Gunning for Obama

The Bitterness Pill
Bullet point #3 on the post card alludes to a misstep by Obama last month that's been in the news practically daily ever since. In the words of the mailer, Obama "accused people in rural places and small towns of being 'bitter' people who 'cling to guns.'"

Well, not quite. Here's what Obama actually said last month to a group of donors in San Francisco:

Obama (April 6): 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. 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.
Now, Obama has said that "some of the words I chose, I chose badly" in that talk. But his remarks weren't quite as condemning of small-town America as they're made to sound in the mailer. The postcard leaves out the important economic link that Obama made between heartland dwellers and bitterness. These citizens aren't born bitter; they're bitter, according to Obama, because they've been let down by successive administrations that have promised economic recovery for their struggling communities.

Still, while we'd call the mailer's wording a distortion, it wasn't too far off from what Obama actually said.

So, what are we to make of this mailer? Depends. If you believe that Obama didn't fill out the 1996 questionnaire and that it didn't represent his views, then you probably believe his position has been fairly consistent over time — and perhaps that he's been a bit condescending about rural America.

If you accept the '96 questionnaire at face value, however, then you might believe that Obama's position evolved over the course of 12 years — or that, as the mailer says, he tailors his views according to his audience.

We hate to dump this one back in the lap of you, the viewer. There's a saying that bad facts make bad law. We'd posit a corollary, that messy facts make for inconclusive judgments.

As a postscript and point of interest, we offer you an interesting tidbit dug up by a reader of The Politico. The rifle that Clinton's campaign  pictured on the mailer apparently is a Mauser 66, an expensive (over $2,000) German gun with modifications, in the photo, that are popular in Europe but not the U.S. Moreover, the image is reversed, according to the website, "making it a nonexistent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle."