cover. “I don’t buy the argument that the racial argument is just a class discussion,” says Paula McClain, a specialist in racial politics at Duke University. “For blacks, it doesn’t matter how high you get. Millions of middle-class blacks still experience slights.”
Obama lost Pennsylvania. But a Washington Post reporter traveling through its small towns found voters who agreed with Obama’s basic assessment, if not with his wording. “People are sort of bitter, but they’re not carrying around guns and causing crimes like he specified,” said retired factory worker George Guzzi. “Everyone makes mistakes.” Guzzi plans to vote for Obama.
American voters may be more nuanced in their judgments than some pundits think they are. And Obama’s influence is undeniable. “No one up until this point has been able to change the dynamics like he has,” says Hanes Walton Jr., a political scientist at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. “Some people would call it a sea change.”
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