Shot With His Own Gun

O shit

George Packer on Obama's "cling" gaffe:

The real problem with what Obama said is that it’s basically untrue. In southwestern Pennsylvania, religion, hunting, and insularity predate the post-industrial era. They’ve have become politically manipulable points in part because of economic decline, but to confuse wedge issues with traditional values is the mark of the high-minded reformer or the political junkie, or both. It’s the kind of mistake one could make only from a great distance, once those voters had become almost entirely abstract—and, again, no one wants to be an abstraction.

This is far from the only thing Obama believes about religion and small-town America, as his 2004 interview with Charlie Rose and much else in his career show. Conservative propagandists like Kristol are predictably and unfairly wrapping Obama’s disastrous sentence around his neck and garroting him with it. So is Hillary Clinton, and the spectacle of her swallowing a boilermaker in a Pennsylvania bar is crass opportunism that will antagonize more voters than it charms. These days the winner is always McCain.