Column: Obama is speaking, is anyone listening?

By Stephen Dick
THE HERALD BULLETIN (ANDERSON, Ind.)

ANDERSON, Ind. April 28, 2008 04:14 pm

— Sen. Barack Obama was here Saturday addressing a much smaller crowd than Sen. Hillary Clinton faced on March 20. About 1,400 people crowded into a high school cafeteria as they screamed over and over, “the next President of the United States.”
It’s understandable why Obama has been scoring political points since he launched his campaign in January 2007. Blessed with a killer smile, a practitioner of self-deprecating humor and an iron grip on the issues, he has more charisma than anyone since the Kennedys. Young and handsome, he’s forceful when talking about the failed economic policies of the Republicans and the catastrophe-for-the-ages war in Iraq, and he doesn’t fail to correctly link his potential GOP rival, Sen. John McCain, to all of George W. Bush’s injurious policies.
There is also a hint of vulnerability to him. Words often struggle to get out as if he were stuck for the right one or just nervous about saying the right thing.
If it’s the latter you can’t blame him. The conservative columnists (of which that’s about all there is) and acid-tongued TV commentators are waiting to pounce on his every utterance. His comments a week before the Pennsylvania primary, which he lost, are still being used to paint Obama as an elitist who is out of touch with middle-class Americans. After all, this reactionary tarring and feathering worked great against John Kerry and Al Gore.
In San Francisco, Obama said, “You go into 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 it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them ... as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The hysteria that followed overlooked a fundamental fact: Obama was right. Everyone knew he was right, but this was a way to attack him. Is truth even relevant in a political campaign anymore?
Obama said Saturday he may have used a wrong choice of words (read: He didn’t sugarcoat what he said), but he tells people the truth and not just what they want to hear. As an example, he said he spoke about a windfall profits tax on oil companies to CEOs of those companies. (Clinton also advocates this tax.)
It’s refreshing to see a politician speak truth to power. This has all but disappeared in our political discourse. The attacks come from people who have a vested interest in the status quo. But most Americans feel increasingly outside the system. They don’t have lobbyists to score points for them. They’ve heard politicians talk, and sometimes say good things, but the ensuing policies invariably ignore them.
So they do turn to guns, religion and immigrant bashing to lash out at what they perceive as the cause of their problems. They have their guns for anyone who messes with them. They have their God to pray for better times and their self-righteous anger to scapegoat others.
They don’t realize that the conservative politicians they keep voting for only care about themselves and money, and the corporations that keep them under an economic burden only care about themselves and money.
Far from an elitist, Obama is a populist. He’s also not as entwined inside the Beltway as his rivals are. He wants to see ordinary Americans become economic and political players to strengthen democracy and reduce the all-encompassing power of the plutocrats.
The people who prey on ordinary Americans — the con men who shake them down with subprime mortgages, the politicians who use patriotic puffery to lure young people to their death in vanity wars, the corporations that put workers in the breadline so their stockholders can get fatter — are the true elites, along with the morons in the media whose rich owners make them bear allegiance to the dollar and those who will preserve it.
Americans have become so used to this perversion of democracy that they worship a god who has been turned into a spokesman for corporate and conservative America, who says it’s OK to keep and shoot your guns and hate people as long as you offer up your bodies to the war and keep your mouth shut when asking for a bigger piece of the economic pie.
Obama instinctively knows this, as do other politicians who won’t speak out because they’re tethered to the greased-palm school of politics.
Obama is going to be whipped like a disobedient dog when he raises the hackles of the true elitists. He lost some ground after the “bitter” comment, but he’s on message and it’s resonating with a lot of voters who are tired of politics as usual, which excludes them. Is anyone listening?

Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.

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