Knowing from Bitter

Larry Bartels:

During Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, Barack Obama once more tried to explain what he meant when he suggested earlier this month that small-town people of modest means “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” out of frustration with their place in a changing American economy.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.

Mr. Obama should do as well or better among these voters if he is the Democratic candidate in November. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because he has offended the tender sensitivities of small-town Americans. It will be because he has embraced a misleading stereotype of who they are and what they care about.

Nailed it, and in the New York Times no less.

More on Obama's pathetic and synthetic approach to the rubes in fly-over-land:

"Sen. Obama will be a strong voice an unabashed voice for America's hunters and shooters and it is with great pleasure that we endorse his candidacy," President of the Association Ray Schoenke said, citing Obama's commitment to the traditions of gun ownership. "We believe recent attacks on Sen. Obama's stand on the 2nd amendment and his commitment to the hunting and shooting heritages are unfair."

Actually, it is Obama's record on firearms that is unfair to Americans, but don't expect Ray Schoenke to know much about gun rights, even if the Daily Kos diarist is the President of the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA). Schoenke, a failed Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland, has donated thousands to Handgun Control, Inc, a virulent anti-gun organization that was the forerunner of Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence. He has donated tens of thousands more to anti-gun Democratic politicians including Ted Kennedy.

AHSA executive director Robert Ricker has testified as a paid witness against the gun industry and consults for several anti-gun groups, and John Rosenthal, President of the AHSA Foundation, is a former member of Sarah Brady's Handgun Control, Inc, and is leader of Stop Handgun Violence, a Massachusetts anti-gun group that has contributed to that state's intolerant anti-gun guns.

I was looking in my local daily paper for a headline like "Make-Believe Gun Rights Group Endorses Obama" but I couldn't find any trace of one.