Inside Politics

Obama’s blunder

“Having grown up in one of those small Pennsylvania towns Sen. Barack Obama sneers at, I know what really makes people there ‘bitter.’ It’s slick-talking politicians who look down on their beliefs and values,” New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin writes.

“Small-town people get doubly ‘bitter’ when those pols have the gall to ask for their votes while demeaning their lives. See, even hicks don’t like being played for suckers,” Mr. Goodwin said.

“When they accused Obama of being out of touch for saying small-towners ‘cling to guns or religion’ out of frustration, Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain were too kind.

“Snob-ama is not just out of touch. He’s from another planet.

“He might consider going back there, because the White House now looks out of reach. All the more so because he later added opposition to gay marriage as another sign of benighted bitterness.

“Snob-ama’s lame concession [Saturday] that his mistake was ‘I didn’t say it as well as I should have’ only makes the repeated smear worse. He should get off his Ivy League horse and apologize to the millions of Americans he insulted. As it stands, he has confirmed he doesn’t understand or respect them.”

Playacting

“The McCain campaign was offended last week, mightily offended,” Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard.

“Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said McCain didn’t care about the people he dropped bombs on during the Vietnam war. ‘You have to care about the lives of people,’ said Rockefeller, who supports Barack Obama for president. ‘McCain never gets into those issues.’

“This was tough criticism. Almost instantly, it triggered e-mails from McCain’s campaign headquarters expressing just how deeply offended McCain’s allies were. First Orson Swindle, McCain’s fellow POW in Vietnam, demanded Obama ‘denounce’ Rockefeller’s statement. Then campaign flack Tucker Bounds zinged Obama for not ‘personally’ condemning Rockefeller. Bounds was echoed by McCain’s Senate buddy, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He urged Obama to ‘step up to the plate’ and say Rockefeller’s comment was ‘out of bounds.’

“What the McCain gang wanted, in effect, was an apology from Obama for what someone else had said. They didn’t get one. Instead, Rockefeller said he was sorry for using ‘an inaccurate and wrong analogy,” which scarcely qualified as a sincere apology,” Mr. Barnes said.

“Meanwhile, an obscure Obama press aide was trotted out to say Rockefeller had gone too far. That only prompted the McCain team to demand, once again, that the candidate himself, Obama, repudiate Rockefeller. There was no telling when the flap would end.

“Of course the whole thing was largely playacting — in other words, political theater.”

Scolding business

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