By G. Tracy Mehan, III on 4.14.08 @ 12:07AM
Senator Obama's social and moral imagination are found wanting.
I confess that I viewed Senator Barack Obama as a winning
personality and, notwithstanding his left-wing politics,
potentially a historic figure in American history who could bridge
the nation's racial fault lines. As a native of St. Louis, a
racially bipolar community, I felt this would be a remarkable
accomplishment.
I was even willing to give him a pass on his controversial
pastor and his militant wife.
But the Senator really stepped in it with his recent inane
remarks at a fundraiser in Marin County, California, patronizing
small-town people in Pennsylvania for resorting to the fix of God
and guns to overcome hard economic times.
Pennsylvania is one of the top outdoor sporting states in the
Union, up there with Texas and Michigan in terms of the number of
hunters. The hunting tradition there goes way back, long before
globalization and outsourcing struck the industrial heartland.
Maybe the Senator has seen, but drawn the wrong conclusions
from, The Deer Hunter (1978), starring Robert De
Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, which tells the tale of
steelworkers in Clairton, PA, a Monongahela River town south of
Pittsburgh, during the Vietnam era. It is a very political, i.e.,
anti-war, movie. The picture painted of those people is not always
pretty. But the characters do portray serious people who, despite
their failings, treasure faith, family, and friends. The movie ends
with the cast singing God Bless America after the funeral
of their friend whose body was just brought back from Vietnam after
a suicide. There is lots of pathos in that scene, but not much
bitterness as I recall.
Michigan has had its share of economic problems. That state
issues something in the neighborhood of 700,000 firearm deer
licenses every fall, more men (and some women) under arms than
the combined forces of NATO. They have been doing that for decades.
There are very few accidents since most Michiganders are
indoctrinated in hunting safety instruction from, well, the moment
of conception.
As impressive as those numbers are, in my wife's home state of
Wisconsin, with maybe half the population of Michigan, they issue
some 600,000 firearm deer licenses (I am recalling these numbers
from memory, but I know I am right within an order of magnitude).
In this state, just as in Michigan and parts of Pennsylvania I am
sure, the work force is decimated by absenteeism once the fall hunt
begins. Mysteriously, many kids get sick and cannot attend
school.
The point is this: people who own guns, especially in small-town
America, do not "cling" to them out of desperation. They enjoy the
sport, the outdoors, the fellowship and good eating that comes with
hunting. And personal protection is an additional bonus if the need
arises.
SENATOR OBAMA'S DISPARAGING remarks about religious people in small
towns is really a puzzler, given his own testimony to his journey
of faith. His own experience is counter-factual to his view of
religious belief as a mere psychological response to bitterness in
small towns.
In some cases it may be that embittering experience leads a
person to faith, but that experience usually helps a person lance
the boil of bitterness through faith, hope and charity. If religion
is an important part of a person's life, it hopefully remains so in
good times and bad, transforming one's being through his or her
relationship with God.
Pennsylvania and other manufacturing states suffering hard times
are regions that have always had large communities of religious
people and very diverse ethnic populations. Again, this was the
case long before the current economic downturn of the last two
decades.
What has failed Senator Obama is his social and moral
imagination with respect to people in other walks of life, far
removed from his own. We all have this failing to some degree. But
given the Senator's self-evident social skills and his
self-professed goal of unity or changing our politics, his comments
in San Francisco were truly stunning -- and disappointing.
Talking about unity and change is one thing, but the
contradiction in Senator Obama's program is that he fails to grasp
the importance of traditional modes of living for folks outside the
hot house of far-left Democratic politics. He cannot even sound
sympathetic when abortion or the right to life comes up on the
campaign trail, which even Hillary Clinton tries to do from time to
time.
Senator Obama very much needs to discover his moral intuition on
social and cultural issues to rival his keen sense of racial
matters.
topics:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Religion, Abortion, NATO, Oil
