OBAMA DISMISSES MIDWESTERN CORE VALUES AT BILLIONAIRE PARTY

The Billionaire's Row SF mega-mansion of Gordon Getty


On April 6, 2007, Barack Obama capped a whirlwind tour of billionaire fundraisers in the San Francisco Bay Area with a $2,300 per person party at the Pacific Heights mega mansion of oil heir Gordon Getty.

Obama had every reason to believe that his remarks about the core values that Pennsylvanians and other Midwesterners hold near and dear—their religious faith and support for the right to own guns—would never be publicized in the national media.

Security at the event on San Francisco’s Billionaire’s row at the Getty mansion was understandably tight--Gordon Getty’s personal fortune is estimated at $2.1 billion, and one of his son’s was kidnapped in the 1970’s. And besides the press was barred from the event.

At the Getty soiree, Obama uttered the words he now seeks to explain away:

“You go into 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...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.”

While the main stream media has primarily characterized the sting of Obama’s game changing remarks as simply referencing the “bitterness” that small town Midwesterners allegedly feel as a result of economic hardship, the full text reveals something more remarkable about the candidate’s unguarded opinion about core Midwestern values—which is at the very least dismissive.

Rather than acknowledge that Pennsylvanians' core religious beliefs and other values are the principled result of philosophical reflection, Obama dismisses them outright as notions that Midwesterners presumably "cling to” as an expression of something else entirely: Frustration about their poor economic circumstances.

The Ivy League educated, Harvard Law Review editor’s choice of language here can hardly be passed of as candidate misspeak since words are Obama s stock-in-trade. Moreover, his word choices clearly evince an opinion by Obama that Midwestern religious and political values are not “values” at all, but rather a desperate reaction to external forces through which these poor unfortunates express their frustration and bitterness at their lot in life.

It is our view that these very revealing remarks, uttered by Obama in an unguarded moment in the cloistered company of his most elite, liberal, and moneyed San Francisco financial backers, once they are understood by the national electorate are game changing. In one stroke, Obama has alienated the heartland of America by revealing that he does not respect their core values on religion, guns, fair trade, or immigration by attributing those values to a knee jerk reaction to outside events.

We are sure that Midwesterners view their own religious and other values as very bit as sincerely held and legitimate as, for example those of Barack Obama's personal mentor and close family friend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

While the candidate has since maintained he “could have said it better”, Obama has not bothered to repudiate his remarks or to explain precisely what he meant.

Nor can the candidate’s patronizing views of the core beliefs held by millions of Americans in several key swing states be explained away.

This is huge, a game changer. And if the Democratic Party fails to realize it before it chooses between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the party’s nominee, the DNC will be virtually conceding the White House to John McCain in 2008.
.
FOR THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE OBAMA “BITTER” CONTROVERSY, CLICK HERE