“It’s not surprising 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.”
No one jumped on Barack Obama for suggesting, in his speech on race, that affirmative action was an ongoing source of white hostility to African Americans. And I suspect no one would have batted an eye if, in his now notorious San Francisco remarks, he had expanded that analysis to attribute his difficulty in attracting white working class votes just to immigration and trade policy (though the latter is a little dicier these days in Democratic circles). But no, he had to drag in guns and God, thereby making gun-toting, prayer-book-wielding Hillary Clinton’s day.
On the gun front, someone has noticed that Obama’s done just fine, thank you, in the country’s most pro-gun states. I’ll leave it to the Second-Amendment-and-the-Campaign bloggers to sort that one out. As to religion, it’s not clear that there are fewer atheists in soup kitchens and unemployment lines. Students of the black church in America note that the decline in church attendance among African Americans has tended to come at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Yet, at a more global level, Alan Wolfe recently made the case that the more prosperous a country is, the less intense religion is likely to be. Tonight, Obama and Clinton will be participating in a “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College. Who wants to bet that this dimension of religion’s role in the social order doesn’t comes up?