Obama Missing the Point

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is running for President of the United States.

Transcript of Obama’s Remarks at San Francisco Fundraiser Sunday

[...]

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

No, we don't care what you're going to do for us. We don't want you to do anything for us, because what you want to do for us is going to end up being done to us.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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.

[The following was cross-posted at Redstate]

Dear Senator Obama:

The government only has a small number of jobs. Bringing employment opportunities to rural Pennsylvania, or Illinois, or California, is not among them.

The government's first job is to defend the people from foreign enemies, such as the human rights violations of Chinese bankers and Middle Eastern terrorists.

Defending the people individually from each other also is the government's job. And too, we let the government take care of parks, roads and bridges and other such common areas. That's about it.

But the poisonous witch's brew of notions that somehow the people of small town flyover country are helpless without you, and that we don't have jobs, and that the Bush and Clinton Administrations let us fall through some imaginary cracks, and that all of that makes us bitter enough to hate anyone not like us -- that is just the wrong way to look at things.

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It is despicable and un-American, and I use that term advisedly, to encourage people to be bitter at the government for not doing enough to help them. The American way is self-reliance, not the desperate bleating of a people living only for the next chance to suckle at the government's teat.

In your class warfare, you foolishly suggest that our alleged bitterness over a lack of jobs causes us to cling to guns and religion. You even said it makes us dislike people who are not like us. Do you not care whom you insult, nor with what hypocrisy?

Guess what, Senator: we know that the jobs aren't as plentiful nor as lucrative in our little towns and small cities as they are in the metropoli of your dreams for us. We read the papers. But we also know that where we live, we don't have to lock our doors at night. We can leave our cars unlocked at the grocery store, or in our driveways. And we even have driveways of our own, rather than having to cram ourselves into mass transit. Our schools don't have metal detectors, because they don't need them.

You have the cart before the horse. We choose to live out here, because we can. It isn't any supposed bitterness over lack of government jobs which causes us to cling to guns and religion. We live here in part so we can go hunting and fishing now and then.

And we like our little churches. They don't tell us that the government created AIDS, either. It's not their job.

We choose to live out here because we like our neighbors, for even the nosiest don't tell us how to live. It's not their job.

And Senator Obama, it's clear from all that we have seen, that the Presidency is not, and must never be, your job.

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