Saturday, February 23, 2008

Shorter Boston Globe:


Barack Obama has the nerve to suggest to our children that they should aspire to more than working at the 7-11 and living in a trailer park. What an uppity, insensitive, uncaring, unfeeling, pompous jerk.
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By Susan Milligan
Globe Staff / February 23, 2008

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - For Tom Buffenbarger, the choice in the Democratic primary is simple: a man with a dream and a woman with a plan. And to him, Barack Obama's lofty vision doesn't answer the nuts-and-bolts questions working-class America has for its next president.

"What do you want? The editor of the Harvard Law Review or a fighter for working families?" Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists, bellowed at an Ohio rally for Clinton on Tuesday night, just after Obama was declared the winner of the Wisconsin primary.

At campaign events, Buffenbarger said, Obama "cocks his head and lifts his nose up" as he talks about changing the tone of American politics. "Hope? Change? 'Yes, we can?' Give me a break!" the union leader mocked, drawing boisterous hoots from the crowd.

They are Clinton's firewall: the working-class voters who say they don't want to hear fancy words about changing Washington; they want to know exactly how the next president is going to bring jobs to their struggling communities and make sure their children have healthcare.

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Why not just say he's an uppity nigger who has the nerve to like classical music?

What a pile of illiterate shit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you're wrong about this. While I voted for Obama, I think you're looking for racism here and finding it, possibly where it doesn't exist. There may be racism here but there's more to it than that.

There ARE still problems with job loss, health care, etc. and Obama's towering rhetoric leaves some people cold. He doesn't get down to specifics enough for some people. I think that IS a weakness of his. I, myself, wish he would do it more. Perhaps then, I might be an enthusiastic supporter instead of a lukewarm one who came to his decision with some difficulty. Obama's been my Senator, I voted for him, contributed to his Senatorial campaign and I have to say he's been something of a disappointment as Senator. I expected more substance (possibly unrealistic for a first-term Senator) and more of the spirit that moved his talk about Iraq on Daley Plaza in 2002.

While Buffenbarger and some of his audience may, in fact think that Obama's "an uppity nigger who has the nerve to like classical music," I don't think it's right to start off with that assumption. Why inflate racial intent beyond what people actually say? What people actually say is bad enough. Obama will need some of these votes in November.

That said, I don't deny that some of the stuff now being said about Obama is beyond the line of racism. But this isn't necessarily one of them. Will the guy go for Obama if he's the nominee? If not, I'll concede your point, but we don't know yet.

Have a little hope.

Douglas Watts said...

I agree with you completely.

What I tried to address in my post, in a not unclumsy fashion, is the idiotic and false concept that poor people like me must choose between total, abject poverty and a shitty, but barely tolerable somewhat below middle class life.

Read the union dude's quotes again at the top of the story. Basically he is saying, be grateful for what you've got and don't have the nerve to ask for anything more.

I ain't no one's slave.