Condescending Remarks Reveal Obama’s True Feelings About Faith, Firearms and Working-Class Voters

Remember Herman’s Head, the Fox sitcom that ran from 1991 to 1994?

That unusual but short-lived show centered upon an everyman named Herman, whose unremarkable life provided little novelty. Its premise, however, was unique because most scenes actually occurred inside his brain, with four distinct characters representing different psychological elements vying to control his behavior. Each personified psychological trait battled ruthlessly each episode and jockeyed for dominance, nakedly revealing Herman’s inner thoughts and feelings in the process.

Like Herman, Senator Barack Obama nakedly revealed his inner beliefs regarding faith, firearms and working-class voters this month while speaking before a Chardonnay audience in San Francisco.

At that April 6 event, Senator Obama was lamenting to the limousine liberal audience his inconvenience in having to court rural, poorer Pennsylvania voters. In doing so, he condescendingly observed, “it’s not surprising, then, that 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.”

As an initial observation, it is rich of Obama to impugn “anti-trade sentiment,” when he has gladly played the role of Grand Marshal in the parade denouncing free trade during this campaign.

More fundamentally, however, Obama’s comments expose his elitist, condescending beliefs regarding the right to keep and bear arms, religion’s role in our lives and his esteem of middle-class voters generally.

By initially characterizing such voters as “bitter,” Senator Obama disdainfully ascribes sinister motives to them, establishing a premise that their primitive beliefs derive more from visceral anger than from any sincere, logical principle. He also mocks the issues of religion and guns, suggesting that people would abandon them like useless clutter as soon as their income levels improved.

To suggest this, or to imply that there are no respectable reasons to “cling” to religious beliefs or the right to keep and bear arms apart from mindless bitterness, Obama degrades principles that the Founding Fathers considered so important that they were enshrined in the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.

Even worse, Senator Obama implicitly associates faith and gun rights with rank bigotry and irrationality. After all, are we to believe that it was mere coincidence that he listed “guns” and “religion” alongside “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and “anti-immigrant sentiment” as beliefs to which less-enlightened people “cling?”

Obama now claims that his comments were taken out of context, but his initial reaction to the controversy suggests otherwise. When first confronted with his own remarks, he confided to aides that he couldn’t understand why anyone took offense to his remarks, and dismissed it as a “little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true.”

With specific regard to guns, Senator Obama deceptively claims to support an individual right to keep and bear arms, but his actual record clearly demonstrates the contrary.

Back in 1996, before liberals realized that advocating gun control constituted political suicide, Senator Obama endorsed a complete ban on handguns in a campaign questionnaire. Although Obama suspiciously protests that he “never saw or approved the questionnaire,” it turned out to contain his own handwritten notes. In 1999, he advocated a nationwide prohibition against gun stores within five miles of any school or park, a devious plan that would effectively expel firearms retailers from every city across the United States. After all, can one imagine a five-mile radius in any metropolitan area that doesn’t contain at least one school or park? And as recently as 2004, Obama voted against legislation providing legal immunity against prosecution for residents who used a handgun for self-defense on one’s own property.

That same year, he also advocated a nationwide prohibition against concealed-carry permits, which have done so much to reduce crime and enable citizens to exercise their natural right of self-defense in the 39 states that have passed them.

Although Senator Obama’s website alleges that he supports the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms, he also admitted to the Chicago Tribune that he considers the infamous Washington, D.C. gun ban constitutional because “local communities should be able to enact common-sense laws.” But if the D.C. gun ban, which almost completely prohibits possession of an effective firearm, is “common-sense” in his mind, what possible gun restriction would not fit his definition?

Senator Obama apparently believes that voters aren’t intelligent enough to catch the inconsistency of his positions, reinforcing his condescending persona.

Indeed, Obama’s April 6 comments in San Francisco probe new depths in condescension. Time will tell whether he pays the same price that such Democratic candidates as Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry paid for similar condescension.