You might remember the earlier coverage of BITTERGATE!!!!!11111 here at Oberliner. If you missed it, here’s what Obama said:
You go into some of 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," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Well, Time Magazine’s Joe Klien weighed in at their political blog Swampland. Klien writes:
This Obama controversy[…]is the sort of thing we journalists blow up into massive gas, mostly because we really don't want to get down in the weeds about the things we need to get down in the weeds about.
Truer words, Mr. Klien, have never been spoken. What I find interesting about his post is how he first recognizes the “Obama is elitist” attacks as being off-base—largely a media creation—but then speculates on how Sen. Clinton might be able to turn “build” the narrative:
We've seen some evidence of non-populism in the past from Obama. Early on, he talked about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods. Shoulda been iceberg at Kroger's. And clearly, if there ever was [sic] an upper middle class family, it is the Ivy League Obamas.
So, in short, we have Klien—perhaps the best example of a mainstream media personality—chastising the media for its role in creating this empirically unfit narrative (Obama-is-elitist), then blithely pointing out how Sen. Clinton could continue it—ignoring, of course, the ridiculousness of Sen. Clinton (worth millions of dollars) and Sen. McCain (with that folksy, charming, massive mansion in Sedona) calling Sen. Obama elitist.
It’s yet another example of Klien somehow being able to get it and entirely miss the point. Instead of making any kind of substantive, normative argument, he makes a speciously positive argument (a normative argument in positive clothing).
Sure, in a sense he’s commenting only on the way things are, but, in ignoring his own normative judgments, he’s giving tacit approval to the very media narrative he spoke against. This narrative—Obama is elite—is grounded in bowling scores and a preference for orange juice. It’s grounded in simplistic readings of nuanced statements and even more simplistic ways of contextualizing these readings.
But, Klien, rather then pointing this out, talks about the ways Clinton could continue this narrative in the media (of which, Klien is certainly representative). Yes, gentle reader(s), this is our Serious and Responsible media at work.
This narrative just won’t die, will it? Our nihilistic, circle-jerking media just won’t let it.
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