It’s come to this: a white, Ivy League grad from a wealthy Republican family calls a mixed-race black kid from a single-mom family an “elitist” and the racists and shoulder-pad feminists pile on – desperate for any excuse to not vote for a black male who worked for $10,000 per year as an Inner City community organizer out of college and just recently paid off his student loans.
Said ambitious, wealthy white woman worked as an attorney right out of college and quickly became a partner in one of Arkansas’ most prestigious (at the time) law firms. She has a net worth of over $109 million–all garnered in the last eight years. Before that she claimed to be some $7 million in debt due to legal bills. Her family net worth is over 100 times that of the “elitist” she scorns.
Sen. Barack Obama received his appellation from Sen. Hillary Clinton after he channeled Joe Bageant made the point that many of America’s white, permanent poor, working underclass are bitter about their economic circumstances and have a culture heavy on guns and religion.
Hell, yes, they’re bitter. Good paying manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared from the American heartland most lost due to one-sided, corporate-friendly trade deals instituted on Bill Clinton’s watch. Most of the jobs have gone to the very countries where Bill Clinton has made many of those $109 millions pulling strings. Rarely a day goes by without another revelation of Bill Clinton taking big money from some of the worst anti-labor human rights offenders out there.
Find the most economically insecure white men … and pander to them.
To contrast herself with her “elitist” opponent, HRC then went on to reveal her heretofore unseen redneck persona (persona version 8.2) by touting her time as a kid being taught to shoot guns by her grandfather at her family’s (non-elitist, of course) lakeside cottage. She bragged about her one hunting experience when Arkansas’ salt-of-the-earth First Lady:
“I’ve hunted. My father taught me how to hunt. I went duck hunting in Arkansas. I remember standing in that cold water, so cold, at first light. I was with a bunch of my friends, all men. The sun’s up, the ducks are flying and they are playing a trick on me. They said, ‘we’re not going to shoot, you shoot.’ They wanted to embarrass me. The pressure was on. So I shot, and I shot a banded duck and they were surprised as I was.”
And, she made sure to be seen tossing back a shot of Crown Royal (no elitist Jack Daniels for her) and eating pizza at an Indiana bar again with all male companions.
Next thing you know we’ll hear of how “dead-eye Hil” successfully fired back on those Bosnia snipers while pissing standing up, and that’s why the tarmac was so peaceful after the cork-screw landing.
After hammering away for days on Obama and burnishing her guns-and-God cred, she was asked just when was then last time she fired a gun or attended church. She had the audacity to answer that it was “not relevant.”
Do Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn (yeah, sure she fired him) really think the American people are that stupid? Do they think no one remembers the Hillary Clinton who advocated fierce gun control and attended the Million Mom March against guns back in 2000?
“We have to do more to stand up to those who refuse to believe the reality that guns do kill and that common-sense gun measures can make a difference,” she said at the time while proposing a national registration of all guns.
Do they think no one recalls that Bill Clinton made essentially the same observation as Obama back in 1991 when Bill was running for president?
“The reason (Poppy Bush’s strategy) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death. You know, he wants to divide us over race. I’m from the South. I understand this. This quota deal they’re gonna pull in the next election is the same old scam they’ve been pulling on us for decade after decade after decade. When their economic policies fail, when the country’s coming apart rather than coming together, what do they do? They find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them.”
Maybe they do think the public will swallow Hillary’s born-again redneck ploy. And, maybe they are right. Though, even if she does wound Obama so badly that she wins the nomination or, more likely, McCain wins over Obama come fall; how will she and Penn rebirth her again now or in 2012 to get past those Million Moms or the Romney, tee-totaling wing of the GOP which will be quite rabid in denouncing her boilermaker-drinking persona of April 2008?
MICHAEL DONNELLY wonders if he and pretty much everyone he knows are “elitists” for believing Joe Bageant and Barack Obama are dead-on and that dead-eye Hil is one too many shots-and-a-beer-chasers over the line? His essay on John Trudell is featured in Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland, (AK Press) edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com